De Buyer is World cuisine I beleive,atleast they look almost identical. I recently purchased 4 of their carbone plus pans and I think for the money they can't be beat. Of course there not SS but they do fit all the rest of your requirements. For the cost of 1 Demeyere SS apollo pan I bought 4 De Buyers. Here's a post I started last week on De Buyer carbone plus Here is a link that might be useful: Carbone Plus

Ksal again welcome to the Cooking Forum! You life doesn't sound like chaos to me, it sounds like you're very considerate of the kinds of foods you eat and your kid. You sound pretty well organized. I'm no toddler, but due to not being able to find work closer, I have an hour commute and I come home starving so the sooner I can get dinner on the table the better for me. That way I can spend more time eating and savoring. Weekend cooking is my real savior. Soup is a great thing to get a toddler started--with fun crackers. Plus some chopped up veggies and dip. I often munch on baked tortilla chips and black bean salsa dip while prepping dinner. Also toasted nut mix and maybe a piece of cheese or small dish of cottage cheese. Most of my friends with toddlers I see making simplified versions of mom and dad's meal. Toddlers have much smaller tummies so they eat less but more often, and are often sick with a runny nose and don't always have the tolerance for the heavy and spicy foods that grownups do. Sometimes yes, I know my friend's daughter loves salty greek olives and I loved smoked oysters and braunschweiger as a kid! But a fruit cup and cottage cheese or a PB&J on whole grain bread are fine starters too. Nothing wrong with good ol' spaghetti O's. There are more healthful versions of instant kiddie foods out there now, in some of the higher end markets. I sometimes buy little chicken drumsticks and bake them with barbecue sauce on the weekends and them have them for quick protein during the week. Check out the homeade applesauce thread. You could make your own applesauce and can it up in little jars that would make a good starter for your toddler. My brother lived on hot dogs, cottage cheese and applesauce as a kid. And a lot of milk. The only veggie he would eat was green peppers, so mom always had some gp sticks on hand to serve him. To this day he still like plain individualized foods. If I had a toddler like him, I would make stuff up on the weekends and freeze it in those little plastic freezer cups--mashed squash, mashed potatoes, baked sweet potatoes. I think I remember reading that if you add cream cheese to mashed potatoes they freeze well. I buy the lowfat stuff.

Yep, Yaya (have you read the Yaya Sisterhood book?) you are right, and when he lashes out it really frustrates me. I understand his reasons for it, but it still is unsettling. The fact he is hard of hearing, has bad knees and cannot do much construction work anymore, also depresses him. I've tried to get as much into this remodel to keep him from even trying to do the work himself. His poor knees cannot take hours on ladders, or hours putting in flooring. He once did ALL the work for additions or improvements but these days no way. I think that is part of his problem too. Of course, he wants to do it the OLD way, which is not up to the stringent code now in place for hurricane zones. So our disagreements about the ways they do things NOW contrary to the OLD FASHIONED way, or the way they did things up in MA which has different requirements (no worry for carrying heavy snow loads here, at all), puts him out of his element. We are not cutting many corners at all, with quality of flooring or roofing or strength of lumber and such as that. Even though we are OLDER PEOPLE, and should not worry too much about definition of "lifetime warranty" that is something he expects. I suppose that is why he insisted the cabinets be custom and wood, instead of the IKEA much less expensive kitchens. I figured that even 10-15 years from now, or not long thereafter, this kitchen would seem OLD to a buyer (more than likely a buyer would consider this a starter home) and they'd want to do some "updating" of the kitchen anyway. I know we updated appliances in our river house that Katrina destroyed, and that kitchen had been redone 10 years before. Steph, I think you make many good points, I like light floors too, which is why we have the ash hardwood going in. And, the new lighting fixtures will be super easy to deal with. I'm not going to keep big closets filled with anything stuck back for a rainy day if I can help it. Or shopworn chairs either--although he has 4 windsor chairs, and he takes pride in those. Somehow I'll have to find a place for them....and NOT at the dining table or in the living room! Right now I'm thinking about the Shaker style of hanging chairs on the wall out of the way. They would do okay in my Teahouse, up about 10 feet on a traditional Shaker "chair rail." with pegs for securing them up high. Hmmm, sort of lends new meaning to the term "chair rail" doesn't it! When I painted and decorated his MA cape, I took great delight in the house. I thought I was making it a traditional and pretty place like other capes. However, everybody who saw it said, "Oh, it is so SOUTHERN." I guess they were right. I believe the structure a lot similar to the cajun style and raised creole cottages of the south and the bayou. Both are charming homes to live in. Anyway, I must add that today he is more amenable to the work in progress. We've had a few days of respite from the work. The old roof, which is so bad it was crumbling beneath the feet of the carpenters, is to be removed tomorrow and the stickyback underlayment is to be laid down. The chimney will be refurbished with copper cap and flashing, new vents and turbines. He was much concerned about the dilapidated state of those crumbling shingles. As soon as GAF delivers our ultra high definition architectural shingles, maybe Thursday or Friday, we shall present a new face to the street. Namely a color called SLATE which has some green in it, and dark enough not to stain easily. The imminent install of the new roof has brightened his outlook considerably. And now I'm going to go read the last 150 pages of COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. What a book!

IMHO, the decision bet. SS and Silgranit does have to do with looks, but also has to do with cleanability. We were about to pull the trigger on a Kraus 16-gauge stainless sink for our kitchen redo. But then we thought about our current stainless sink's water spots and also how quickly the sink looks dirty or dingy. Yes, it shines beautifully immediately after cleaning, but that doesn't last long. We changed to a Blanco Silgranit, and while it's not installed yet, what a relief it'll be not to have to deal with the water spots any more. We chose the Anthracite color cause it'll look good with our granite. We went single bowl, without hesitation. The kitchen is small, we have room for a 30" sink max, and we didn't like the idea of bowls too small to soak the largest pans. The topic of single or double bowl sinks is discussed A LOT on this forum. One point mentioned frequently that resonates for me is that double bowl sinks were great when many people didn't have a dishwasher. But we spent $$$ on a dishwasher, and can see no reason now to have a double bowl for separating clean water from dirty, or soapy water from clear water or whatever. That, plus our 30" maximum size, made a double bowl not make sense for us.