Coffee heat rising

funny

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Spare Me EFFETE!

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The great little Braun coffee grinder gave up the ghost late last week. It had resided in my kitchen cupboard for the past ten or fifteen years and survived daily use. Literally: I grind coffee and make at least one, sometimes two, French press pots of brew every day.

This meant I had to whack up coffee grounds in the mini-food processor, which works OK but is not how I’d like to wear out that thing.

So when I noticed that Target carries coffee grinders, I picked up a Mr. Coffee grinder, the one that came closest in size and appearance to the reliable old Braun. I don’t care much for Mr. Coffee products—electric drip coffeemakers in general make terrible coffee, and this maker’s is no exception. And this little machine makes a coarse, clumsy grind that’s just good enough for government work. If you wanted the grounds very fine, you’d either have to grind it in several stages with some cool-down time, since it heats up  quickly, or just let the grounds get an extra zap of heat. Not that big a deal, but mildly annoying.

The Braun grinder and the KitchenAid grinders Target had were big, clumsy, clunky things that would never fit in my cabinet. When Satan and Proserpine took out the old cabinets that came in this old house, they didn’t replace the large cabinet that hung from the ceiling over the counter between the kitchen and the family room. Not doing so did open up the space beautifully–the living room/dining room/kitchen area is bright and open now—but it also reduced the amount of cabinet space so that there’s really not enough for a person whose idea of cooking extends beyond the microwave and the frozen pizza. The old Braun fit exactly into the single small spot that was conveniently at hand for it. Any of the newer models would require me to empty out another cabinet to find a space for it.

So when I was over at Biltmore Fashion Square to hassle with the Apple people fruitlessly (they no longer sell software in their store—you have to download EVERYTHING from the App Store, like I have nothing better to do than figure that out), I dropped by the Williams-Sonoma there and asked after the Braun.

They’re all huge monsters.

But, said I, don’t you have a model about so high and so big around (gestures)?

Well, no. Said she. Well, yeah, there’s one. But it’s (shudders) a blade grinder, not a burr grinder. You wouldn’t want THAT.

Oh. No. Of course not.

The reviled blade grinder was also too large to fit in my cabinet.

Spare me the goddamn fake gourmet effeteness!

And spare me the corporate schemes to make us buy things that we don’t need, whether we want them or not. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

The thing that’s particularly annoying about this is that to get things that were commonplace thirty or forty years ago—a decent pan, a real cast-iron skillet, a functional goddamn coffeegrinder that’s not the size of a baby elephant, a dinner plate that’s larger than a salad plate—you have to search all over creation and usually pay for the schnozzola for it.

If we’re gonna replace things for the sake of style (read, “for the sake of improving the corporate bottom line”), could we at least replace them with stuff that’s better?

What’s your least favorite “improvement” of the day?

I WANNA SPEND!!!!!

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Spend, spend, SPEND! That’s what I wanna do.

Actually, it’s not quite that petulantly tantrumish. I’m coming to think that all work and no play is making Funny a very dull girl. One needs to have a little bit of a life. All I do now is sit in front of the computer, clean house, do the laundry, meet students, read copy, shop for food, and tend to dogs. I’ve become so tight with my money that I don’t drive unless I absolutely have to, I rarely go anywhere outside the immediate environs of my neighborhood and job, I don’t go to movies, I hardly ever go out to eat and certainly  not during the more expensive dinner hour. If it costs anything, I don’t do it.

My life has become cramped and crabbed.

It’s not like I’m THAT broke. I do put $200 a month aside in a savings account specifically for so-called “extraordinary” expenses: costs that fall outside my routine budget. And in fact, during the winter I never spend all the money budgeted for nondiscretionary expenses, so there’s always a one or two hundred bucks left over between November and April. Why am I clinging to every little penny? What is it about gazing at a number at the bottom of a Quickbooks column that’s so mesmerizing that it keeps me from doing anything else?

Comes in today’s New York Times an ad for this fall’s Chamber Music Society season. For $200, you get six concerts featuring nationally and internationally respected groups. OMG, here’s Chanticleer (!!!) and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Octet amd the Harlem Quartet and…Midori is coming here! That’s just $33 a concert, quite a bargain for any of these groups. And their venue is in a lovely little concert hall not far from my house, not way to heck and gone out at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, where they used to play back in the day when my ex- and I had season tickets every year.

Hmmm… For $75, you can go to an extra concert at the Desert Botanical Garden, which would be lovely.

However…the DBG itself has a series called “Music in the Garden,” which features performers in many musical genres. For $65, you can get a Garden membership and admission to those concerts for $15. You also get free admission whenever you want to walk around, free admission to the flashlight tours, 20% discounts on classes and gift shop purchases, 10% off on the annual plant sale, and reciprocal admission to a whole slew of other botanical gardens around the country, including—within driving distance—the charming Tohono Chul park in Tucson and the Arboretum at Flagstaff.

