FOAS - try it with pork. I stuffed a pork chop with onions, garlic and mushrooms, then put bay and smoked paprika on the outside. The braising juice was white whine and pork broth. I've also sprinkled in on roasted potatoes, green beans, and added it to ground beed that was then used to stuff baby zucchini. It's also good on egg dishes. (I keep both sweet and sharp, snoked and regular, and I'm always sprinkling it on somethign just to see how it goes. I've heard it is good sprinkled on oysters, but I don't do oysters so can't verify that. If you click on the link and go to the bottom of the page, there are some recipes using the Spanish hot smoked paprika. If you have the sweet, just do a search for sweet and there will be recipes at that bottom of that page, too. I think what tweaked me about the tone of the article is that they are writing it as if pimenton is something different and more exotic (and therefore snooty and high brow) than paprika. They would have been more forthright to say "The problem isn't paprika; the problem is you bought low-quality paprika and kept it for ten years. Go out and buy some of the good stuff and you'll be pleasantly surprised." Here is a link that might be useful: recipes using paprika.

Apologize for the length, but what the heck: Bumblebeez, I have to say it's one of those individual decisions, speaking as someone who lives a little over an hour away from Napa and visits just for the restaurants. I've never made it to FL, but a foodie friend I trust made it in on a last-minute cancellation (yes, sometimes those impromptu calls really do work) and he loved it, said it was the best dinner he'd ever had. OTOH, as someone once commented to NYTimes critic Pete Wells (she is in the industry, eats at these very top-level restaurants without having to pay for it), you are paying for two things: the very freshest ingredients and exquisite precision of execution; e.g., the cutting and placement of food. She pointed out it does not actually taste any better; it is simply beautiful and consistent with no flaws, plate after plate. You need never worry that somebody else's caviar with oyster foam is a little bigger or less salty than yours; the food will be the same no matter who is receiving it that night. Now...that kind of experience may well be worth it, just as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Nothing wrong with that - every gourmet/foodie has their own memories that they hold dear! I can only say I've given up trying for FL. It just isn't worth it to us. We've eaten great food in Northern CA for 45 yrs, and would rather spread my $$$ around elsewhere at restaurants we can get into, that also have truly remarkable food. We're retired and can spend as much time and $$$$ as we want up there. That said, your friend might try for Meadowood. Chris Kostow is not the household name that Thomas Keller is, but unlike Keller, Kostow remains the ExecChef, hands-on, at Meadowood, which holds the same # of Michelin stars that FL does. Talk amongst local foodies is that FL is still very good but Meadowood is better and more exciting. If it was my $2K, this is what I'd spend it on (but I could do it because we don't drink, which saves a lot of money!). Opinions are STRICTLY MINE, ymmv: - Auberge du Soleil - Upscale resort with glorious food and an even more glorious view IF, and only if, you can snag one of the four tables on the outdoor patio. Sitting there overlooking the Napa Valley, eating a lobster and veal sandwich on brioche and finishing with an after-meal French brandy, is one of our favorite memories. It's the only restaurant in the Napa Valley with a high-hill valley view. Worth every extra penny it’ll cost. - Ca'Momi @Oxbow Market - Brilliant authentic Italian cuisine in a noisy, uncomfortable market hall. Try to get a patio table because the tables inside are small and smashed together. Bring a cooler and ice for those luscious pastries! - Etoile @Domaine Chandon - Stunning. Wonderful. Worthy of LVMH's Dom Perignon (they own all three brands, and more). If I had to pick only one dinner in the Napa Valley, Etoile is where I'm going. Perry Hoffman is a genius, with the masterfully understated touch that only terrific talent and classic training (French, of course) can produce. Try the Chandon brandy, 24 yrs old and only available for sale at the winery - phenomenal stuff. - Solbar @Solange Resort: A Relais & Chateaux property, and worthy of its siblings. Too many people miss this phenomenal restaurant in Calistoga. The service is excellent and the food is exquisite. The heartier side of the spa menu is surprisingly carnivorous as well as generous. But don't miss the spa dishes; they aren't your usual rabbit food. A chicken pasta soup from the spa side was downright stunning; a rich dark brown from roasted bones, full of juicy shredded chicken breast and