Best stainless steel mixing bowl set

Answer:  In my opinion, it's the "Bakers and Chefs" set of 3 + 1 at Sam's Club, of all places.

They are sold in a conventional set of three but then you can buy the fourth, which is the 13-quart, separately if you want that.  Obviously to look at them nested like this, all four were really intended to go together.  Less than $30, all-in.  

As with many consumer endeavors, what seems like it should be a very straightforward purchase often turns out not to be.  When I set out to search for these things, I assumed I had a very simple and reasonable wish list of characteristics:

1. It had to be a set of at least four bowls (many consumer sets only have three).
2. The largest one had to be at least 12 quarts (I'll reveal why below).
3. They had to be commercial grade or close to it (no flimsy steel).
4. They had to have an efficient aspect ratio.

Those sound like four easy criteria, but it took me months to find a set that met them.

By efficient aspect ratio, I mean that the bowls had to be deep relative to their width.  Many mixing bowl sets are very shallow.  

In terms of aspect ratio, I was also taking into account the need for a stable base.  This is IKEA's current stainless bowl (Blanda).  It's very hip and stylish, but look at that tiny flat bottom in the center!  I feared the bowls in this set would be too unstable, roly-poly like.    

Prior to buying this set, I owned a few mixing bowls that were too shallow, and one that was too flimsy, to the point where it would expand so much upon washing in hot water that it would later sit unattended in the drain board and go "SPROING!!!!" when the bottom of it cooled down and contracted enough to snap back into its original shape.  This would happen at entirely unpredictable times and would routinely scare the crap out of me.  And life is simply too short for mixing bowls that make random obnoxious noises and scare the crap out of you.

Happy mixin'.

This is why I need a lot of mixing bowls, and large deep ones at that.  During this time of year, there's a daily haul of fruits and vegetables from our back yard gardens, and that stuff tends to fill up every kitchen container in sight.  

Healthier banana muffins

I can't tell you how many calories my recipe has because I have no way of measuring calories, but you can be fairly certain that these muffins have less than the up-to-740 calories (!!) in the offenders on this list of "Top 12 Dangerous Muffins".  

And it's not just muffins that are our present culture's sugar-bomb offenders.  WHAT IN THE SAM HOUSTON IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE SUCH THAT THEY'D ACTUALLY PUT CRAP LIKE THESE DRINKS INTO THEIR MOUTHS?!

Screengrabbed from this source.  

Physical depictions of sugar equivalents have become very popular since "The Weight of the Nation" was released by HBO (they were one of the first to make this kind of presentation to people).  Read on to see an analogous sugar-in-a-bag depiction for my muffins.

Screengrabbed from this site.  

Seriously, I don't know what the hell goes through peoples' minds when they consume crap that is so obscenely chock full of refined sugars.  It does not take an aggregate IQ over 85 to know by common sense that sugar-heavy drinks and sugar-heavy muffins are extremely unhealthy.  As in, poison yourself unhealthy.

There are no analogous sugar-bag depictions for muffins, just calorie summaries.  This is the standard ridiculous Google return for 'muffin sugar', although obviously muffins will vary tremendously in calories.  

Big Mac, just for comparison.  Both screengrabbed from Google.  

Anyway, here's my ingredient list and I will follow with step-by-step pics of the preparation process.  All dry measures are heaping measures except for the sugar.  

Ingredients:

• 3.5 large bananas, aged
• About 0.5 cup brown sugar (or less)
• Dollop of molasses (1 tablespoon)
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 0.5 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 0.5 cup Teff flour (if available, else substitute white or wheat)
• About 3 tablespoons of ground flax meal
• 0.3 cup light olive oil
• 0.5 to 0.75 cups ground almonds (depending on taste)

Procedure:  

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.  As it is warming up, combine ingredients thusly:  

Bananas should be mushy but not rotten.  

Combine dry ingredients EXCEPT for brown sugar in a sifter.  That's the heaping cup of whole wheat flour in the background and my favorite other flour, teff, in the foreground.  Teff is no longer available locally - Whole Foods used to carry it but now it must be ordered over the internet.  It ain't cheap, but neither are cancer and diabetes.    

Sift to the extent possible.  Obviously the flax meal won't go through the sifter, but get as much of the material through as possible and then just dump the remainder on top.  

In a separate bowl, combine eggs, olive oil, molasses, and brown sugar.  Mix coarsely - do not homogenize.  

