If you're no totally soured on GE...... In three family houses and one friend's house there are a total of six identical GE Profile wall ovens -- three convection; three w/o convection. Black with glass fronts and touch-button controls. The oldest is nine years; youngest about five. They've been exemplary performance-wise and trouble-free. Only complaint is the indicator tone. Everything else on the unit is easily user adjustable but the volume of the tone is not. My aging ears wish it was.

Update: I broke down and bought some boneless chicken breasts. They were on sale and they were actually cheaper than the bone in ones! I'm a meat novice, lol! I'm learning that part of the secret is to make no more than one involved dish per meal. For example, I was visiting friends and they made risotto for dinner, but the side was just simple grilled fish and a salad. I'm trying to amass a group of quick dinner recipes and menus. It's funny, at 50 I am dealing with "new bride" issues, :) Here's the fettucini recipe. I think I either got if from a friend or got it at a health food store on a recipe card. Wholewheat Fettucini (serves 4-6) 8 oz. of whole wheat fettucini (I used spinach fettucini which is what I recommend using, but WWH would work fine too if you can't find or afford spinach) 1/4 cup soy sauce (I used 1 TBLSP) 1 TBLSP wine vinegar (I used wine, and probably about 1/8 cup of that) 1 tsp. dried basil 1/2 tsp. each oregano, savory and marjoram (I left out the savory and marjoram, don't really know why, I forgot to add them!) 1/4 tsp. thyme 1/2 lb. tofu, crumbled finely. Here you could substitute a cup of canelinni beans or some chopped chicken if you like. If using tofu, I highly recommend using a baked italian style tofu if you can get it. Then you can skip the marinating bit with the tofu. 2 TBLSP olive oil 1 med. onion, chopped 8 cloves garlic, slivered (I couldn't do that! I used 4 cloves minced garlic) 1 cup chopped mushrooms. 1-2 TBLSP Parmesean (optional) minced parsley to garnish (I left out) Mix soy sauce, vinegar and herbs, then pour over tofu in a shallow dish to marinate. Strain after about 1/2 hour. Note: from what I know about tofu, this is a useless step so I would leave it out. Tofu does not absorb marinade. If you want to try something with a marinade, slice the tofu into thin slabs and pour the marinade over it and bake in a 400 degree oven for about 40+ minutes. Turn and rebaste the tofu halfway thru the baking time. This will make the tofu firmer because it will dry out and it will make a coating of spices that will stick to the outside of the tofu. OR, if you're lucky, just buy pre-baked italian style tofu, which is what I did. Or leave out the tofu, use beans or diced cooked chicken instead. Cook fettucini as per package directions. While water is boiling, start sauteeing the onion and mushrooms in the olive oil. I use a big braising pan from which I can serve the final product. I used presliced mushrooms, which made it go fast. It will take about 10 min. for the onions and mushrooms to start to get a translucent appearance and have flavor concentration. That's about how long it takes to boil the water for the pasta. Now, add your personal choice of spices from the list to the sautee, and use vegetable broth, white wine and a dashes of low salt soy sauce or tamari to keep the mixture from sticking and to dissolve the fond. You'll end up adding about one cup, most of which will be vegetable broth. You can use water in a pinch, but that will make the final product kind of bland. I also added a half a large package of chopped frozen spinach. That was DELICIOUS. You could also add whatever other vegetables you have or like, such as zuchinni, fennel, etc. If they are raw veggies you'd have to add them to the saute earlier on. When the sauce is finished and the pasta is drained (add a dash of olive oil to the pasta to prevent it from sticking together), add the Parmesean to the sauce if you are using it. Then you can toss all the sauce with the pasta or scoop the sauce out and top individual plates of pasta with it. I combined all the pasta and all the sauce, which is how I like to eat pasta. Garnish with parsley if you feel the need, a drizzle of olive oil and more parmesean (or seasoned bread crumbs if you're counting calories). Serve with a little dish of parmesean on the side to pass around if you're not counting calories! Spinach with spinach noodles is what made the dish delish for me. You could also do this with feta instead of parmesean. Is OK without cheese, but no where near as yummy, but if you're diet restricts it then that's the way it goes. Is fine as a side dish without spinach or other veggies. Here's a link to how I did the summer squash, I followed LoriJean's directions. They were DELSIH. However, if I make this combo again, I will slice the squash, layer in single layer in my broiling pan, and top with a mixture of seasoned bread crumbs and olive oil. Then broil well away from the heat for about 8 min., 4 on one side, then pull out, sprinkle crumbs on the other side and 4 more to finish. Not as cool looking, but very tasty and doesn't need all the constant attention that frying does. Can be prepared before starting pasta and then popped in the oven during pasta prep. I don't have a grill, but that would be a good option for a squash side for the fettucini. Here is a link that might be useful: Breaded fried yellow summer squash

