Meet Me at the Playground
Hop, skip, and sauté.
No, not that playground. No monkey bars, no teeter totters. When I was five, I broke my arm falling off the top of a sliding board.
No. My playground is the kitchen.
Don’t get me wrong. I get hurt there too. Grace and coordination are not arrows in my quiver.
Burns, cuts and slices have sent me to urgent care. Now that I think about it, the very first time I had to get stitches was from a kitchen accident. I was washing dishes when a glass broke in the soapy water. I used that injury as an excuse to excuse myself from kitchen chores for years.
As a witness to my many kitchen calamities, G has made sure that I have oven mitts that go up to my elbows. He always warns about OSHA regs when I try to maneuver around the kitchen, hands full, but oven door still open. Or when I think I can easily balance something hot all the way to the dinner table.
And still, the kitchen is my happy place.
Last month, I found new kitchen toys under the tree. I’m having a blast trying them out.
Look at this beauty.
It sat on the counter so I could admire it first. It took me three weeks before I could actually use it.
Then there’s this monster.
I can steam vegetables and dumplings of all kinds. I can make large amounts of stock for freezer storage. I can finally try a lobster or crab boil. I can cook all kinds of pasta, including…
my homemade pasta!
Pasta attachments for my precious KitchenAid…a dream gift I’ve wanted for years.
I have an old-fashioned hand crank pasta maker, but it just sits in its box most of the time. I never seem to have a counter that it likes to attach to and because of my lack of coordination whenever I try to use it I get frustrated and start to swear like a sailor. An angry cook makes angry food.
I made my first batch of noodles with the KitchenAid attachment, using a pasta dough recipe from Marcella Hazan’s book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. As I stood there feeding the dough into and out of the roller, the dough getting thinner, longer, my smile got bigger and bigger. It was a Zen moment.
Next up, fettuccine. And maybe that lobster.
Oh, and just to be fair, I tried a pain au levain recipe that failed miserably last week.
This thing could’ve been a frisbee we threw to each other on the beach. They can’t all be winners.
I care about you. Please don’t forget to eat your greens.
The first time my husband and I tried the Kitchen Aid pasta attachment, he accidentally put in the sausage grinder disk instead. Neither of us noticed it, other than the fact that the spaghetti seemed really, really thick and worm-like. As we plated it, I started noticing little glimmers and sparkles. mmm Sure enough, there were little metal shavings from the wrong disk being used. Our daughter, who happened to be at home for dinner that night, still mocks us for that error LOL