1. In 1993 we registered for twelve blue-and-white coffee cups from William-Sonoma. We received a gift box with eleven blue-striped cups and, like an ugly duckling, one with a stripe of green. Green Stripe always sat in the back, used only for a crowd, if we really needed twelve cups – until Josie came along and decided it was special, it was the lucky cup.  The renamed Lucky Green isn’t pictured – he’s busy holding her ice cream, or tea, or hot chocolate. Now he’s a swan.

2.  That is one big Kansas Jayhawks mug. It originally belonged to a friend, a friend who asked me to edit and proofread his dissertation, his 300-page, ten-years-in-the-making, bone-dry military history dissertation. I drank gallons of late-night coffee from that mug, pencil in hand, and when all was said and done he got a PhD – and I got the mug.

3.  Five-Layer Butterscotch. Lemon Angel. Raspberry, Blueberry, Bumbleberry. How do I love thee, Betty’s Pies of Two Harbors, Minnesota? Let me count the slices.

4.  Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire resides in my pantheon of breakfasts: buckwheat waffles, cob-smoked bacon, bracing coffee and maple sugar, maple butter, maple syrup, maple heaven – all from right down the road.

5.  I’ve had this butterflied mini-mug as long as I can remember, which is – ahem – at least the early 70′s. It held everything from root beer to Lipton tea to coffee nabbed from dad’s bigger mug. Today I don’t think of it as child-sized; it’s espresso-sized.

6.  Oh Maine Diner of Wells, Maine. We were in such a crustacean daze after your meaty lobster rolls and melted butter, we sprung for a mug.

7.  Once upon a time, long ago when Josie was not a supercool 14-year-old, she marched into a glaze-your-own ceramics shop and boldly painted the word DAD. It’s been Greg’s number one mug ever since, enjoying permanent favored status in the front row. The bottom reads Love, Josie – which is code for “break this, and feel bad for life.”

8.  Greg’s brother Stephen and his wife, Swedish-born Moa, live in Stockholm. When Josie was 8 or 9 she fell hard for the charming Moomintroll books by Swedish-Finn author Tove Jansson, and the Scandinavian connection proved especially useful in obtaining cute mugs and other Moomin-shwag.

9.  Are you true to Anne of Green Gables, like me and Josie? If you get misty saying “Marilla’s cordial” and “Gilbert Blythe,” this souvenir is for you. My mom visited Canada’s Prince Edward Island last year and dropped by the real Green Gables, part of author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish National Historic Site. I want to go. For now I’ve got a mug.

10.  I spent a good chunk of my childhood collecting penguins, and here’s what it taught me: people might forget your name, but never your collection.  And you will spend the rest of your life thanking said well-meaning people for penguin keychains and figurines and mugs. You can pack it all away and wait for people to forget – but keep out the mugs. They’re darn useful penguins.

11. I may or may not have stolen this cup from a restaurant in Falun, Sweden. I’m sure you’ve never nabbed anything from a restaurant. Have you?

——

That concludes our mug shot. Have a lovely weekend, and tell me – what’s in your cabinet?

You scrape the bowl like a housewife. In the culinary school bakery, that’s what you heard from Chef – my Chef,  a mentor known for good brioche and painfully dirty French puns – what you heard if you worked slowly, or if you left batter lining the bowl, or if you moved like the cake was for next Christmas. And if that was you, pushing batter at an aimless pace (only me once, Miss Speedy after that) then it would be your back Chef would immediately appear behind. “YOU,” he would announce in loud Franglish, “you scrape the bowl like a HOWZE-WIFE.”

He aimed at both male and female and never explained, just moved to the next unfortunate scraper. But it was clearly an insult, this wifey business, calling you sluggish and semi-pro. You were not quick enough, not efficient enough, your arm might have been reaching for bonbons, you might drop baking altogether and go shopping, you scraped the bowl like a housewife.

I filed that phrase and would hear his words in every working kitchen, chopping fast, prepping hard and scraping every ounce of cookie dough from stainless 12-quart bowls. I would clean all the cake batter from the 20-quarts, and lose my hat peering into 60-quarts to hand-scrape the day’s baguette. Years later I too would have underlings, and if I caught a whiff of whatever or saw idle utensils, I got my chance: Look at you. The way you scrape that bowl, it’s like a housewife.

