Sure! How's the ice cream going? The information about the shortening was in Loves2cook4six's thread about substituting for dairy in a tart recipe. Cloud Swift recommended Spectrum cold pressed palm oil shortening. I've baked a lot with the trans fat free shortening that used to be made by Smart Balance then seemed to be the same thing made by Crisco. It works fine in cakes and breads, but it separates when you try to melt it, and it's pretty stiff even at room temperature. The Spectrum is soft and kind of velvety at room temperature, and just becomes softer and looser when melted in the microwave. I think that's from being pressed rather than concocted. A couple of years ago I started researching matzah ball recipes for a vegetarian friend and found a lot that didn't sound good, but saved a file with ones that had potential. The only one I found that had shortening rather than oil (from mrfood.com) was very close to our old family recipe with the addition of water. Some of the better liquid oil recipes used seltzer. I thought that made them sound really loose, but my friend gave me a Soda Stream and I thought it sounded fun to include it. I have no idea if the bubbles actually help anything. :) The shortening recipe sounded best because the proportions didn't just say substitute liquid oil for schmaltz, one to one, which sounds goofy to me, but I waited until the end to add the water, to see if it needed it. In the end, I combined all the recipes and it came out really well. Here's what I made (which I already e-mailed to the friend since she still hasn't made any matzah balls, hence the extremely detailed directions): Vegetarian Matzah Balls Yield: 37 medium sized matzah balls Cooking time: 8-9 hours. No joke. • 12 eggs • 1.5 cup soda water • 1 cup vegetable shortening, melted --Spectrum cold pressed. • 1 + 1 scant teaspoon salt • 1 teaspoon black pepper • 1 teaspoon white pepper • 3-4 Tablespoons (one handful) of Fines Herbes • 3 cups whole wheat matzo meal (Yehuda) 1. Separate the eggs into separate mixer bowls. If you only have one mixer bowl, put the whites in that and the yolks in another large bowl. Add about 1/4 tsp of the salt to the eggwhites. Put the rest, along with the pepper and dried herbs in the matzah meal and stir well. 2. Combine the yolks, shortening, and matzah meal and mix well, alternating between shortening and mix about three times. If you're doing it by hand, use a heavy wooden spoon or use the paddle on the mixer. It should all be well stuck together. Add the soda water about a third at a time and mix well. Adding the water in stages helps you assess how wet you want it and adjust the amount of water you add. It could vary on things like how wet the eggs are. The end result should be about the consistency of chocolate chip cookie dough. Stiff but not rigid, and not loose and wet. 3. Whip the salted whites to stiff peaks with the wire whisk on the mixer. Don't worry if it's not perfect meringue. It'll still work. 4. Gently fold the whites into the yolk/matzah meal mixture, using a heavy wooden spoon. Add about a quarter of the whites on top, then reach under with the spoon, turning it over as you reach the top. The mix should seem to wetten, but don't keep folding until all the white is absorbed--you'll overwork the batter and squash all the loft out of the eggwhites. Just fold until the white is like a ribbon through. Add the rest a quarter at a time, gently folding. It should still feel kind of fluffy when it's all mixed, and have no big white spots. Stop as soon as you can. 5. Cover and chill 30-120 minutes. (Half to two hours). Don't leave it much longer, or all the loft will go out. 6. Fill your biggest, widest, pot (stock pot, bean pot) about 3/4 full of water and put it on to boil. You'll want a rolling boil, but even with induction that much water takes some time to boil. If it's ready before you are, turn it down. Bringing it back to the boil will be easy. 7. Put a bowl of water where you're working to rinse your hands and a tray lined with parchment paper to put the balls on. (You can drop them right into the water but this is easier for me.) A medium food scoop is a great help for portioning. Take a rounded scoop's worth (i.e, don't flatten, but get round like a scoop of ice cream, but measure with your eyes--don't try to make it any particular shape in the scooper. Use a soup or serving spoon to get a similar portion if you don't have a scoop. Handle and mush the batter as little as possible. Dump the scooped portion--the size of a walnut or golf ball--into your damp hands and very gently roll it to form the ball shape. Don't worry about the exact shape. Just give it one roll in one direction and one in the other, without pressing, and put it down. Rinse/wet your hands as needed. 8. When your matzah balls are ready and your water is at a rolling boil, lower the water to a fast simmer--the high end of low (probably number 3). Carefully place matzo balls in the boiling water trying not to get spattered. Simmer for as long as you can. Bare minimum, 4 hrs. They'll sink first, then they'll rise to the top. If you have more balls than room at the top, they'll kind of stack up and the top ones start to turn brown. Just bop them down with your wooden spoon so the brown parts turn under and to let lower level ones up. After they've floated for a long time, they'll start to submerge, though they don't go down all the way to the bottom. When they're all hiding under the surface they might be done, but you could leave them in for another hour or more. If they start looking waterlogged and fluffy floating away, as in falling apart, they're overdone, so aim for 5-7 hrs. Yes, other people make matzah balls that they say are done in less than an hour, but this is how we do them for firm, fully cooked, tender and bounce free matzah balls. 9. Drain the matzah balls well while you're dishing them up. I use a ladle with a built in strainer, but you could also fish them out with a slotted spoon or small strainer with a long handle. Nobody likes the matzah ball water in their soup. :)

