2. Tools of the Trade

More home repairs are done by a woman with a high heel shoe and a butter knife then by a gang of men with a garage full of craftsman tools. It’s the same in the kitchen. You can have every fancy gadget in the gourmet catalogue but if you don’t know how to use them, they’re useless. I have a fancy juicer that takes up an entire shelf but has never been used because I can’t decipher the instruction book. I’ve got a rolling pin that was a housewarming gift from a dear friend and has never left the drawer. It’s just so much easier to grab a clean glass. I’ve got a drawer full of odd little gizmos that I don’t know how to use but I’m afraid to throw away. As the Hungarian Carpenter Husband used to say “You’ve got to be smarter than the equipment you operate”. He collected antique hand tools.
 
To be a really good cook, you don’t lots of gadgets. You just need basic tools. You need good tools. You need a good sized wooden cutting board and a few good knives. If you can put the knives in the dishwasher then they’re not good knives. You need mixing bowls and measuring cups. You need a couple of good pots and a well seasoned cast iron skillet. I never liked Teflon pans and never used them. It seemed to me that no matter how careful you were, some of the Teflon flaked off as you cooked. Now three decades later scientists and doctors tell us that we all have Teflon flakes in our blood.

 I prefer my pots and pans un-coated and treated correctly they’re just as good as Teflon.  My Mom who taught me how to take care of pots and pans. She said that if you keep them shiny food will never stick. She was right. It doesn’t matter if they’re the expensive stainless steel or dime store aluminum, if you keep them shiny then they will last. You have to soak the food off as soon as you’re finished. If you use a fork or a metal utensil to dig at the burned on food, you’ll make gouge marks in the bottom of the pot. That’s where the food will stick next time you use that pot. It’s where the food will stick every time after that. Never use metal. Never dig at the bottom. It’s better to let ‘em soak awhile. As soon as I’m done using a pot I stick it in the sink with soapy water. My sister-in-law Jeanne taught me to use cold water for starch and hot water for grease. Then use whatever kind of scrubber your pot maker recommends. Or not. I like steel wool. I have stainless steel pots and you’re not supposed to use steel wool. But I do. I scrub till the bottom of the pot shines like a mirror and nothing ever sticks to my pots.

 If you think you can skip this step and stick it in the dishwasher, you’re wrong. It will only compound the problem. Maybe you think that the super hot water will disinfect whatever food particles are on the pot. Maybe that’s true. But the next time you cook, food will stick to that spot and getting it clean will be twice as hard. Skip it again and it’s four times as hard.

 When we were kids, my sister Kitty, hated doing dishes. She never wanted to take her turn. She would hide the dirty dishes under the sink and inside the stove. She even climbed out the window once to avoid her turn. When I complained my Mom told me, “One day she’ll be married and her husband will make her do the dishes.” I believed her, just like I believed the fortune teller who said I would live in a house with a white picket fence with a husband and kids. When Kitty got married, the first thing her husband did was buy her a brand new dishwasher. I married a man liked to live in the woods far beyond dishwashers and even without indoor plumbing. So much for the fortune tellers.

Of course you can go too far. You can be obsessive about keeping the kitchen clean and tidy. People always accuse me of doing that. That may be true. But sometimes people make a problem seem harder than it is just to avoid doing it. Once when I stayed at Kitty’s, her dishes were piled half way to the ceiling. The sink was full, the countertops were covered and the table was full of last night’s dinner dishes. Out of curiosity, I checked the oven and I was right! She was still hiding dirty dishes in the oven!

I decided to do a good deed and I spent a day doing her dishes. I filled up the dishwasher twice and then did a bunch of dishes by hand. She didn’t have steel wool, just those fancy scrubber things. So I used that. I didn’t expect praise from her but I never expected to be ridiculed for my ignorance of proper dishwashing techniques.

It seems I had done it all wrong and it would have to be redone. In my sister’s house, washing dishes was a complicated task and always a two-person job. I had loaded the dishwasher incorrectly. The knives were wrong, the spoons were wrong, the utensils never go in the dishwasher and neither do the glasses. Each pot had a specific cleaning method. The copper bottom pans had the most elaborate cleaning method. I never mentioned that I had the same pots at home only my bottoms were shiny and they never stick.

 As I listened to my sister rant, I began to think of George W Bush. When he failed to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center, he claimed that no one could have foreseen it. It wasn’t that he was lazy and hadn’t done his job. That’s not why the dishes were a mess. It was that dishes were the evil of all evils. No one could have foreseen the attacks on the World Trade Center. Cleaning my sister’s kitchen was a job for the entire family and I should never have attempted it alone. With cleaning requirements like Kitty’s, you can be sure that the kitchen was rarely cleaned and dinner was rarely cooked there. The Bush solution to the terrorists’ attack was to live in a constant state of terror.

 So you need to keep it simple and easy to clean. You don’t need every new gadget in the catalogue or the gourmet shop. Instead try to invest in a few quality tools. Choose tools that are well made and then take care of them. Remember never put good knives in the dishwasher, always dry the cast iron, never make gouge marks and keep your pots shiny. Don’t be stubborn or proud. Say I’m sorry and never let the wounds fester. And most of all never go to bed angry.