look up the recipe for making rose beads - that might work to keep them from turning brown...

I bought most of my cast iron at yard sales, inherited several well-used pieces from around WWI (not kidding!), and believe it or not actually dug one frying pan out of the dirt in the backyard of a mid-1800s farmhouse I rented 15 years ago when rototilling for my landlord's garden. It was very rusty but once we got the rust off (wire brush attachment on an electric drill!) and reseasoned it it was good as new. I see them all the time at Goodwill and "Sal's Boutique" ;-) for just a couple of dollars because they're always all black and nasty looking, but they're easy to rescue. IMO the best place to buy NEW cast iron is an old-fashioned independent hardware store, where it costs maybe 1/4 what the fancy kitchen stores charge. Lodge is an excellent brand and the only brand still made 100% in the USA (and mostly from recycled iron!). There are many ways to go about seasoning cast iron and everyone is convinced that only their way is the right way and everyone else is wrong. :-) The ones I had that came from yard sales and other dubious sources got a run through a self-cleaning oven cycle or blasting-hot grill (if you use a charcoal grill, bury it right in the coals while you cook on the grate above) until a layer of ash formed on the surface. I washed that off and reseasoned them, and they might as well have been new. I had to give up my cast iron a few years back, which made me very sad, but I couldn't cook anything with them unless DH was home to pick up the blasted pan for me. My favorite pieces were my Dutch oven, the great big "chicken-fryin' pan" as one of my Southern friends called it, the flat griddle (best grilled cheese sandwiches ever), and a 12" skillet with lovely smooth sloped sides that made wonderful cornbread and Yorkshire pudding. Oh, and I had two ancient muffin pans which made the most glorious popovers. Popovers are one of my favorite things, but muffin tins and modern popover pans tend to be too thin to get hot enough for a good "pop". At least I gave them to a fellow foodgeek who would take care of them. All-Clad makes a stainless steel wok but I don't have one. My horrible glass-topped electric stove (I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it) doesn't produce enough heat to bother with a wok so we gave ours away to a friend who actually cooks on the same iron wood-fired stove his great-grandmother cooked on. He fires it up blasting hot, takes one of the lids off and drops the wok right inside. I preferred the woks with a smallish flat bottom and the single rolled-metal handle rather than the ring and two little loop handles.

I'm glad you all like them...I'd love to be eating those crepes, this morning! I need to go buy some good quality, chocolate bars :) Deedles- I saw Laura Calder's kitchen for the first time, thanks to a link from a GW post. The minute I saw those blue tiles...I was hooked. I love white, blue and plants...have you seen my bunny tiles? LOL As for inspiration pictures, I usually look up 'english country cottage kitchen' or french country kitchen' or eurpoean country kitchen' sometimes even 'rustic romantic' but that's usually a bit too frilly...although I've found a few good pictures. Vintage kitchens might be a good place, too.

The canola oil is important to the recipe. This was the answer to the same concern about canola oil, from a website that I get sent to Disney for trying to post. The canola oil story is a HOAX!! And that's all there is to it. Any "warnings" from an e-mail are 99 percent certain to be lies and hoaxes. Don't buy into it. "What we have here is a bit of truth about a product's family history worked into a hysterical screed against the product itself. There is no earthly reason to give any credence to this rumor -- Canola oil is not the horrifying product this widely-disseminated e-mail makes it out to be, nor has the FDA turned loose on the American public a health scourge worthy of being named one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. An appreciation of what this scare is based upon begins with a better understanding of what canola oil and how it came into being. The rape plant (Brassica napus) is a member of the mustard family, as claimed in the e-mail. However, before associations between rape and mustard gas set in too strongly, it should be noted turnip, cabbage, watercress, horseradish, and radish are also members of this family of plants. Rapeseed oil has been used for cooking for centuries in Europe, India, China, and Japan. As modern science is finding out, its previous use wasn't necessarily a guarantee of safety. Cooking at high temperatures with unrefined rapeseed oil now appears to be related to an increased risk of lung cancer because at high temperatures cooking oil gives off chemicals capable of causing mutations in cells. Unrefined rapeseed oil is particularly notable for this, but other oils also have this association. Those intent upon doing large amounts of wok cooking with any sort of cooking oil should therefore lower their frying temperature from the 240C to 280°C called for in Chinese cooking to 180°C. Rapeseed oil naturally contains a high percentage (30-60%) of erucic acid, a substance associated with heart lesions in laboratory animals. For this reason rapeseed oil was not used for consumption in the United States prior to 1974, although it was used in other countries. (Americans chose to use it as a lubricant to maintain Allied naval and merchant ships during World War II.) In 1974, rapeseed varieties with a low erucic content were introduced. Scientists had found a way to replace almost all of rapeseed's erucic acid with oleic acid, a type of monounsaturated fatty acid. (This change was accomplished through the cross-breeding of plants, not by the techniques commonly referred to as "genetic engineering.") By 1978, all Canadian rapeseed produced for food use contained less than 2% erucic acid. The Canadian seed oil industry rechristened the product "canola oil" (Canadian oil) in 1978 in an attempt to distance the product from negative associations with the word "rape." Canola was introduced to American consumers in 1986. By 1990, erucic acid levels in canola oil ranged from 0.5% to 1.0%, in compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards. This light, tasteless oil's popularity is due to the structure of its fats. It is lower in saturated fat (about 6%) than any other oil. Compare this to the high saturated fat content of peanut oil (about 18%) and palm oil (at an incredibly high 79%). It also contains more cholesterol-balancing monounsaturated fat than any oil except olive oil and has the distinction of containing Omega-3 fatty acids, a polyunsaturated fat reputed to not only lower both cholesterol and triglycerides, but also to contribute to brain growth and development. In other words, it's a healthy oil. One shouldn't feel afraid to use it because of some Internet scare loosely based on half-truths and outright lies."