mini-farfalle. I drag my DH all over to eat and he said this was hands-down the most amazing soup he'd ever had, simple yet utterly perfect. After that splurge you need something cheaper. Cheese and pate and good bread for a picnic: - Bouchon Bakery- Croissants a little saltier than Parker-Lusseau in Monterey, but crisp and lovely. Chocolate budino dessert cakes are a winner. Baguettes are extremely neutral in flavor, excellent for a cheese tasting. Note they get very crowded at lunchtime and sell out by 2p. - Dean & Deluca Delicatessen/Specialty Grocery - The goose mousse pate is worth selling your soul, or more probably all your arteries, for. Come with ice packs and your cooler, and stock up! - La Foret Chocolatier - Opened by the former pastry chef at the French Laundry, she makes fairly salty chocolates (and still supplies FL for their chocolates). But we did like the white chocolate macadamia ginger bar, which surprised us since we don't like white chocolate or ginger. Hidden in a very obscure, tiny residential strip mall outside downtown Napa. Look for Browns Valley Market which fronts the mall, and BVM also carries Bouchon baguettes (but skip BVM's deli offerings, Dean & Deluca are better). And yeah, I'd make time to visit the Castello di Amoroso, Sattui's own personal folly. I'm a sucker for brick buildings, and a series of wine cellars with double-vaulted brick arched ceilings? There are only 7 brickmasons in the world who know how to do that kind of artisan work any longer, and Sattui had three of them working on it. Their wines aren't top tier, but they offer a cabernet and chocolate tasting that is a lot of fun. Loved the tour and recommended it to my role-playing Renaissance Fair friends! It's hard to get bad food in the Valley but it's possible. I'm not a lover of over-the-top, "throw in the kitchen sink" cooking that many young chefs do. And we avoid Napa in summer, when service is more amateur (the summer temps are hired in May) and everybody is crushed under busloads of visitors. Good for more casual meals: - Angele, Napa - Bistro Jeanty, Yountville - Lucy @Bardessono Resort, Yountville - Market Restaurant , Yountville - Redd, Yountville Avoid: - Bottega, Yountville (gone downhill) - Bouchon Restaurant, Yountville (go to sibling Ad Hoc instead, casual American food) - Brix, Napa (new chef just started) - Don Giovanni, Napa (tired oldie) - The Grill @Meadowood - Note this is NOT the upscale FL competitor, Meadowood Restaurant, which is sited upstairs above the Grill. Too expensive for a casual place. - La Toque, Napa. Erratic. - Mustards, Napa. Sloppy oversized plates - Oenotri, Napa. Same as Mustards but Italian - Siena, Napa. Corporate blandness Anyway, no matter what your friend does, I'm sure she'll have a great time. Just don't schedule too much in one day -- common first-timer error. Distances are long, traffic is messy in summer, heat is tiring. And remember, bring a jacket for cool evenings! 64 degrees may sound great but when at 3p it was 103, it'll feel surprisingly cold. Here is a link that might be useful: Sattui's Castello in Napa Valley This post was edited by jkom51 on Tue, Jun 10, 14 at 11:29

I'll be the odd (wo)man out here. I love to cook, but I've been doing since I was 11 yrs old, and frankly cooking 7 days a week is drudgery. Add in breakfast and/or lunch and it's a pain. I loved my career and it wasn't unusual to be gone 12-13 hrs, 5 days/wk. Weekends were crammed with errands and family/friends. We are fortunate to live in one of the greatest restaurant areas in the world: the San Francisco Bay Area. There is great food at all price points. You can eat for $5 or $500, but either way you could eat well -- check out NYTimes' Seth Kugel's visit last month to Portland, where he gave himself an $8/meal budget and was wowed by the amazing meals he got from the local food trucks. When I worked it wasn't unusual for us to go out 4-5x/wk. The question was, "What country do you want to eat today?" We could do Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cal-Mex, American, Moroccan, Korean, French, Italian, Burmese, Greek, and more - all within 1 mile walk, and usually several iterations of each one (you couldn't even count how many Chinese restaurants of various regionalities there were). Now we're retired. We have both money and time. When I feel like cooking, I make the dishes that took too much time when I was working - long slow braises or slow-roasting, or dishes that just require an enormous amount of prep. But we still go out 3-5x/wk, When we travel around the area as we like to do (we just got back from Napa last week and will be in Sonoma next month), we travel specifically to eat. In Napa, we had amazing, elegant, fabulous Cal-French food that I would never bother cooking in a million years. There were brilliant combinations, such as the black cod served with a