Most rankled at the scorn, worked faster and got better. Once, after watching a new girl swirl pumpkin bread batter like moisturizer, I said it and she yelled “God I HOPE I do.” This I did not see coming.

“Are you kidding?” She placed the filled bread pans on the oven rack, one by one, letting out all the heat. “Have babies and make brownies and not open a freaking shop at five in the morning? Yes, thanks. Scraping the bowl like a housewife sounds pretty good.”

I told her to shut the oven door and mix muffins.

A few businesses and a thousand bowls later I’m in my home kitchen, the kitchen we carefully planned, every knob and drawer and foot of useful space. The kitchen’s cook, she no longer opens at five; I left restaurants to get some peace but still, I move like the lunch rush. The difference now is that a door needs answering, the dog requires feeding, a daughter needs talking. Sometimes batter waits on the counter. Some days I put the bowl in the fridge and bake later, and at some point I began leaving batter in the bowl, just a few chocolate stripes up the side. I might call loudly to the other room, “I think there’s some batter left,” and Josie will run in and grab it, jump on the counter, swipe it like finger food.

Then I think about Chef, and how he’d unfurl wallet pictures of five kids, and how often he mentioned his wife. He told us stories of his family’s bakery in Provence, how he had learned baguettes from his uncles and croissants from his father. He told us about the cake his mother baked at home, an ugly chocolate affair with a sunken middle and crusty sides. She wrapped him a piece every morning, and when his uncles gave him a break from kneading, he sat on flour sacks in the back and ate cake with his hands.

I imagine they were proud to see him succeed, to work as a great chef and teacher, speeding through perfection and showing us the same. As his student I thought of him that way, wholly efficient, but now I consider his drive home, and remember that we were surprised to hear his wife was the dinner cook, roasting chicken and mashing potatoes, simple things he liked. I think of him pouring a glass of wine and hugging five small children, some at his leg, some in his arms, all hunting for the little cakes and treats I knew he toted home in white bags. And now I think at the end of the day he loved the housewife, and messy hours, and the sly disorder of long, lazy strokes.

Lately I’ve tried to change the scenery, to write and do other non-cooking tasks outside the kitchen. Why? Certainly it cuts down snacking. Working elsewhere puts baguettes and Nutella out of reach, and keeps me from drifting toward the what’s-for-dinner zone. But other rooms must be dull, because I am still glued here, with a messy bun that redefines messy bun. I am peering in the oven or upright at the stove, with one ear to the phone, two hands in a bowl and a lightly breaded keyboard.

Greg certainly benefits from my base. The other day I was about to throw steak over arugula for lunch – but decided to save the steak for dinner. Instead I grabbed a few linen-shaded eggs, a fresh gift from a brave chicken-raising neighbor, and they took a star turn on the salad – poached – with parmesan, pepper, and mustard vinaigrette.

The next night we had roast chicken, and I’d planned a little spinach-ricotta souffle on the side. When I found more arugula than spinach, it became arugula-ricotta souffle, vividly green and equally good. You can mess around in the kitchen; you can mix and match and literally think on your feet. You can teach tired old tools brand new tricks.

Like the cheese shaver, which loves butter. Who knew?

If you like to play with your food, do as you please: add that vanilla, take out onions, toss the recipe, make your fine-rib shirt an apron. It is, after all, your kitchen. Late afternoon in my kitchen, light barges through panes above the sink, rays strong enough to blind the cook, but I like it.

I like the gleaming faucet. I like stirring in bright shadows. I don’t mind squinting or pushing back hair or tripping on Cleo, in dreams on the floor. I am always in the kitchen, a room where I taste honey, correct sauce, know the answers. Anyone can triumph there, or fight, or get engaged, or take a call that stops you cold; in the kitchen, you may fill the teapot and go on. A reporter once asked my favorite teacher, a chef, do you eat your mistakes? He looked stunned. “No,” he smiled, “we fix them.”

Take that holiday season, the one I spent baking a forest of buche noels. I piped hundreds of meringue mushrooms too, each one lovingly dirtied with cocoa, earthy and sweet. They delighted me, and when they seemed to delight the masses, I lined berry baskets with gingham, piled in faux shrooms, then cellophaned and ribboned the whole thing. I called them Champignons-Something-Or-Other and slapped a wildly Frenchified sticker on top. When a gourmet sales pal declared them fabulous, I raced up to Chicago’s Fancy Food Show with sugared mushrooms and dollar signs in my eyes.

