Thanks digger, Imagine my surprise when this whole thread started up after 2 years!! LOL it's always helpful, no matter how timely, to get good info from fellow ponders. The pond looks great, and I am guessing (fingers crossed) that it will stay this way the rest of the year. We kept our fish food in a gumball machine by the pond so it would be convenient for guests to throw in a little food when they are over...........a raccoon (I guess) found our little treasure last week, and ripped the hinged lid off the top of the wooden roof we had over the machine. Then it ripped the metal lid off of the gumball machine and cracked all the plastic so it could eat all of our food :( I should probably just be happy that whatever it was, it was that close to our fish and just ate the food instead! I'm glad it didn't notice the beautiful smorgasbord sitting right behind him!!! Thanks to everyone for their input. Hoping all of your ponds wind up crystal clear like ours is right now. With the heat that we have had here, I'm just taking it one day at a time! Judy

I can answer your question from experience as we have the exact same Culinarian cooktop configuration and opted for the 54x27 wooden hood with an insert from ModernAire. Our counters are 37-1/4 inches high, in part because we're tall but also because this pushes the cooktop an inch closer to the bottom of the hood, given a fixed hood height. Here are our finished measurements: 69-3/4 inches from floor to bottom of hood 32-1/2 inches from countertop to bottom of hood 31-3/4 inches from top of Culinarian stainless to bottom of hood (and the top of the iron grates are about 1 inch higher than the stainless, making the hood 30-3/4 above the top of the iron grates) We planned to mount the hood higher but dropped it down when we realized it is not a danger. One drawback of mounting the hood to high (in addition to poorer performance) is that you see the undersides more easily and some complain about the hood lights shining in their eyes or in the eyes of people sitting at the island. Plus the perceived noise is higher if there's a straight shot from your ears to the underside of the hood. We have never bumped into the hood and it would be almost impossible to do so because the rounded front of the Culinarian sticks out past the front edge of the countertop, making the cooks stand further out from the back wall. The wood hood itself is 54W x 27D, so the opening is less (perhaps I should have made the opening this dimension). Just now I discovered the hood sticks out only 26-1/2 inches from the back wall. This is due to the backsplash installed after the cabinets, as usual. A 24 inch deep hood would be a disaster with this cooking machine. I wish we had gone 27 inches deep on the inside of the hood, making the outside of the hood about 27-3/4 inches deep before backsplash. But I suggest you get rid of the shelf on the front of the hood unless you place it up higher. Even then it will block light from ceiling. If you have a deeper cabinet made for the Culianrian (not sure if you're getting a cooktop or a range) make sure your cabinetmaker doesn't make the cabinet too deep or it will result in your cooktop being pushed away from the back wall too far, negating the extra depth you built into your hood. We have an Abbaka 1400CFM fan on the roof, and it sucks well, even with a couple of bends. We've had no problem with smoke from wok cooking but amazingly we haven't used the grill yet. We're still dealing with tons of punch list items so we haven't gotten around to wrapping the grill parts in foil prior to firing it up. To fit the insert in the hood we had Modernaire ship the insert directly to out cabinetmaker so he could build the wood hood to match the insert. During the design phase we made mockups from foam board. I suggest you do the same if you want to play with the dimensions. Good luck with your project! Billy

I don't remember the store.....but I remember a peanut butter machine when I was a kid, Don't think it was a supermarket....but more of a deli place. I remember it had a window that was completely filled with peanuts in the shell,,,,and they had a roaster and you could buy a brown paper bag full of warm peanuts or get a carton of peanut butter squirted out of a machine which looked a little like a soft serve ice cream machine.... This was more than 60 years ago in northern New Jersey. It was on the south side of Bloomfield ave in Caldwell.... on a corner. Linda C

That's essentially the recipe my mother used all the time. They're great. She always used shortening. Nice and crumbly. My sister mixes butter and shortening. I usually use the butter flavored shortening. Also she never added the salt. Peanut butter generally has enough salt and if you use salted butter, that too has salt in it but use if you like. A suggestion to speed things up, just grab a bunch of the dough and roll it in your hands into a log shape about 1"-1 1/2" or however big you want them, then break off the pieces and set in the pan. Take the fork and go at them. My mother's recipe said to dip the fork in flour but I usually touch the fork to the dough then dip it in sugar. As you're breaking off pieces, usually 2-3 in the pan and one in the mouth. Love that peanut butter cookie dough!