I've always called my grater a saber but I think it's a microplane. It's just a great grater. It does grating cheese,lemon zest, ginger, nut meg, fingers ...everything. I don't do the foot thing and I don't think I will suggest it to my DH. Honestly I used to hate grating cheese and was absolutely shameless in what I would do to con someone else into doing it but I really like doing it now. I swear I am not now and never have been employed by the makers of that thing......Tache

For hard cheese like Parmesean, I sometimes throw it in the food processor like lowspark suggests - it's what I do when making pesto. We have a couple of the shredder/storage containers like grainlady mentioned. Ours came from Ikea. I find them very convenient and the shredders that come with them work well. We have micro planes that work nicely when wanting to grate directly on to something. For doing a lot of cheese, the shredding disk on the food processor is nice, but I only use that when the amount is worth cleaning it. Usually, I shred by hand. My hands are small so when using a big block of cheese, I'll often hack off a piece that I can hold more comfortably and shred that. It makes it a lot easier.

I agree with sleevendog and Annie about using canning jars. I start with something that was stored in the food storage room in a 1/2-gallon wide-mouth jar, and as the food item is used, down-size the contents to a quart, pint and 1/2-pint, and they all use the same wide-mouth jar lid (I use both metal rings and lids and the plastic screw-on lids for jars, and metal lids I have spray-painted with chalkboard paint and use chalk pencils or liquid chalk markers to mark the contents on the lid.) For dry storage in the pantry, the quart to 1/2-pint jars I use take up the same amount of space since I store my jars on their side with the lid showing the contents of the jar. I have my shelves adjusted so they are the same space as a 1/2-gallon jar between them (and have between 75-80 jars in my pantry holding dry-goods). I stopped and counted 15 canning jars in my refrigerator. We also use a number of glass Pyrex storage bowls with plastic lids (1-cup and 2-cup). Hubby takes them to work in his lunch - so they are filled with leftovers from previous meals and stored in the freezer. They go from the freezer to his lunch bag, and then microwaved when he eats lunch. A plastic container I like to use are Ball Freezer Jars - the 8-oz. size often used for freezer jam works great for single-servings of soup/stew/broth, and they also come in 16-oz. size. I like the screw-on lids. These plastic jars stack nicely and the lids nest together. -Grainlady

The Anova box was on a promotional e-mail. I really didn't need it at all, but I'm very pleased with it. The e-mail was entitled "Hurry before they are gone", though it was a pre-issue promotion. Since it arrived immediately, I have to think they were already ready to ship. I don't know if the "hurry" was a marketing ploy or if they're not going to be keeping these in stock permanently. I just was in the mood, having just done the cheese. It's not like blintzes are daily, or even monthly, food. It'll just be so much easier to open the cheese, take its temperature, cut the curds, etc., if the whole deal is on the counter, and a roaster pan has too much evaporation and is too in the way... Anyway, sometimes I get all happy from having a new, mostly useless, toy, and I'm delighted. I think it's the blackest thing I own. It's like black hole black. Even white light doesn't bounce off it. Kind of beautiful and spooky. Here's the flyer: Anova Box Re blintz flavors, I think too much sugar overwhelms the distinctively blintzy flavor, though it does well for disguising having the wrong cheese. :) OTOH, nothing wrong with a sweet blintz with blueberries or mint. Or raisins. If you want traditional Northern European, they're served with sour cream and applesauce. You don't combine the two, but many will alternate bites, to maximize the tickling of the taste buds. My applesauce secret is to cook the apples down in TJ's sparkling apple cider rather than sugar and water. It keeps it very apple-y and has just the right amount of sugar, not too much. (The latter part is why I use that particular cider, but any would do. If it's too sweet, there's always water. :) ) On the blintz making, I can only hope for intelligible instructions. Do you have a hand crank rotary egg beater?