I bounced into the aisles with a purse full of samples and a song in my heart, but one of the first booths we saw stopped me cold. People lined up, clamoring and craning for…meringues. Meringue mushrooms, to be exact, charm-ready and packaged. Clunky, I thought, but they were ready to go, first in a place where first topped best. I narrowed my eyes at the now-copycat stuff in my bag, now just sugar fungus, and saw torn wrapping and meringue crumbs on my keys. What would be next?

Well.  All kinds of bright stabs would be next, including a long-time favorite almost, Ooh La La! I’m a Pastry Chef. That was a book idea: sharing tips and tricks from the bakery world to make people appear almost pro. Why, and I mean why, Ooh La La? Because it’s silly French, and at the time – in truth, maybe still – my ideas held a wide range of glaring to obvious. I planned outlines, notes and a vividly detailed Paris book tour, but soon walked into Borders and found, in rapid succession, one book after another offering the exact same thing. Except they were…already books.

I like to believe that nothing is ever a total loss, and thus I’m certain that the gods send you already-ideas for a purpose. If Ooh La La! wasn’t destined for the shelf, perhaps its tips and tricks – obvious to me, but that’s my middle name – might be useful to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an occasional baker or a perpetually flour-faced nut; adapt to these five essentials and your kitchen ideas will rise, elevating everything you make to (almost) pro status.

Cake Stand

My iron-based Ateco is about seventeen years old now. In equipment years that’s a baby – and these babies will last a lifetime. Use a turntable stand and all frosting secrets will be revealed; with a little spin and the right spatula, below, you will learn – smooth or swirly – how to properly ice a cake.

Offset Metal Spatula

Think of an offset metal spatula as the diplomat in your kitchen: there’s nothing it can’t smooth out. You can use it to spread buttercream, layer preserves, swirl pastry cream in tart shells. It’s the right tool for thick batters like brownie, banana bread and pound cake. My favorite metal spatula trick: for a glossy buttercream finish, heat the spatula blade under very hot water, then quickly smooth the top of your cake.

Pastry Bag

Yes, with a little practice, you and a pastry bag can pipe shells and ropes and spirals – even roses – and all sorts of frosted goodies on your newly enhanced cakes.  But the pastry bag is no one-trick pony – it can also swirl pastry cream onto sponge cake, above, or pipe sweet potatoes into rosettes; portion jam into tartlets; it can pipe a hundred macaron halves for fifty perfect bites.  Once you get the squeeze of it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Parchment paper

“I know I should use it,” said my mom, “but I don’t.”  Granted, parchment paper is a luxury, and a bit wasteful – if you’re not buying in bulk, those grocery-store tubes seem awfully small for the price.  Still, every baker should have one box around, enough to protect delicate spritz cookies, to evenly brown your layer cake, to line your lemon bars.  Advanced but essential for the serious baker: learn to cut and shape parchment triangles into mini paper cones, perfect for writing with melted chocolate, striping cookies with royal icing, applying dots of jam.  Become one with parchment, and all those little finishes will make a huge dessert difference.

Graduated Round Cookie Cutters

I don’t list knives here, because if you like to cook, you probably already have the one good big and the one good small knife you need.  Knives do the work of slicing, chopping, even layering – but for a truly creative arsenal, you’ll want a good-quality set of graduated cutters. The most important thing you’ll never hear about cutters? They’re called cookie cutters but are not just for cookies. Bake a sheet of brownies and turn them into hearts.  Cut circles of maple fudge, stamp square pound cake petit fours, shape your carrot cake, your polenta, your scones.  The leftover middle bits?  I believe we call those snacks.

Growing up, we had exactly one round, fluted cutter – I know some families used an upside-down glass – so personally, I can never get enough shapes. You can move on later to delightful squares and endlessly useful hearts, but start by investing in a set of graduated rounds. They’ll give all your desserts a polished, no-you-did-not-make-that look, leaving them thinking that clearly, you’re (almost) a pro.

The Five Essentials meet: brownies baked on parchment, cut into hearts, offset spatula-glazed and piped with tiny pastry bag roses.  The cake stand? It doubled as lazy susan, serving brownie bits in the round.