By the way, this is what my brown sugar looked like in the obligatory plastic sack.  This is not for one muffin - this is for TWELVE large muffins. And I used less than depicted here.  Obviously the muffins also get some natural sugars from the bananas, but my point is, this recipe is not overflowing with refined sugars.   

Ah yes, the bananas.  Peel them and mash them on a plate.  They should be nice and soft.  

Mix the bananas in with the other wet ingredients.  I do not like homogeneous banana bread or banana muffins, so I leave mine lumpy.  Not as extremely lumpy as pictured here, but visibly lumpy.  

Fold together the wet and dry ingredients, again, not making the mix too homogeneous.  You MIGHT have to add a couple of tablespoons of water, depending on how dry your mix turns out to be.  If it looks like this above, you should be OK.  

Once you've got it mostly mixed, throw the almonds in and continue to stir.

This is what my almonds looked like.  You'll notice that the volume of my almonds exceeds that of my brown sugar.  Almonds are good for you.  Refined sugar is not.  

Spoon into a muffin tin.  I like to use muffin papers.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.  

Voila.  

You'll notice that my muffins are a little muffin-toppy-saggy.  I don't have much gluten in this combination of two flours (whole wheat and teff), so they don't rise all puffy like higher-glycemic muffins.  No matter - they are light enough so that you won't notice anything wrong with the texture, and they taste great.  Try 'em.  And for God's sake, stay the hell away from sugary drinks.  

Recipe for the unofficial dish of Centerpointe Section 9

Requiem for a Meme:  This post is dedicated to whoever crafted this anonymous gem:

There's no attribution, which makes it even more powerful, because this guy could be any one of us who still knows how to cook real food in a fast-food universe.  

As Section 9 of our subdivision is now turning four years old (!), I'll mark the occasion by presenting a well-received recipe in the sections below.  I am presumptuous enough to declare this to be our dish.  And it's a heck of a lot better for you than birthday cake.

The good news, and the specific reason I chose this dish, is that everyone can eat it regardless of ethnic, religious, health, age, or other lifestyle restrictions.  Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus have all eaten this and declared it to be worthy, and if I could find some Jews in here, I think it could be made kosher also.  Vegan and non-vegan neighbors have both approved it irrespective of their ethnicities.  It is gluten free (I think - see notes below) and none of the ingredients are particularly allergenic (that I know of), so no limitations on that dietary front either.  It's also very simple as recipes go, so cooking skill is no bar.  And furthermore, it costs only pennies per serving.  In sum, I can identify no resident for whom this would not be a suitable healthy dish to make and eat.

The bad news is, on the day when I last made this, I was preparing three dishes simultaneously, and so I was a bit distracted when I was taking the prep photos.  My photo spread is a bit disjointed as a result, but here goes.

Cuban Black Beans

(This ingredient list makes 7 to 9 quarts - cut recipe down for smaller batches)

• 4 cups dried black beans (Whole Foods organic from the bulk section are good)
• 2 cups dried kidney beans (ditto)
• Approximately 6 large Spanish onions
• 1 to 2 full heads of garlic (depending on taste), split into cloves and minced
• Approximately 0.5 to 0.75 cups of virgin olive oil
• 4 large bunches of cilantro
• 28 to 36 ounces of canned diced tomatoes
• 0.5 to 1 cup of British malt vinegar (any issues with gluten or kosher?)
• Salt to taste (usually a few tablespoons)
• Water

Like many dishes that include only simple ingredients, the taste derives from proper preparation, which is a 3-day*, multi-step process that goes something like this (*the good news is that you can freeze this which means you don't have to cook batches of it very often).

Start on the evening of the first day, perhaps before you go to bed, putting up the dried beans to soak in water.

First pour out the dried black and kidney beans onto a clean, flat surface such as your dining room table.  Inspect carefully and remove any small rocks, wood chips, etc.

Then, put them in a large pot and cover with several inches of water.  They're going to swell up considerably, so they need a lot of water.

In this photo, it looks like I have many more kidney beans than black, but that's only because the kidney beans tend to float better.  

On the afternoon of the second day, after the beans have soaked for at least 12 hours but perhaps as long as 14 or 16 hours, begin the cooking.

Turn the heat on under the soaked beans, making sure that there is about 1.5 inches of water remaining over the top of them (bean purists debate whether the soaking water should be discarded and replaced with fresh water for cooking... I tend to retain the soak).

Bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer with the top of the pot on, but cracked open.  Add some salt.

Then dice four of the onions and most of a head of garlic (depending on your taste for garlic).

Fry in at least a quarter cup of the olive oil.  The olive oil is the only real fat in this dish, and there has to be enough of it to transmit the tastes.

