Well, then, if you only hit 90, we were 4 degrees warmer than you. We hit 94, but only briefly, although we had stayed at 93 for quite a while. It was so hot out there! I am not ready for 90-anything degrees yet. My sugar snaps have behaved as yours---stalling during hot spells and then resuming growth, blooming and setting peas during cooler days. I don't know if Saturday's cooldown with kick them back into happy land right now because they definitely are not happy in this weather, and it shows. I hate to yank them out if it is going to cool back down but I am not sure how much more of a roller coaster ride they can tolerate. I planted peppers and tomatoes in molasses tubs today. I really wanted to put more of them in the ground, but I do have to save some room in the big garden for southern peas, okra, melons, pole beans and winter squash. I'd like to find room to squeeze in sweet potatoes....but I'm rapidly running out of space. Tim looked at the garden this afternoon and said "it looks like you have more planted in there this year" and, bless his heart, he said it with a straight face! I think maybe he's referring to the extra 50-something tomato plants I have in the ground compared to last year. Or, maybe it is the seven rows of bush beans. I was determined to get beans before the heat arrives, and we have teeney-tiny baby beans now, so I believe we'd have beans to harvest--but the heat did beat them here after all. I don't think he realized how many extra tomato plants I was sticking into the ground here and there. I put a couple of tomato plants in the onion bed where I'd pulled out a lot of green onions over the weeks, and some alongside the fence beside the rows of beans, and some in the cabbage and broccoli bed. I've been putting mini-tomato plants like Little Sun, Sweet-N-Neat Yellow, Sweet-N-Neat Scarlet, etc. in the lettuce garden whenever I remove a head of lettuce. I just stick a tomato plant in the bare spot. Today, Tim noticed there's as many tomato plants as lettuce plants in the lettuce bed. I feel like the season is accelerating without me. I'm stuck in planting mode, and there's the beans almost ready to pick while I'm still harvesting snap peas, and the corn's tassels are starting to appear. It's like Alice-in-Wonderland where we've fallen down the rabbit hole and found ourselves in a different world we don't understand. After all my whining about endless mud and wet ground in January through March, we've had very little rain the last 3 weeks, and you know the rest of the story....the big pond is dry already and the little one only has about a foot of water in it. The clay ground out behind the barn is cracking. I'm not liking the dry trend during what usually is a pretty wet month for us. You know, I hear that the Norman area will be having perfect weather on Saturday, so if I was going to visit someone in Oklahoma, I'd head for Norman. : )

A door to a garage is not allowed to connect to a sleeping room and it would only need to be fire-rated if some unusual code applied (like the UBC or NFPA 101, etc.). The typical residential code requirement (IRC and its predecessor CABO, etc.) is for a solid wood, a honey-comb or solid core steel, or a 20-minute fire-rated door so it is usually possible to use an ordinary solid core wood door with an ordinary wood frame without rated hardware and without an automatic closer. (If you use a 20-minute rated door the frame and hardware should be rated/labeled/listed as well). It is always wise to ask the local building official; I've run into some who also like to enforce NFPA 101 but some aren't concerned about the pairing of a rated door and an unrated frame. These doors are not usually located in fire-rated walls (usually only the finish on the garage side is required to be rated board, if rated at all) so, making the doors carry a fire rating label from a testing agency makes little sense. Typical garage separation walls are, in reality, smoke partitions and the doors should be considered smoke doors. Therefore a more pertinent requirement would be for door gasketing which some jurisdiction do require. The risk of fire in a garage is far less than in a kitchen or bedroom. The requirement for a quasi smoke partition and door are due to the fact that a fire might not be detected as quickly in that location as in occupied parts of the house.

