Posts
My kitchen has three drawers. Three is not very many, when it comes to kitchen drawers. To maximize space, I keep my cutlery in a wall-mounted box. The drawer by the stove contains vegetable peeler, can opener, bottle opener, spatulas, melon baller, pastry brush, ice pick—all the regularly used tools, right at hand.
This leaves me with two other drawers, side by side to the right of the refrigerator. In one of them I keep a rubber mallet (for halving winter squashes), a pair of tongs for removing canning jars from boiling water, extra jar lids, and the re-usable plastic mobcaps (very old-fashioned) that I use instead of plastic wrap.
The one remaining drawer? That's where I keep my (sheathed in plastic) rasp for grating chocolate or hard cheeses, a few plastic spoons and forks for when I need to take a lunch, my favourite dough-scraper for lifting and trimming pie crust dough, and my pastry blender, never used for blending flour and lard but for mashing pinto beans for refried beans and avocado for guacamole.
Last week when we had guests I served the dessert but had forgotten to put the grated chocolate on top of it. (My husband noticed this because he had chosen a nice port specifically to go with the chocolate that I had said I'd be putting on top of the dessert.) I went to the drawer for the rasp but could not find it. I pawed, however, through dozens of pairs of chopsticks as I looked for the rasp. Where had they come from? I finally found the rasp, grated and distributed the chocolate, and finished out the evening.
The next day I removed every single chopstick from that drawer and put the huge pile on top of my husband's work space. You need to know that twenty years ago I did a lot of Chinese cooking. I laid in all the supplies and spent as much time as it took to make pot-stickers, moo-shu pork, kung-pao chicken, and twice-cooked pork. Them days is gone forever. So how had we managed to accumulate all these chopsticks? I promise you that we don't order in more than four times a year—and it's not usually Chinese. The only answer is that, in the dark privacy of that drawer, they are breeding like rabbits. It was time to put a stop to that.
Together we sorted the chopsticks into pairs and then groups. We finally kept four handmade pairs that I probably bought as Christmas stocking stuffers, plus one tarnished pair of silver chopsticks (who knows where THEY came from?). We put eighteen bamboo pairs (plus three singletons) into the discard pile. I said, "These are leaving the house! I don't care whether you give them to Goodwill or put them in the garbage, but they are OUT of my kitchen forever!"
Amazingly, my husband the packrat made no objection. But he gathered up the remaining group of chopsticks: 22 pairs of the cheap kind you get with Chinese take-out food, all of them still in their paper sleeves, all of them still joined at one end. I said, "These are also going out! The end! Get them out of here!"
And the packrat said, "I'll just keep these for a year. I'll store them in the basement and then I'll throw them out."
The chopsticks may still be in the basement, which is chock-a-block with things he is waiting to throw away someday, but at least they are no longer in one of my pitifully few kitchen drawers. When you have just three drawers, you want to fill them with essentials!
No comments:
Post a Comment