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Kitchenware Lost and Found


maggiethecat

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I’m a pragmatist about how much kitchen storage I have, and a realist about worn out dreck kitchen equipment I’ve accumulated since Creedence broke up. Viz: all those fancy shrimp deveiners kind friends have given me – I just pull out those blue slimies with my fingernails. The odds and sods from numerous sets of china, the orphaned juice glasses, those expensive electric self-contained deep fryers (a thousand bucks down the tube for dross right there!) All those expensive crappy non-stick pots and pans from the early nineties, again gifts from people who loved me. Ditto the gleaming Teutonic steel I could never raise an edge on. (Mind you, I’ll be buried with my collection of pie birds, one of which gets used every two years.)

This historical meandering through my kitchen is to establish my cred as a non-hoarder. If it doesn’t work, I 86 it.

Flash to dinner last night. We had home made puff pastry (butter has been on sale here) and roast chicken leftovers, with stock from the bits and the carcass. Sounds like chicken pot pie, a tiny CPP. (He did roll it and prick it and mark it with M – in peas.) It was good.

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A few hours later, after writing and chatting with friends, I finished the dishes and tossed the rolling pin into a drawer whose sole purpose is being a holding place for the rubber mallet, the rolling pin, and some good silver serving pieces that come out at feasts. For some reason I actually looked into the drawer and spotted my honeymoon- acquired at Crate and Barrel “Croque Monsieur” iron. gallery_6375_3224_602278.jpeg

It cost about 3.50, probably 15 bucks in today’s currency, made in France, aluminum.

gallery_6375_3224_556757.jpeg I hadn’t seen it or touched it in twenty years. Given my minimalist approach to kitchen storage and practicality, why in Sam Adams did I still own this? (Well, I bought it a year after a romantic Paris spring, when I ate Croque Monsieurs from street vendors for lunch. Every day.) I have cast iron skillets and a panini grill, should I need to brown and melt sandwiches

Oh frabjous day! I’d been feeling a mite peckish, and, what the heck, I had cheese odds and ends, soft butter, and some jalapenos. I buttered the shell-like aluminum crevices with love and a certain “Je ne regret rien” vibe, sliced cheese and jalapenos, found a couple of soon to go stale rolls, and clamped this primitive but pretty item together. Onto the gas flame it went. I’d forgotten that the lip around the edge seals the filling within – which skillets and panini grills don’t – and I felt 21 again.gallery_6375_3224_137391.jpeg

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I want to hear about your kitchenware lost and found. When have you kicked yourself for selling a space grabber for 50 cents at a tag sale when you could use it Right Now? Have you, as I did last night, found a Sleeping Beauty and put it to use, thankful that it never hit the AmVets box? And what, against all price and reason, did you chuck because it just didn’t work?

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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