Interesting question that got me thinking. So I did some research. My conclusion: there is no simple answer and a lot of interesting information to ponder. Here's what I've come up with so far from plowing through the research I've found. USDA conclusions about how low and how slow are not limited to sous vide, but will not apply for every cooking method, either. Basically, the ideas are valid for anything you can safely cook low and slow. "Safely" depends on a lot of factors including the particular food(s) you are cooking and how well you can avoid the possibility of cross-contamination. You certainly don't want to try this for, say, for cooking unrefrigerated home tomato preserves (what we call "home canning" over here) or anything else that might carry botulism spores. Beyond that, there seems to be be controversy over how low and how slow for any given foodstuff. Here's an example to consider if you like roast beef. Back in the 1950s, cooking gurus Adele Davis (on our side of the Atlantic) and Elizabeth David (on yours) had recipes for roast beef that (IIRC) involved 5 or more hours in a 200°F/95°C oven, followed by a brief sear of the exterior. (Maybe vice versa.) Over here, Cook's Illustrated magazine revived that low temp roasting idea in the mid-90s and even suggested going down to the 170°F temperature which was the lowest that most modern ovens could maintain (at least in North America.) Those recipes left some food safety experts and critics aghast and vociferous --- the concern being about fear of interior bacterial growth during the long time it took for the interiors of thick roasts to reach "food-safe" temperatures. Other experts felt that the problem bacteria were on the food exterior surfaces and the oven temperatures were suffient to get the surfaces hot enough and quickly enough to kill the bad bugs (or at least reduce them levels that were not a health concern. More recently, celebrity British chef and author, Heston Blumenthal, one-upped (downed?) that controversy with a recipe that called for a five hours in a 131°F/50°C oven followed by a sear of the exterior with a blowtorch. Certainly sounds like you could do these recipes in a suitable warming drawer. (Suitable meaning that the drawer maintains a relatively even temperature.) FWIW, Cooks Illustrated now recommends different techniques for slow roasting beef and and does not recommend them for poultry. The current recommendations are these. For less expensive cuts with lots of connective tissue, 250°F/120°C for five hours. For leaner and more expensive cuts (such as what North Americans call "prime rib"), 20 minutes in an oven preheated to 500°F/260°C, then shut the oven off and leave the roast to sit there (door closed) for 2½ hours or so. I've tried both recipes and both produced very good results. So far, I have not yet run across anything scientific discussing before and after "bug counts" for Blumenthal's 130°F method. (The info may be out there, I just have not found it yet.) Sounds like a science fair project. Hmmm. While I no longer have a stove with a warming drawer, my current stove's oven will hold a steady 130°/55°C temperature. I do have a blowtorch. A friend of mine is a biology professor with a lab than can measure surface bacteria levels. But, heck, maybe I should just try the recipe and see if I get sick? ;>P In the meantime, I ran across an interesting and thoughtful article from Scientific American magazine that might be of further interest. It's sort of halfway between the USDA study and Kenji Alt's simplified digest. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/complex-origins-food-safety-rules/

Well we don’t use ours a ton, just for the odd reheating here and there. I usually reheat on the stovetop or cook fresh, so I might go a day or two without using it. I would’ve loved to have a pantry large enough to keep a microwave in, but that wasn’t going to happen in this kitchen. I’m in my mid 40’s, I’ve had back problems before, and I’m about 5’6” and the shortest person in my family. None of us have any complaints about it being too low. I wondered if pulling liquids out of there was going to be a problem like it can be when a microwave is up high, but I haven’t found it to be an issue at all. I could see where it might be a small problem if my kids were all still little and into pushing buttons, but my youngest ones are 16 now. Really, the only inconvenience is that you can never see the clock on it... the angle is wrong, and in the model I have the display isn’t very bright. So I never keep the clock set now but I have other places in my kitchen where I can see the time... and I use a separate digital timer (that can run three separate timers at once) near my range since my range doesn’t have electronics like that. (And sometimes I just use the timer on my smart phone, especially when I’m grilling outside). The only other time it’s moderately inconvenient for a minute or two is when I’m cleaning out the inside of it, and I tend to just sit in front of it when I do that. It’s also a little bit more to move it aside to clean under it periodically compared to just shoving it aside when it sits on a counter. But I don’t do that very often, LOL! Thank you for the compliments on my kitchen too! It was a gut job diy remodel and my hubby designed and built all of the cabinetry, including the waterfall walnut island. I’m very proud of the work he did. :)