In this photo, I also threw in a handful of frozen tomatoes from our garden, but you can ignore that part (I make it a point to include something I've grown myself in each dish I make).  This isn't my full four onions, either.  I added more after this pic was taken.  

After the onion/garlic mixture is sauteed, add it to the pot of simmering beans.  I don't have a pic of that step.

Allow this initial mixture to simmer for several hours before moving on to the next step.

OK, now for the potentially novel part of this cooking experience.  What distinguishes this bean dish from others we know more commonly (e.g., Texas pinto beans) is the inclusion of a concoction known as sofrito.

Screengrabbed from Google.  

To make a black bean sofrito, continue with the following steps.

Chop the other two onions, the rest of your garlic, and saute in more of the olive oil.

After you get done sauteeing, you'll need to add a great deal of chopped cilantro.

I make such large batches of these beans that I get lazy with the cilantro.  Cilantro tastes best if you strip the leaves off the stems, but if I tried to do that here with the volume of cilantro needed, it would take me about a week.  It's easier for me to just buy four bundles and cut off the top sections, discarding the stem-rich remainder.  That still gives me four large fistfuls without having to do a lot of work.

By the way, I've since built for myself a much more effective chopping board.  You can see that here if you're interested.  

The cilantro is one of the two main components supplying the aromatics to this sauce.  You actually throw all that cilantro in there and cook it down - you reduce it, but somehow that does not totally kill the taste of the cilantro - don't ask me why not because it seems like it should be more fragile.  

After the cilantro has had a chance to reduce, you add the canned tomatoes.

Bean purists often used canned rather than fresh tomatoes in cooked beans because they claim that canned helps keep the dish from spoiling.  It prolongs the refrigerator life, in other words.  Or so people say.  But if you freeze most of your beans like I do, that shouldn't be an issue either way.  

So here's what the intermediate stage of sofrito looks like.  You'll need to cook the heck out of this one, too - at least 45 minutes.  

After the above sofrito ingredients are well-reduced, you add about a cup of malt vinegar.  This is the other component that supplies the aroma.

I like this brand.  A little maltose goes a long way - it's a very distinctive taste (Negra Modelo beer is an example of another product that has a lot of maltose in it and people tend to either love it or hate it).  If you're not sure that you like this flavor, start with a half a cup and then later add a bit more to the bean pot if you feel like it.  I use a full cup.  

Keep cooking the sofrito until the liquidity is again reduced.  Another 20 minutes at least.

Then, the sofrito is added to the main pot of cooking beans.

This is one of those moments when I wish I didn't have an over-the-range microwave oven because it's hard to get it in there when the pots are so large.  

Stir thoroughly and (you guessed it) continue to cook on low heat (barely simmer) for another hour or so.  Taste to adjust the salt if needed.

This is where I cover and turn my pot off and go to bed, leaving it on the stove overnight.  This is a 15-quart pot you see here, so the beans are still warm when I wake up on the morning of the third day.  I then turn the pot back on for another hour or three on very low heat.

The cooking duration sounds extreme, but it's really hard to screw this dish up by cooking it too long.  You'll be able to tell when the beans are done by the texture when you taste them - they should be slightly firm but not stiff, and generally smooth.  If you're using conventionally grown beans, the litmus test is to separate some beans from the sauce and blow on them to see if their skins split.  Yes, you heard correctly:  if the skins split, they are sufficiently done.  However, I've found that Whole Foods organic beans have skin that either barely splits or does not split at all no matter how long they are cooked.  I don't know why this is so.  With those beans, you sample them to taste for texture and smoothness to tell if they are done.

They should look something like this at the end of the long, long cooking process.  The surrounding liquid becomes like a thick gravy. 

Into the freezer for multiple future servings.  

The advantages to this incredibly long cooking period are as follows:

• Optimal taste.  Ask numerous of my neighbors.  This recipe is unexpectedly good.  No other home cooking that I share around here is met with as much enthusiasm.  
• Little (if any) gas.  Long cooking times help break down the indigestible cellulose that causes gas.  If you eat beans and a lot of gas results, one or more of these three issues is at the (f)heart of your problem:

1. Your beans were not cooked properly.  Most commercial sources (restaurants, packaged food manufacturers, etc.) simply cannot afford a two to three day prep cycle, and so this has a lot to do with why beans have a bad reputation.  The preparers cut corners and poor digestibility results.  
2. You don't eat beans often enough.  If they are a regular part of your diet, your body gets used to them and doesn't react by producing gas (that whole beneficial gut bacteria thing again).
3. You eat beans as too large a fraction of your total meal.   They need to be a component balanced out by other servings.  I like to have mine with a hearty brown rice and maybe a piece of grilled chicken breast and a small salad.  Diluting the beans makes your body better able to handle any indigestible components that may remain.   

