One other item that I have found extremely useful - a pot hanger on the wall over my butcher block table. As my kitchen is so small, there isn't room for an island table with a pot hanger, but the wall opposite my working area serves the purpose of the lack of extra storage cupboards. It has 12 hooks to serve a variety of pots, fry pans, sieves, hand mixer, oft-used utensils, etc. On top - a shelf catches other seldom used utensils. This allows more room in my tiny kitchen cupboards for the rest of my usual baking dishes. As Linda Lou mentioned in her post, having mats on the floor where most of the work is being done, helps tremendously also. I bought 4 heavy-duty rubber mats decorative - from Home Depot) to lay end-to-end on this area, and it saves a lot of wear and tear on the feet and legs during heavy canning times. Also easy to pick up, clean with the hose, and they are ready to go again. Just my 2 c's. Bejay

Just a update. I came up to Tahoe for a few days to see my daughter. She got two days off work, after working 12 hours/day for thirteen days straight. Her summer is going great. The kitchen is running smoothly. She's been learning how to manage her kitchen staff, 10 people including two assistant supervisors and a bunch of junior cooks. Lots of training, teaching, correcting, encouraging, and now doing job reviews and planning staffing for next summer. She's also been writing up recipes and procedures, filling out employee evaluations, and other administrative stuff. Along the way they've had to deal with equipment breaking down, water shortages, a small forest fire that closed the road and interrupted food delivery for awhile, and other interesting aspects of cooking in the high mountains. The camper feedback on the food has been very good. People have told me the meals have been the best they've ever had in years of coming to camp. She's been asked for her recipes several times. (As an aside, I think they need to change their policies for accommodating special dietary requests. This being a Berkeley camp, families are always requesting that their meals for the week be gluten free, dairy free, meat free, nut free, kosher, vegan, soy free, low fat, low carb, without certain spices, no raw vegetables, no garlic or onions, no peppers, no tomatoes, and on and on - the list of idiosyncratic restrictions seems endless. Right now the camp kitchen accommodates every request, which means they have to improvise a special variant or two of the meal, for one or more individual campers, almost every day. I told her they need to develop a standard list of alternative dishes using food that they will stock all the time and offer those and only those, instead of trying to create bespoke versions of every meal served during the week. For example, they should always be able to accommodate vegetarians or gluten intolerants or lactose intolerant, but I don't think a camper should be able to present any arbitrary list of restrictions and always expect to be accommodated. This isn't a restaurant, it is a summer camp.) On her first day off, we drove to Reno and found a restaurant supply store, and I bought a bunch of little stuff they need. Things like more aprons and oven mitts, egg slicers, thermometers, etc. My daughter was like a kid in a candy store. The camp kitchen needs a lot of other equipment, but my "helpful dad" budget does not extend to a commercial mixer (the kids are making dough by hand because they only have one Kitchen-Aid for 140 people), a Robot Coupe (they chop everything by hand, no food processor), a commercial rice maker, etc. The kitchen does get improved a little every year. Maybe next summer they will actually have their new ovens installed. Can you imagine feeding 140 people a day with just one large flat top, four burners, one small oven, and one charbroiler? At the former camp in Yosemite that burned in the big forest fire of 2013, the kitchen was well equipped. At this camp in Tahoe, the kitchen is nowhere as good. I've been vagabonding while I'm here. The first night I put my sleeping bag on the couch on the deck of the tent cabin that my daughter shares with some other girls. That was comfortable enough but I am a bit appalled at how messy four teenaged girls can be. The next night my daughter and I slept on the beach at Lake Tahoe, outside a friend's house. We watched the local bear splashing through the water about 70 feet away, then fell asleep to a fantastic lightning storm on the other side of the lake. Pictures below. Tonight I'm borrowing that friend's tent cabin, so I'm slightly less on guard about the local bear. He has never threatened anyone, in the five years that he's been living in this grove by the lake, and I've been within 40 feet of him a few times, but you still have to make sure you don't have food in your car or in your sleeping bag. Well, that's it for now. It might rain tonight, so I'm glad my sleeping bag isn't on the beach.

I leave salt out of a lot of dishes, and I do NOT believe that salt enhances flavors in candy, especially chocolate. I do add small amounts of salt in desserts that are made with flour, but if they do not have flour, I omit the salt. I do have a collection of wooden mid-century salt and pepper shakers, but they are mainly for looks, as I do not consider them practical for use. I do think they are pretty and decorative, however. On most of them, I cannot tell which is supposed to be salt and which is supposed to be pepper. I suppose I could put salt in both of them, since I only use pepper grinders for pepper. What I hate is when restaurants fill the pepper shakes so full that no pepper will shake out. In those cases, I have to remove the lid and sprinkle the pepper. I almost never add salt to food in restaurants, but there have been rare occasions when I wanted it - mostly on salads that had oil and vinegar on them but no salt and no pepper. I've not been to Father's Office in Culver City, but it's very close to Kevin's work. We do go to La Dijonaise, which is half a block from it, however, and Surfas Restaurant Supply used to be down the street from that, but it looks like they've moved about four miles up the street (Washington Blvd), making it a bit less convenient. HBO is putting a building where the old Surfas was :(. They changed their name to Surfas Culinary District also.

I desire to purchase absolutey nothing! I have been down sizing for years now and I actually have empty storage spaces in the house. The attic is empty and most of kitchen cabinets are empty. I have only 4 pairs of shoes and my hanging clothes are only about four feet, not including the winter coats and a few sweaters that hang with them. I not only find peace in having less to maneuver around, I also find a lot more value in what remains. Not wandering around and not buying is not hard to do, given how so many of the storefronts have disappeared. Other than the usual suspects of Walmart, Target and Kohls, there is really not much for miles. Even though I live in the burbs of DC, the real shopping is almost gone and all the malls within a reasonable distance from me have closed. The one remaining about 15 miles north of me has so little traffic that the stores in it dont even open until noon. I really dont understand why this is. This area is densly populated and there is a high income level here. I can see no explanation for it. but it is true. I actually worked in retail at the mall for a number of years. dont know what is to become of the actual builiding. Other than the three usual suspects there is no where to go to shop, anyway. The local Macys died an ugly death last month and was the only breath that was left in the mall. All gone. BBB, all gone. Pennys, all gone, from near here. Ktichen stores, all gone. There are no little unique shops of any manner in this community. They could not afford the retail space and the over head. Only the big box stores survive and Kohls often seems to have more employees than it does customers. I really baffles me, but I stand by my assessment of the situation.