This Monday rerun is from just around the corner, January 2009 – but I think we can all agree that you don’t see oven-mitt puppetry every day, and it’s worth another look. I recall that one particular reader – I’m looking at you, Average Betty – noted that I’d “brought the crazy,” thrilling words for a buttoned-up broad like me.  Original post – with very amusing comments – found here.

—————-

Today, we bid farewell to an old friend. It pains me to say so, but it’s time. Yes.

Oven Mitty has pulled out his last banana bread.

I know. It’s not easy for me either, buddy.

We’ve worked in the trenches together for so long. How long? Let’s take a look.

Good times, and not always pretty. But – look past the scars. This kitchen helper was more than just useful, more than burnt batting – a mitt with real oomph. Sure, he’d run into a burning oven for you. But he could also be tender…

…bashful even.

And the talent! Always with the clowning in the kitchen.

There was The Manatee…

…the Jumbo Jet…

..and of course, The Diving Orca. After the Broiler Grab Incident of ’99, that one was never the same.

If I had my druthers, he’d never go to that big Bed Bath in the sky. But…it’s time.

I salute you too, my friend. I will warmly remember you forever.

Or at least until trash day.

We have plenty of local beekeepers that provide everything from lavender to wildflower, but whatever the variety, I still must have the bear.

Precious, no? He is a regular on my counter, golden and waiting.

More toast, Marilyn? No thanks. Just had some.

Well. Just butter, then. No – no, I couldn’t.

Yes you could. Ha ha, I never do that.

Oh, but you do.

What a kidder! Innocently plastic and well-meaning.  Still – sometimes I wonder about my will to honey, once in a while, when it turns just a tad too quickly from request to demand. Much the way some words, words you’ve used all your life – words like welcome or cheese – suddenly look wrong.  Chicken. Doorknob. If you fix long and hard enough, they swim out and back to focus, making you doubt they were ever right at all.  Doubt me?  Stare at the word doubt.

And there we are.  One day, the things you take for granted, your dear basics like language and crackers and honey, might all at once look different.   Are the things we love as sweet as they seem?

Oh, dear. Honey – or is it Hunny?

And the most important thing to not-see when reading a food blog?

Dishes. I mean, please. It’s not art – it’s just a mess.

Hold on – I think I found something sugared and tasty.

Ah – Apricot-Chocolate Chip Scones, dutifully sparkly and warm. I’m feeling better already!

We’ve worked in the trenches together for so long.  How long? Let’s take a look.

Good times, and not always pretty.  But – look past the scars. This kitchen helper was more than just useful, more than burnt batting – a mitt with real oomph.  Sure, he’d run into a burning oven for you. But he could also be tender…

…bashful even.

And the talent! Always with the clowning in the kitchen.

There was The Manatee…

…the Jumbo Jet…

..and of course, The Diving Orca.  After the Broiler Grab Incident of ’99, that one was never the same.

If I had my druthers, he’d never go to that big Bed Bath in the sky.  But…it’s time.

I salute you too, my friend.  I will warmly remember you forever.

Or at least until trash day.

I chose today’s flashback to honor the many readers who stumble onto Simmer just because they Googled something like this:

“stench coming from dishwasher”
“odor inside dish machine”
“kitchen smells real bad gross like dead thing”
“crap is something in my dishwasher??”

So, let me get this straight – stench sufferers turn to Google, and this is what they get? I’d ask for a refund. From February 28, 2008, let’s take another look at my problems with pears.

———-

Why I’m Afraid of Pears

from February 28, 2008

It’s true.

I’m a little afraid of the most painterly fruit – and all this M-Word talk has brought sweet paranoia tumbling back like three baskets of lovely but rotten green ones.

Why, you say? What kind of sane, grown woman can’t admire a shiny pear?

Well. Let’s hop to another time, years ago, when Josie was but a rosy-cheeked toddler and I ran a dessert company, The Happy Ending, out of our 1929 home. I’d had the county health department inspect my cleaner-than-restaurant kitchen, and we’d made some necessary modifications to operate on the level.

One thing we installed was an industrial, high-heat dishwasher with a powerful food grinder. It felt solid, official. It could quietly chew a whole rump roast, were I to casually toss one in. And that thought comforted me as I went about my busy business. It was serious equipment, and I considered the machine a stainless steel shield, my protector in the new worlds of motherhood and business.