If you abide by those three pointers above, you should have no problem.  Happy noshing.  And Happy Birthday, Section 9!

Four years ago almost to the day, we were regaled by these genius tradesmen.  Rather than carrying the drywall up all those stairs, they cut a tiny slit in the wall of the house and simply passed it in through the side.  Texas ingenuity!!!
:-)

To the grocery grave, Part 2

As I begin to write this post, I feel like that dude in the old Verizon Wireless commercials.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

I don't know if anyone is actually going to hear me, but let me say it again, echolalia-style:

Screengrabbed from To the grocery grave, Part 1 (January 14, 2014).  

With that January declaration in mind, imagine my surprise when I saw this front page Chron headline yesterday...

Screengrabbed from the frontpage of www.Chron.com's online edition, March 8, 2014.  It's referencing The Fresh Market, which is also scheduled to open a store in Clear Lake in a few months.  The store that's closing is near Highland Village (Westheimer at Weslayan).  

...and then proceeded to read this part:

Screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle piece (paywalled).  I would have used the word "irrelevant" rather than "redundant".  

Are you kidding me?!  Seriously?!  Somebody actually (ahem) got paid to make a business decision like that?!  Someone actually attempted to operate a grocery store across the street from THE flagship Central Market?   I had no idea!

Local readers, let me ask you this:  Is there a Houstonian alive today who would have given such a venture more than a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding?

Absolutely not.  There's no way.  Zero chance of any store in that location competing with HEB Central Market.  The reasons are many and the explanations too long to go into in a blog post, but that's the way it is.  And the fact that The Fresh Market made a blunder of that magnitude tells me it didn't do good market research, which doesn't bode well for its future in our area.

Sigh.  Market research.  Let's go there for a minute.

In October 2012, I visited the Hubbell and Hudson specialty grocer in The Woodlands and gave it a resounding thumbs down.  That store proceeded to fail by January 2014.  Here's what I had to say about it at that point, as it relates to the grocery scene we have in Clear Lake Texas:

As I see it, the only way for a g-store to compete effectively with our twin [HEB juggernauts] is by occupying a different niche.  And the niche that we're missing - and that I think Hubbell and Hudson was also missing - is the health niche.

The true health niche.  A grocery store can't make the mistake of settling for the appearance of filling the health niche.  They have to actually meet the market.

I still believe that.  Simply parading out a new grocery store with a big hoity-toity factor isn't going to cut it.  It didn't work in The Woodlands and it's not going to work in Clear Lake.  Especially for any grocer who makes the risky decision to locate on the west side of IH-45 (we saw what happened to Fiesta's flagship because of that fatal decision... that may have been many years ago, but the psychological and logistical factors that contributed to its demise are all still in place).

I've begun to suspect that grocery analysts have given up entirely on the idea of competing with Whole Foods.  If that's the case, then it's a stupid, short-sighted conclusion.  Whole Foods actually has two very soft spots in its corporate underbelly:

Number one - Their pricing structure (which they enjoy by virtue of non-competition in their niche and which has led to their nickname of "Whole Paycheck").  

An amusing Google manipulation - when you Google "whole paycheck", the first return is actually the legitimate website for Whole Foods.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

Number two - The fact that so much of what they do is not supported by factual analysis.

About two weeks ago, The Daily Beast published this excellent article explaining exactly that.

Screengrabbed from The Daily Beast.

Much of what they do is not supported by factual analysis, and the educated portion of its clientele knows that.  But everyone also knows that you have to take the bad with the good in the American retail landscape.  I don't go to Whole Foods for the pills and the potions - sometimes I literally shield my eyes as I'm walking by those aisles, because the pseudoscience makes me so uncomfortable.  I go there because the non-potion products, the ones that are not hype-driven, are simply of better quality than the average grocery store, to a degree that is readily apparent to anyone in possession of taste buds.

Last week I made a huge batch of Cuban black beans (recipe to follow in a subsequent post because I have declared it to be the official dish of Centerpointe Section 9).  My husband was elated because he found this batch to taste noticeably better than my last batch.  I said, "That's because the dried black beans and kidney beans that I used this time came from the Whole Foods on Waugh Drive.  They are organic and specialty-farmed rather than being the factory-farmed tasteless junk for sale in most other grocery stores."