seafood sabayon, roasted matsutake mushrooms, and the tiniest perfect baby turnips that had no bitterness at all. Or an amazing carpaccio, dressed with nothing but a touch of Meyer lemon EVOO. I cook when I want to, but dining out is simply more fun. No shopping, no prep, no dirty dishes, no leftovers, no fuss. Yes, I could grow my own piquillo peppers and buy Ceylon cinnamon -- but why? I'd rather go to the great Spanish tapas restaurant a few minutes away and have them roast, skin and stuff the peppers with fresh chevre; roast, skin and sprinkle the cinnamon on fresh beets; and make that perfect paella 'tradicionale" for my spouse and the dreamy Fideua Negre, noodle paella with squid ink, for me. I mean, do I seriously want to buy a pressure cooker just for my octopus? Why should I bother cleaning and skinning a cephalopod when there's at least a dozen restaurants that make fabulous smoke-grilled octopus within 5 miles of our house? Should I want to soak the bacalhau in 8 changes of water over two days? It would just be so much easier to go to the Cuban or Portuguese or Italian restaurants, and have a couple of orders of really amazing salt cod fritters or roasted salt cod with polenta, instead! The take-out food these days is so much better quality than before. One place offers a marvelous frozen (bake it at home) chicken pot pie - perfect butter pastry, organic chicken breast and organic vegetables - all they offer is either a fried chicken sandwich on artisanal roll with housemade slaw, or the pot pie. That's it; they open 4 days/wk for 3 hrs a day and then go home to raise their baby daughter. Lines out the door every day. One specialty market with various food sellers (we lust after their pork tomahawk chop - wowie! What a hunk of meat!) has lovely little frittatas with artichoke, red pepper and Gruyere. My DH hates frittatas, so I buy one for myself while he gets the penne with San Marco marinara and Kurobuta pork meatballs; that way we both win. I loathe Food Network. When I write up reviews on the restaurants we've eaten at (I do it for my own archives, not to publish them), I often refer negatively to "Food Network chefs" - cooks who slop the food out as fast as possible, in ridiculous combinations of too many ingredients. They don't know the difference between a sauce Amoricaine and a Bordelaise. Bleh. It's taken me decades to get my DH off the crappy food he grew up with. But he's finally come around, so that when we drop $$$$ on the perfect dinner at Etoile or Spoonbar or La Folie, he says, "That was absolutely worth every penny." And you know, it is. Here is a link that might be useful: NYTimes Frugal Traveler does Portland on the cheap This post was edited by jkom51 on Wed, Sep 10, 14 at 0:17

My Electrolux has settings between 0 thru 9 and with half steps in between those numbers, IE 4, 4.5, 5~~~~~etc. I can't recall the last time I needed one of those "Half steps". Changes in temp that you make happens faster with induction, as you don't have to wait for the gas burner, and its grates to heat up or cool down to the changes you just made. Also you can always go to the "Exact Temp" that you want, (time and time again with induction), IE "4" will always be the same temp, where as with gas, and the way the knobs are marked, (or more the case, "not marked"), it's hard to set the temp to "exactly what you had it set to", last time you used it. Of course the above isn't really a "Big Deal", as just about all cooks look at the "action in the pan", and adjust the temperature based on what's going on inside the pan, alto those that use gas may peer underneath the pan, just to get the temp in the "ball park range", but what's going on inside the pan is what really determines the heat settings, for both gas Induction and even conventional electric. What I would do, is google Induction griddle, or induction capable griddle and see what you can find, and find reviews on same. With gas or induction, a "Quality Pan or griddle" in this case, is More Important that the source of the heat. (IE a cooking vessel that transfers heat evenly and fast), is going to do more to get your pancakes "even", than will the choice of heat used. I say that based upon using just "El Cheapo" aluminum pans on my gas cooktop outside, where as I mentioned, I have to keep stirring continuously, versus using better pans, (All Clad knockoffs)" with the induction. I have tested for the evenness of temperature across the better pans, plus no constant stirring required when I use the better pans. I think the copper in the "All Clad Knockoffs" (Emerilware) contributes to the even heat distribution across the pan. OK, I just followed my advice as far as googling for "Induction compatible Griddles", and I found this thread, which You may find "useful". http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/827956 Hope this helps! Gary