I'm not too keen on the idea of a set; much like cookware, there may be some items in the line that just don't work as well, and you may be taking a hit in performance just to get things to match. ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." --Emerson) My recommendations are similar to pllog's above. You can do 95% of all kitchen cutting tasks with just a few well chosen knives-- a 10" chef knife, a 5-6" boning/slicing knife, and several paring knives would handle most tasks, and I then would add a 10 or 12 inch Granton edge slicer. You can get some pretty cool stuff for knife storage wherein he might store his knife trove. For many years I had a magnetic rack near the stove (see the link). And it worked great at storing the knives safely while having them readily available. This particular model was strong enough to hold a cleaver. Sadly, when our kitchen was remodeled, SWMBO told me that that knife rack wouldn't go in the new kitchen. I'm a bit of an aficionado of old school stuff; I write with a fountain pen, listen to LP records through a tube amplifier, and use old rustable carbon steel knives. Oh, modern high carbon stainless is very good, but I can get a much sharper edge on old plain non-stainless carbon steel knives. (Julia Child preferred carbon steel to stainless, by the way, so there.) I'll use stainless blades when I'm cutting up onions or citrus, but for most other tasks I'll use carbon steel. (Is his cleaver a rust-prone Chinese cleaver? those are popular in part because you can get them sharp as a razor at home.) To keep my knives in the sharpest condition, I use a paper wheel sharpening system (see Steve Bottorff's web site sharpeningmadeeasy.com for details on that and other sharpening systems). And yesterday was a good day: I found a vintage carbon steel Sabatier at a thrift shop for $1. The same item on eBay was $100. Just my opinion, of course; YMMV. Here is a link that might be useful: magnetic knife rack. This post was edited by arley on Sun, Oct 5, 14 at 20:43

One of the reasons that Whole Dog Journal will not put a dog food on their "approved" list without the manufacturer freely giving out the name of the manufacturing plant when asked by a legitimate inquiry is that such full disclosure helps guard against the kind of accident that occurred in 2007. Many of the small dog food companies have their foods made at plants that manufacture for many different companies. Knowing that the precise ingredients that the individual manufacturer specified for their food were used in the manufacture of it is part of the trust that small companies must have in these "batch" manufacturing plants. At least one pet food plant used ingredients not specified by the pet food manufacturers whose food they were making, according to Wikipedia's article on Protein Adulteration in China Having the name of the plant that manufactures your food easy to look up in case of a food contamination event allows consumers to decide whether to buy other foods made at that plant. Given all of that work that WDJ does to get this info for us, it is pretty obvious that the plants that are making these foods are right here in the US and Canada. The protein supplement that was imported from China was criminally poisoned with the addition of melamine plastic in 2006 and 2007 and there is evidence that there was a similar outbreak in 2005 (see the Wikipedia link below). Chinese companies who participated in this in 2006 and 2007 that poisoned our pets were not immediately sanctioned, and the milk industry went on to commit horrific poisoning of baby formula and milk products in China that was not discovered until May 2008 and not made public until August or September. Milk products from China shipped all over the world were found to have melamine in them even into 2009. From Wikipedia: "Two people were executed, one given a suspended death penalty, three people receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), being fired or forced to resign. Yes, all that had to do with the poisoning of babies and others who drank the milk in China. It only came to light because a New Zealand affiliate of the Chinese milk company kept insisting that something was wrong and had to be investigated. Melamine can be manufactured from urea (a concentrated part of urine), coal, and other sources. Urea and other nitrogen sources are added to the feed of ruminants (multi-stomach animals, animals who chew a cud) to increase the nitrogen level because they can get protein's nutrition from these non-food sources due to their unique digestive processes. THAT is how melamine started being put into food - the waste from making it was used in cattle feed. when it was made from urea. A crude way to measure how much protein is in a food is to measure the nitrogen level. Melamine, urea, and some other non-foods increase the nitrogen level without adding to the nutritional level (except for ruminant feed). So now, they have to use more sophisticated testing methods to test foods for animals and people. Because people cannot be trusted, in capitalist or socialist countries, not to poison each other for profit or to make their expected output! This all goes back to my sneaking feeling that this planet can only healthily sustain a very tiny fraction of the people we have living here. If we can't eat whole foods, or feed whole foods to our meat livestock and pets, then we are going to have this kind of thing happen. I have been discussing the need to change our diets to "no processed foods" with my fellow chronically ill friends online. Most of us had no children. It is turning out that this is a good thing.