I didn't lead the witness.  I didn't give him any indication that I'd used a different source this time.  He could detect it directly.  

So what's the bottom line on all this rambling commentary of mine?

The bottom line is that we still have a genuine grocery niche deficiency in our area and it's still ripe for commercial exploitation.  I don't know whether The Fresh Market is in a position to become that player, but after reading the Houston Chronicle story (paywalled) yesterday, I'm beginning to have my doubts.  I guess time will tell.

Thus far, despite the other local failure announced yesterday, the indications are that the Clear Lake Fresh Market store is still a "go".  They are recruiting senior staff (e.g., this LinkedIn posting, which was live as of the date of this blog post).  But whether or not they'll actually meet the market is another question entirely.

Screengrabbed from this Houston Chronicle article.  

IKEA Hack, Part 2: Chip off the old chopping block

Question:  How do you stop cutting boards from sliding around on your kitchen countertop?

Answer:  Make them yourself in a better quality than what is commonly for sale in the American consumer market.  This post shows one way to accomplish that.  

*  *  *  

In Part 1 of this trilogy, I showed how to customize a piece of IKEA's Numerar 39" countertop for use in a typical tract home laundry room.  This post continues with a description of what we did with one of the sections of Numerar that we had to cut off to make the main piece fit the space.

The countertop turned out wonderfully, but...

...fitting it to the available space meant cutting off a substantial amount of the original piece.  There was no way I was going to waste all that good stuff.

We made the longer cut first, which meant that the end piece in the foreground of the photo above looked like this:

It was pretty obvious what this chunk was best suited for: cutting boards.  There's my ugly old stained plastic board positioned over the cut-off piece to show the size comparison.

I see no reason why this stuff shouldn't be made into cutting boards.  IKEA developed this product for use in the kitchen intending for food to come into contact with it, so I'm assuming that the wood has not been treated with anything potentially harmful. 

It just so happened that, because we needed exactly 30 inches in laundry counter depth, given that we did the longer cut first, this shorter end piece measured 12" x 30".  Which meant that it was naturally divisible into standard cutting board sizes of one 12" x 12" and one 12" x 18".  Keep that in mind if your own laundry room also proves to require a 30" depth.  When you cut the Numerar down to size, you automatically spawn two standard-sized cutting boards.  

As I mentioned in Part 1, we don't own a table saw.  So this is how we geared up to use the circular saw to get this job done.

Aside:  That animal you see sitting attentively was adopted from our local County shelter.  Please consider adoption if you are planning to get a pet - it saves a life, and a very valuable life at that (our dog is wonderful - we would not trade her for any purebred).  In this previous post I published some tips on how to select a shelter animal with the best temperament for you and your family.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled post:

One of our more romantic husband and wife portraits.
:-)

I'm there to keep the board from slipping.  My massive weight holds it in place.  

You'll notice in many of my posts that I'm often not smart enough to change into old clothes before doing manual labor.  I like to make work for myself in terms of extra laundry, I guess.  

Now you can see the two pieces relative to my existing board.  I would rather have slightly larger boards, but these are good enough given that I didn't have to pay extra for them.  My main complaint with my existing boards wasn't size so much as stability, but I'll get to that in a minute. 

The Numerar came with nicely rounded edges, but of course when you cut into it, you get sharp edges that need to be smoothed down.  

It's easy to accomplish that with a sander (I used a P120 sandpaper).  You just kind of rock the sander back and forth gently over the sharp edges to round them.    

My eyesight is not great, so on a project like this, I judge progress and uniformity as much by feel as by sight.  

The obligatory art shot.  

The offspring now sanded.

Here's where we separate the cutting board men from the cutting board boys and I describe my fuller inspiration for having done this particular project.

These are my existing two cutting boards, one plastic and one bamboo, and you'll notice two deficiencies:
(1) The boards themselves are not substantial.  They have almost no mass (they don't weigh much).
(2) Both of them have tiny, tiny, tiny rubber feet.  Literally, the non-slip feet on each of them are only a few millimeters wide.  Way undersized.  

Years ago when every middle class homeowner had matte finish laminate countertops, cutting boards like those might have performed OK.  But now a lot of us have granite or other stone product with a mirror smooth finish.  And what happens is that, once the countertop gets a bit wet, cutting boards like these will begin skating around uncontrollably.  They slip.  And slide.  Which is a supreme annoyance if you do as much cooking as I do.  I need a cutting board that stays in place.  