I worked in our tiny kitchen, which doubled as catering center and family feeder. On any given day you’d see the fruits of both labors: stacked butter cookie trays cooling in the sun room, Josie’s favorite sweet potatoes browning in the oven, hazelnut mocha cakes on the dining room table.

Josie also loved pears, and snacked on them in every form – raw, roasted, pureed and, depending on the day’s work, poached in red wine and vanilla bean-specked. One hotel client required weekly deliveries of pear-and-almond tarts – so it was a lot of fruit. And I spent many hours prepping at my little butcher block table, with one eye on Josie, cheerfully tumbling over 50-pound flour bags while I peeled, cored, poached, sliced, diced and tarted up a veritable orchard of pears.

There was an odd, controlled chaos between the ganache and the Legos, the snack bowls and meringues, but my kitchen was clean, so clean. So clean that on the day I noticed a slight odor coming from the dishwasher, I was thrown.

“It smells,” I told my husband.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“He said it’s fine,” I’d repeat to Josie, who giggled. Funny daddy. “It SMELLS , but it’s fine. Ugh.”

In 24 hours the faint off-odor had become a mild stench. I would hold my breath and crack the dishwasher door for a jam-and-slam; that is, jam in the plate, slam the door and run. Later, I’d exhale in the hallway. Then Greg started to come around.

“Yes,” he pronounced one night, two days later, “it smells.”

O Merciful Olfactory Gods! If we can arrive at the golden spot where we agree that something smells, that smell will surely be found. I had seen nothing yet. I’d furtively rattled and prodded the racks, but could not find the source. When the insistent green cloud started spreading out for real, I got bold.

Armed with a flashlight, I swung open the dishwasher door. Oh! Should have had a gas mask. But I went in.

The rotting smell of – of what, of what, a thousand trout guts? old jockstraps in ammonia? – hit me in the face as I swept light toward the back. The smell got stronger, and I saw the shadowy outline of a chunk – pears, I thought – down toward the bottom. Blinded, perhaps by stench and the fact that I was crouched in a wet dark corner of my dishwasher, I did the unthinkable. I reached.

And poked it, with my finger, and in a frozen instant knew that it was not a pear. Not pear, not pear, not pear! I yanked away fast, whacking my head as I backed out, cartoon stars around my head and the sprayer arm spinning, dirty water dripping on me and the slimy, unknown chunk.

I grabbed the closest tool, cooking tongs. Summoning every breath of calm, I turned the flashlight back towards what I now knew was death, death in the dishwasher, a dishwasher death chunk.

I moved in, half-secure that whatever it might be, it was, at least, not moving.

There, stuck between a stainless steel ring and the wet nether regions of the grinder, was a mangled piece of…well, in shaky light, I could just make out a pointy grayish shape, with a small round…oh my god, ear…and then…an eye. A tiny black bead of an eye, unmoving and staring straight at me.

I should have expired. I should have dropped cold right there on my kitchen floor, but instead I reached in with the tongs. In my career, these particular metal tongs had lovingly browned coq au vin. They had turned peppery steaks on the grill and set roast ginger carrots on the plate, but not that day.

That day, guided by shaking hands, they would perform the ultimate service – a service no kitchen tool ever wants to perform. Today, they would scrape out the remains of – now clearly visible in kitchen daylight – a waterlogged, festering, three-day old mouse head.

I had poked naked finger into the squishy cranium of a dead mouse. Not pear, I thought, why could it not have been a rotting pear?

Both head and tongs were thrown into a bag, and then tied in another bag, then frantically stuffed in the trash. I sanitized the dishwasher five times and washed my hands for a week, and threw out the trash can too. If I could replace my finger, I would.

I shed no tears for the mouse’s end, only for my tainted finger and the heroically lost tongs. My dishwasher-shield was just doing its job; he’d scampered into death on his own accord. But…pears. So sure was I that the death chunk was pear that even today, it’s hard to separate visions of soaked, torn rodent head from a nicely peeled Bartlett.

I might overlook it, sliced in greens with walnuts, blue cheese and vinaigrette. But no poaching. If that fruit is in a soft state, a state most people adore and are pleased to eat with creme anglaise, that’s when I check out.

My fellow diners won’t see it at the table, but inside, while they feast on dessert, I’ll be doing a full-body shudder, remembering the cold, cold surprise of wet, beady-eyed, furry not-pear.