So, there you go: Get a season ticket to chamber music and combine it with a single-person Desert Botanical Garden membership and be entertained for a year.

Why not?

Part 1: Never. Ever. Fails

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What is it about three-day weekends that causes infrastructure to collapse? How is it that whenever tradesmen are trying to take a couple of days off (and intend to charge you accordingly), things go radically, spectacularly WRONG? And why does it never, not once, ever fail?

In addition to working on the pool (routine stuff) and running the laundry, I wanted to clean out the moldy refrigerator and a couple of cabinets. The fridge, in particular, was pretty desperate; indeed…frightening.

So I’m madly throwing things out. One jar, though, I must save—the glass part, that is, not the mildewed peppers inside. Very pretty jar, so reusable. So, naturally, I throw the peppers down the garbage disposal, which is madly running. It keeps on running and running and water is…not running. Not running down the drain at-tall.

Matter of fact, instead of going down the drain, it’s backing up into the other sink.

Damn. Turn off the disposal.

Get the plunger. Plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and…not one drop of water goes down the sink.

Turn the garbage disposal back on. More water backs up into the other sink.

Call the plumber. Wonder how much time & a half is going to cost.

Plumber answers on about the 10th ring. He ain’t workin’ today. For cryin’ out loud, it’s Sunday on Memorial Day weekend! What?

He’ll come by tomorrow. Meanwhile, don’t use the sink and don’t use the dishwasher. ’Bye!

{sigh}

The dishwasher contains about three days of dirty dishes, some of which I need and all of which will be stinking by tomorrow. Luckily, there’s a work sink in the garage.

Shovel off the washer and dryer. Clean the tops of the washer and dryer, which have become somewhat littered and soiled during an encounter with Charley the Golden Retriever that involved confiscating a pile of half-eaten plastic and silk plants.

Set up the garage so as to wash dishes. Haul three days’ worth of dirty dishes into the garage. Wash. Rinse. Drain.

Reflect, while enjoying this task, that some time back I saw a blog post whose writer was holding forth on how to wash dishes by hand. Think of that.

A whole generation, maybe two, have never had to wash dishes by hand as a routine matter. How many Americans don’t know that there’s a special pattern to washing dishes? So, let us consider, ↓↓↓↓↓↓

Part 2: How to Wash Dishes by Hand

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So here we are in the garage, recalling a youth misspent scouring dishes in the kitchen sink and reflecting that there must be a lot of Americans who’ve never had the privilege, thanks to the almost universal distribution of the dishwasher. Come the Apocalypse (which as we know is bearing down on us at all times), they might like to know. So it goes like this:

Scrape food off the dishes into a garbage can. Pour any grease from pans into an old can or disposable container; failing that, soak it up with paper towels and put in the trash. Do not ever pour grease down the drain. Otherwise you’ll end up in the same predicament I’m in: calling the plumber in the middle of a holiday weekend. It’s inevitable.

Place a dish rack on a dish drainer (a plastic or rubber mat designed to let water drain off into a sink) on the countertop, or lay out some towels on which to arrange the dishes to dry.

Used a sink rack to span the washer & dryer...

Assuming you have a functional kitchen with a double sink, fill one sink with hot soapy water and one with cold, clear water.

If you have only one sink, as in, say, a dingy garage, get a pail or plastic dishpan. Fill it with hot soapy water.

If you have an actual kitchen sink, wash in the soapy water and then set the clean dishes into the cold water to rinse. Lift them out, one by one, and set them in dishrack to drain. If you have a sidekick, that person can make him- or herself useful by lifting the dishes out of the cold water, setting them in the dishrack, and drying them with a towel. But the truth is, that step isn’t necessary. It’s probably better—more sanitary—to air-dry the dishes.

Always start with the glassware. You’ll want to wash clear glass items first, while the water’s still clean.

If you have only one sink or washtub, rinse each item one-by-one in running water. Turn the water off between items; this is a wasteful technique that should be avoided if possible. Oh well. We’re in the garage, after all.

Next, wash the silverware. The water’s still clean, so they’ll come out shiny if you get to them next.

See this little guy?

Do not drop a thing like this into a sinkful of soapy water! You won’t enjoy the nasty cut it’ll give you while you’re groping around trying to find it. Silverware can be dropped in the water to soak. Cutlery…not so much.

Next move on to the stoneware or china. This stuff will be greasier and will start to get the dishwasher dirty. You’ll notice that the suds get progressively less sudsy as you proceed. There’s a reason for that.

Wash all the cups, saucers, salad dishes, bowls and plates. Arrange them in the dish drainer or across a towel.

Finally, it’s time to tackle the pots and pans.

