A Literary Feast

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Eight

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Eight. I have room for eight utensils. My husband and I will be road tripping and camping for three months, and I have room for eight cooking utensils. It is an arbitrary limit I have set for myself, admittedly. I do that sort of thing pretty regularly, and also end up frustrated pretty regularly trying to adhere to them, which is sort of bewildering to my husband. But I haven’t yet figured out if he realizes that without this self-set limit, we’d end up carting our entire kitchen east across Canada and back west across the United States, to the detriment of space for important things like, oh, our tent. So here I am with my eight arbitrary slots, for the only kitchen utensils…

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Tending to a Case of Grad School-Itis

Posted on August 16th, 2012

I found it in an antique store and, at $19, it was a steal. It’s big and heavy — made of thick glass — and has a shiny aluminum top. There are images from the world of leisure painted all over the sides: tennis racquets, bowling pins, a sailboat, and even a dapper golfer raising his club in mid-swing. Flanking the sailboat and golfer are recipes for classic drinks like “Whiskey Sour,” “Side Car,” and even the “Bronx” — a mouthful of vermouth that allegedly set the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous off on a 17-year bender. It’s vintage, alright. It’s also the perfect replacement for the flimsy metal cocktail shaker that came with my Groupon-purchased online bartending class. That’s right: I enrolled in an…

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Silver Spoons: Remembering A Well-Set Table

Posted on August 16th, 2012

I learned how to eat at my grandmother’s house. “How” being the key word, not “what” – because by the time I came along, second to last in a long line of grandchildren, my grandmother, once a respectable 1940s-era cook of roasts, mint jellies, and the perfect fudge, had diabetes, little sense of taste, and even less of a sense of adventure in the kitchen. Sunday brunches were always cinnamon rolls as hard as hockey pucks and slices of bacon that tasted like ashes. At least one dinner a week consisted of a gray roast beef sawed right at the table (an experience that very possibly contributed to my later decades of vegetarianism), and salads were limp lettuce bathed liberally in oil and vinegar,…

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Frontier Chef

Posted on August 16th, 2012

The summer after my freshman year of pastry school was hot and sticky. I spent it in Oklahoma helping a surgical nurse take over an existing bakery she purchased during some sort of mid-life career crisis. It was quite a successful bakery; the products were good and there was no competition except the supermarkets. The space was large but the resources were a bit limited. I had two mixers – a forty quart and a twenty quart – and two ovens – a standard double door convection and an old-timey carousel oven that functioned in a fashion more akin to a ferris wheel. You might be thinking, ‘that doesn’t sound so limited’; and you would be right if all this nurse wanted me to…

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Spatula of Salvation

Posted on August 16th, 2012

The box was only half full when I finished tucking in the mixing bowls and straightened to scan the kitchen for my next target. My gaze slid over the high use shelves, jumped the spot recently vacated by a set of white porcelain ramekins, shuddered away from the scary cupboard over the sink, and came to rest on the drawer of miscellaneous kitchen utensils. This was the drawer that seems to exist in all kitchens, the one that houses both your favorite and your never-used-even-once gadgets, the one where someone asks, “where’s your lemon zester?” and you say, “in that drawer…with the other random stuff…no, no, the one next to the fridge.” I slid my box over. Here was the hard part. Everything that…

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The Scoop

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Mine was a childhood spent in the kitchen, though I dont want you to get the wrong idea and imagine me peering into a sinkfull of freshly washed vegetables as I helped to prepare a nutritious dinner. No, it wasnt quite like that. I was raised in large part by an elderly aunt who never had kids of her own and who had fully embraced the fifties’ dining model. As the majority of her small apartment was plastic wrapped and moth balled, we rarely left our tiny kitchen sanctum except to sleep. We did everything in that one little room; played endless games of war and rummy, did crossword puzzles, watched candlepin bowling on Saturday afternoons. She had her short wooden rocking chair, her…

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Coffee Chronicles: When Things Go Wrong

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Tools are overrated. Human civilization, or at least human cooking (you’re reading this—don’t tell me you believe there’s a difference), began when Thogiz or maybe Dal-Tor put one thing into another thing and then consumed it. Ate it or drank it. Hot or cold, stiff or runny, tough on the teeth or slippery down the throat. Can we agree on that much? Coffee—the cornerstone of the modern world?—is little different than our troglodyte forbearers’ meal of, say, leaves and goat bits. We take seeds. We roast and grind them. We soak them in water. Sometimes we don’t really roast them. Sometimes we don’t really grind them. We soak seeds in water and then we drink it. The technology, fire and bludgeon, has been widely…

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Spoon, Man

Posted on August 16th, 2012

“Say man, where’d you get that spoon?” As much as that could be the beginning of William Burroughs book, it’s not, and I wasn’t talking about smack when I uttered it. Instead I was in the kitchen of a beautifully restored late-17th century home here in Portland (Maine!) helping my friend Chad out with a pop up dinner. The guy is easily 6’3” but this spoon, which he was using to lovingly baste duck breasts in their own fat, dwarfed even his massive paws. It had a handle like a serving spoon but the head was almost as big as a gardening trowel, with what looked like a unique depth-to-width ratio. In a single, deft little stroke — a flick of the wrist really —…

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The Incredible High-End Bird Crap Scooping Jar Opener

Posted on August 16th, 2012

In the winter of 2000 A.D., I was a penniless Psychology major with aspirational living fantasies. Wrapped in a navy pea coat, I would wander the icy streets of Manhattan, gazing with lust at the brownstones of Gramercy, dreaming of the day when I would causally look through an issue of Home & Garden magazine and flippantly say, “Well doesn’t that look nice? Perhaps we’ll buy it tomorrow.” (I still dream of that day, 12 years later, even as living in Manhattan stopped being my aspirational anything.) Christmas was approaching. I thought of my mother complaining about a jar of something or other, how it was impossible to open, how if she had a jar opener, a lot of frustration might be avoided. I…

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Little Green Knife

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Stockings have always been my favorite part of Christmas. No matter what grandiose lumpy mystery package awaited me beneath the tree, the real prize that hauled me out of my bed in the pre-dawn of Christmas morning was the knitted bulky oversized sock that hung by the fireplace (with or without care). When I was younger, it was an endless stream of trinkets, (anchored down at the toe by a corpulent orange), whose number seemed to approach the infinite. How many tubes of sparkling lip balm can this stocking hold? A billion. That’s how many. When I graduated to the realm of more sedate adult gifts, including genuine enthusiasm for woolly socks, the plump, swaying, charcuterie-esque bulge of my Yuletide stocking still held sway…

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