Tales of Battle from the Kitchen of a Failed Domestic Goddess.

 

There’s been an incident… That’s Karen-speak for “the kitchen is a disaster and stuff has landed where it really shouldn’t and now it’s dried up and stuck there forever. Or water. Sometimes there’s just a whole lotta watta EVERYWHERE!

Actually, there were TWO incidents in as many days. The first happened when it was time to clean our wonderful steam juicer. We love that thing, as it is a much easier way to extract juice from fruits in order to make jelly. Clean-up, however is another story.

The juicer is quite large. It comes in three pieces (five if you include the hose and the lid). You’d think being able to break it down into smaller components would mean easy clean-up, right? Not in our tiny kitchen sink. It’s like trying to bathe a buffalo in a bathtub. There was a lot of loud noise, clanging, and some swearing. It managed to get caught between the sink and the tap, which forced water to go places. Many places.

Then, just when I thought it was all over, I discovered I’d forgotten to clamp the hose. I learned of this omission quite simply when the front of me became sodden. I grabbed the hose to bring it back up to the sink and it flung an arc of water across several cabinets and counter areas. It reminded me of when my older son was born and he peed on the doctor that delivered him. At least this time nothing was sticky.

That same day I canned 9 quarts of veggie broth done, so I was a bit tired and the kitchen was sweltering.

The very next day someone (Tammie) mentioned zucchini bread and I thought, "what the hell. I'm terrible at quick breads, but I'll give it a shot."

We (Tammie) looked through several cookbooks (we have...a few...dozen) and all the recipes called for a cup of oil. That seemed a bit excessive, so we (Tammie) decided I should buzz up a couple of apples to replace some of the oil. This requires the use of a piece of kitchen equipment with whom I am locked in an eternal battle of wills, but because zucchini bread sounded so good, I figured, "eh, I can do this."

I peeled, cored, and chopped up some apples and tossed them into mine enemy, the Vitamix ®, placed the pitcher onto the base and then watched the blades slap the shit out of the apple pieces. Fine. I’ll throw in a banana to give it something more to work on. That helped, but there were still apple pieces in dire need of pulverizing. Ok. Let’s add ½ cup of oil.

Yeah, that didn’t do much either, so… it was time to bring out the tiny cup thing. Now, this tiny cup thing is a marvel. It gets the food right where it needs to be in order to turn it from solid to semi liquid in mere seconds. It’s super small, and therefore will not tolerate bouncing apple bits. I put part of the apple/banana/oil mixture into the tiny cup, fastened the blade part, and set it on the base. That little bastard made short work of the mix, giving me a lovely smooth sauce-like stuff. Very tasty sauce, at that. I emptied the cup and refilled it with the remaining stuff from the pitcher, attached it to the blade whatziz, set it on the base and… nothing.

Zero, zip, zilch-a-roonie. This is not unusual, and highly annoying. I took it apart, cleaned things, put it back together, and still nothing. After several minutes of repeated nothingness, I surrendered. Fortunately, I had enough “sauce” to get things done, it just wasn’t all super smooth.

Turn we now, to the stand mixer. The mixing paddle was present, but the bowl was AWOL. Then I remembered, I’d assigned it dishwasher duty and it was awaiting further orders. I changed tactics and dumped stuff into a regular mixing bowl and grabbed the electric hand mixer. We’re good buddies. We understand each other.

Of course, one of us just has to be a fucking traitor.

Everything was going as planned. Batter was mixed and the mixer was removed from the bowl. Unfortunately, there was a bit of oil on my hand and it compromised my grip. The next thing I knew, the “on” thingy had been moved forward and the beaters were flinging batter EVERYWHERE!

There’s batter on the counter, there’s batter on the cabinets, there’s batter on my jars of broth, and there’s batter in my freshly washed hair. Zero to disaster in .5 seconds.

Tomorrow? Tomorrow I’m going to work at the shop and stay as far from the kitchen as possible. By the way, the zucchini bread turned out perfectly, despite the lack of walnuts. But with what’s been happening to me in the kitchen the past couple days, I wasn’t about to add sharp knives to the mix.