Save the dirtiest cookware for last. Chances are you’ll need to scour a pan or two. Barkeeper’s Friend is great for stainless pans. Comet and other chlorine-bleach powder knockoffs are almost as good.

Et voilà! The whole mound of dishes is clean!

Now you can get on with, God help you, the rest of your day. ↓↓↓↓↓↓

Part 3: What Happened Next…

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Okay, so now both sinks are full of standing water. The dishes are washed and left to dry in the garage, and the mess in the kitchen is more or less cleaned up.

So it was back to the refrigerator, where the shelves were still laden with alien life-forms whose excreta had left them sticky and gummy.

Threw out vast quantities of former food; hauled trashcansful out to the alley.

Pool pump sounded like it was laboring. Pressure up to 18 psi.

Backwash filter, clean out pump pot filter, reassemble, restart. Looks OK.

Hack back the jungle vines that are trying to suffocate the pool equipment. Work on espaliering the Lady Banks rose. Pick up dog mounds; haul more garbage, dog mounds, and vine cuttings out to the alley.

A great deal of time has been wasted fooling with the dishes. I’m determined to get through at least one other project I’d planned to do today, and so decide to take on the hall closet. This dark cave has been collecting bottles of prescription drugs since 2007(!), along with piles of ancillary debris.

Two hours later:

Not bad, eh? Tidy.

Top shelf, cleaning and ironing stuff. Next shelf: health and hypochondria. Below that: vanity stuff—creams, perfumes, soaps, cotton balls, and the like.

Negotiate a deal with a new client. Damned if we didn’t get a fair hourly rate. Things are looking up.

Throw out another large trashcanful of debris.

The day is still middle-aged. Decide to move on to cleaning out the garage cabinets, especially the desperately annoying collection of debris where I like to stash cute bottles, potentially useful bottles, cool bottles, and colorful bottles. Bottles. A lot of bottles.

Toss out more old jars and plastic containers and fancy tea cans than carter has oats and hauled another ton of debris to the trash. Carry it around the front and side of the house to the garbage bin in the alley, noticing that the Devil-Pod Tree’s undead roots are sprouting more suckers.

Hike back to the garage to get extra-concentrated Roundup; poison infant Devil-Pod Trees. Carry bottle of undiluted Roundup concentrate back to the garage, dodging fierce tiger-clawed eye-gouging twigs on the Texas ebony and the palo brea. Pick up gloves and trimmer; cut back fiercely vicious tiger-clawed eye-gouging twigs; haul skin-ripping plant debris to the alley.

Enter the kitchen, anticipating a bourbon and water. Very, very, very tired.

There, confront a battalion of marching ants. Yes…it’s…

Ant Wars!
The Battle of the Bosch

They’re entering the theater of action through a hole under the threshold and advancing on the dishwasher.

Spray them all with DIY Windex, which in the past we’ve seen slays them in vast numbers. They keel over. But they have reserves. Many reserves.

Sprinkle diatomaceous earth (pool supply) across the threshold. Move on to cleaning out a garage cabinet.

Fill up another trash can with glass jars, plastic jars, fancy tea cans. Wonder what possesses me to keep these things.

Haul piles of junk to recycling bin. Arrange surviving glass- and tinware in the cleaned out cabinet.

Wow! You can actually reach stuff! Those old blue water bottles make great bud vases. And surely I can find something to do with all those other…valuable pieces.

Back in the kitchen, the ants have regrouped. They’ve burrowed a trench through the diatomaceous earth and again are taking over the dishwasher. Engage battle. Engage. Engage. Engage. Engage. Spray floor with Simple Green, scrub kitchen floor on hands and knees, beating back the ants at last. Clean dishwasher innards.

Stagger away, exhausted. It’s after 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry but even if I could use my kitchen to cook in and even if there were even something to microwave in there which there is not, I’m too tired to cook and probably too tired to eat.

Fall on the bed.

Discover a strip of veneer peeling off expensive goddamn bed. Figure out how that can be fixed. Think it’s a little beyond my carpentry skills but maybe not. Feed the dog & wash the dog’s dish to discourage ant interest.

Now it’s 10:09 p.m. and I am exhausted.

Never. EVER. Fails.

All-Clad On Sale

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Williams-Sonoma is having a 20%-off sale on All-Clad. The 1.5-quart saucepan, which I’ve been coveting for awhile, is marked down from $109 to $87. Add the Arizona sales tax of almost 10% and you’re back at $95, not that big a deal.

Cookware & More has a 1.5-quart irregular for $71.40, but they’re not tellin’ what the shipping charges are until you actually order the thing up. That suggests shipping is pretty high.

At Amazon.com, the same pan, not irregular, can be had for $79.95 and free shipping.

Something to know about. 🙂