There are two ways to compensate for that sliding effect:

Number one - use heavier boards.  An ordinary consumer-grade cutting board might weigh a pound or two, but these two Numerar offspring weighed in at 5.5 lbs and 8.5 lbs respectively.   

Number two, use better feet.  This little gem is actually a pool cue bumper similar to this one.  In other words, it's what you'd screw onto the non-business end of a pool cue so that when you're winding up to take a shot and your pool cue slams the wall behind you, the damage is minimized.

There are a number of different models on the market and I will warn you of one thing:  this one is a rubber similar to tire rubber.  If you have OTHER than stone or granite countertops, this could potentially mark your countertop if it gets dragged across.  Find the product that will work best for you.  

Do you know how some ladies have everyday tableware and special occasion tableware (fine China)?  Well, this lady has everyday drill bits (which tend to get abused and torn up) and special occasion drill bits.  I figured this project called for a special occasion drill bit.  That red mark you see in the middle is not the blood of clumsiness - it's a red Sharpie mark telling me how deep to make each pre-drill hole.    

I set the feet in about an inch from each edge.  

There was an issue with these cue bumpers, however.  My husband attempted to order some off the internet with stainless steel screws, because the cutting boards will get wet (be washed) daily.  However, thems don't look like stainless steel.  

Thems don't act like stainless steel either (I accidentally stripped one, but just one).  They're cheap, soft metal that will swiftly corrode in kitchen use.  If you do this project, take one of the supplied screws with you to the hardware store and tell them you want the same dimensions in stainless steel.  I put the feet on these boards with the supplied screws just to see how they'd look and function, but we will be replacing these screws.  

Here's the finished larger board, upside down.  I nicknamed it "six feet under".  Get it??
:-)

In Part 1, I talked about finishing the Numerar with IKEA's own mineral oil product which is called Skydd (ironic because the one thing I don't want these boards to do is skid).  However, a cutting board is going to receive much more intensive use than a countertop, so I have a two step finishing recommendation for that.

I started by coating the things repeatedly in mineral oil.  By that I mean, at least six successive dousings.  This is raw wood, so it is amazing how much oil it soaks up.  It also tends to do so unevenly, as this close-up photo shows.  So it becomes important to make application after application.  

Once they were thoroughly soaked in mineral oil, I added this product on top:

Clapham's Beeswax Salad Bowl Finish.  

In my experience, all wooden cutting boards will stain with heavy use, but using a sealant that incorporates a food-grade wax will greatly reduce the extent of it.  

And here's the proverbial money shot, the finished and sealed larger board:

Now we're talking - this is closer to being a real chef's board.  I expect it to darken with time, so some of that yellow tone will go away.

This is what I was referring to in Part 1 when I said I couldn't stain the laundry room countertop because I needed all pieces of Numerar to remain the same color.  Design-wise, the kitchen is now tied in visually with the adjacent laundry room because of the cross-referencing (what HGTV designers call "repetition" of design elements), the use of Numerar in both places.  The art of these DIY projects is as much fun as the practicality.

BTW, if you'd like to know about that cooktop to the right of the cutting board, see this post.  It's a very special cooktop.  

The economics of the project start to become more attractive when you take into account what a comparable cutting board of the same dimensions would cost if purchased rather than DIY-made.

Well, that's a bit ridiculous, but the one below is probably more comparable.

Screengrabs from Google Shopping.   

This is probably more representative.  If you want a full six-quarter (inch and a half) thickness in any cutting board, you're going to have to pay for it.  

I may have spent $200 on the Numerar, but look at the value that derives from that investment.  Not only do I have a new laundry room countertop, but I also have two cutting boards that probably would have cost me at least $80 if I'd instead bought comparable quality boards in the consumer market.  And I haven't even used the longer of the two Numerar trim pieces yet, so there's even more value to be realized.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your own IKEA hacks!

:-)

It pains me that this piece of reporting has apparently evaporated from the internet (I can't find it), but IKEA Houston reportedly does a million dollars per year IN MEATBALLS ALONE!  I distinctly remember reading this - I believe it was Houston Chronicle which asked them about their annual sales volume, but they are a privately-held company and they don't disclose that kind of information.  So they replied (paraphrased), "We can't tell you that, but we will say that we sold $1 M worth of meatballs out of our Houston store last year."  Wow, eh?  Wrap your head around what that store's overall revenues must look like.   And I'm betting that they could probably sell twice as much Numerar as they are able to stock (see Part 1 for a description of what appears to be a common shortage of it).