bedroom galilee clive barker bathroom martha stewart's living car/walk beach boy ardashir vakil
office up r.e.m. car breakheart hill [book-on-tape] thomas h cook living room the sci fi channel
brand x the message came from out of the blue: Brand X welcomes you into its clutches.
1999 may 10
gadgets
i love kitchen gadgets.
i could easily fill a 3500 square foot kitchen with gadgets of every sort and still not have enough. i have knifes of every shape and size, three garlic presses, juicers [both manual (2) and electric (1)], an assortment of whisks and ladles and spatulas and scrapers. egg separators, ice cream scoops, wooden spoons, sieves, crockpot, toaster oven, rice cooker, blender, food processor, toaster. and now, three potato mashers.
as a child, we always used the hand mixer to make mashed potatoes. i suppose we should have called them whipped potatoes but that is neither here nor there. after visiting my grandmother in germany, i watched her make her potatoes with a wooden mallet like thing she called a grumbeer-stempler. [i have absolutely no idea if that is the correct spelling and my mother is not answering her mail, so we'll have to go with it.] she pounded the potatoes into submission, after adding just a little butter and milk. they were the smoothest, most wonderful potatoes ever.
at the time i didn't realize half of it was due to the superior potatoes available in germany so i bought my own wooden masher and took it home to work its wonders. i was a little disappointed with the results, but more in the flavour department than the texture. and it was amazingly gratifying to pound out a day's worth of frustrations on a pot of potatoes.
when gene moved in last year, he took one look at it and said, "i'm not using that thing." so we bought a new fangled metal thing, and then a heavy duty black plastic thing when we forgot we had purchased the metal version, and he used his and i used mine, and things moved along smashingly in our kitchen until last week, when mine fell off the counter and the handle cracked from the pounder; the pounder cracked too, in several places. i was crushed and actually went so far as to look up the cost of flying to frankfurt, just to pick up a new one. and a new enamel pot while i was at it, since gene almost melted my favorite one to the burner a few months ago.
i thought i would have time to mourn, but we had meatloaf on saturday and i wanted mashed potatoes with it. i feel like such a traitor, but i loved using the metal masher. you don't have to get quite as much muscle into the whole operation, but the squishy noise it makes almost compensates.
i can't believe i wrote a whole entry about mashing potatoes.
smashed, claire
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