rmkitchen has the right link. Columbia Gorge Stoneworks, stonewallplates.com, made our outlet and switch covers. They were a pleasure to work with. They aren't cheap but it was worth it to us to complete the look especially given how many switches and outlets we have. We followed the directions on their website regarding how much stone to send - they need extra in case they have a problem with an area on the stone. We used two sink cut-outs and the cut outs from the 3 wide switches which were just the size needed for a one wide outlet cover. We used some plastic transparent film cut to the size of each wall plate so we could slide it around on the scraps and see the stone underneath. We found the spots on the scraps that provided a good match to the backsplash around the wall cover and taped down the transparent film to mark the spot. Then we packaged the stone and shipped it to Columbia Gorge Stoneworks. My careful DH used about 20 pounds of cardboard to pack the stone because he didn't want it to get damaged in transit! :^o In a few weeks, this came back: Here is the back of a wall cover so you can see how much they shape the stone: We had the blanks marked with letters for each outlet position and they put the letter on the back of each wall plate so we didn't have to figure out which went where. They had one case where they couldn't use the spot on the stone that we had marked but they chose a good alternate spot with a great match. The silvery rectangles on the back are magnets so that we don't have to have screws. We checked and all our outlets and switches attracted the magnets. They have magnets that you can glue in place on the outlet/switch if yours aren't magnetic. The colored cover on the Lutron outlets extends over the part of the outlet that the magnet would stick to so it is in the way: No problem, the excess plastic breaks off easily enough - here you can see the plastic with one end taken care of and the other still there: Close-up of a finished cover in place:

Hi Greg, That's the conclusion I was coming to a well, since I need the ducting on the kitchen side of the wall. (The other side will be a bedroom, probably the guest room.) I drew the thing four different ways in SketchUp and did 2d images of them.... Chimney hood. I think this one is my favorite because I'm going for a contemporary look: Hood under stacked cabinets like my architect suggested. Overwhelming, but maybe OK if I were going for a more traditional look. A lighter color on the 2nd row might make it a it better, but I couldn't find an easy way to draw that. Lowering the ceiling by a foot might help too, by making the 2nd row shorter. A chase / soffit like tubeman has. I think this one is a close second place visually. I wonder if this would be quieter since the ducting would be less exposed. Just for the heck of it, a hood inside a wooden enclosure. This looks nicer than I thought it would, and it might be nice in a more traditional / transitional design. It's probably not quite right for me, but I need to think about it and go find some real life pictures of this sort of design. Thanks for all the advice! BTW, for anyone wanting to play with SketchUp, the 3d warehouse has some "SketchData" frameless cabinet components that make this sort of thing pretty easy to create. There are even some YouTube videos explaining how to use them. Laura

It is the Grohe Ladylux Plus. We have the same faucet on our main and island prep sinks. We have been happy with them - I particularly like that the pull out goes back into place easily.