well-equipped

My kitchen is well-equipped, but certainly not in the modern sense. I love looking through catalogs and stores at all the little gadgets you can get. Of course, you'd need to do fancy cooking (or at least intend to) to make use of most of them, and then, where would you put it all? Certainly not in our workspace, which has adequate but not overly generous storage space.

I recently replaced my quarter-century old knives. They were expensive (to me) when I bought them, served me well, and just weren't, as they say, cutting it anymore. The new knives are light and quick and very sharp, and if I'm lucky, I'll be thinking about replacing them in another quarter century.

I'm still using the Revere Ware I bought in the late 70s, and the blender and mixer that were used when I acquired them in my early 20s. I have two Creuset pots (enamel covered cast iron) that I use for dishes such as macaroni and cheese or milk-based soups. But now we're dipping into specialty equipment.

By far, the equipment I use the most is probably the oldest. In 1978, I met the man who would be my boyfriend for the next two and a half years. We were both young, though he was ten years older than I. His father had died that summer or perhaps the summer before. He had cleaned out his father's apartment and come home with some treasures.

For part of his career, Tom's dad was a chef in Army officer clubs around the world. At least, that was always the claim, though Tom never did understand how his father acquired shrapnel wounds several times while toiling away in a kitchen. Having grown up in Washington, I thought this story made perfect sense, myself.

Anyways, Tom saved a set of cast iron pots in fairly miserable shape. I guess he decided he didn't want them after all, because I ended up with them -- two big frying pans that can serve as covers for each other, a stock pot, and a cover for that. They were filthy and their seasoning was questionable. So I spent hours and days scrubbing and attacking the edges with a toothpick. scraping off decades of crud. Then I seasoned them all over again.

I lost the soup pot and cover in my first (and I hope, last) divorce. But I still have the frying pans. And I use them constantly, probably two to four times a week, about as often as I cook real dinners. They have seen me through so much cooking history, too, from the barely inedible to dishes I, at least, would order again.

My mother used to clean her cast iron out with salt and paper towels. No water touched those babies. My friend Daniel would use water, but never soap, and never anything harsher than a sponge. We're rough on our pans -- we apply soap and water and plastic scrubbers and scrapers. They're well-seasoned, so they just wash out. Then we dry, re-oil, and put away.

And I hope that in a quarter century I won't be thinking of replacing these babies. Perhaps I'll even be able to pass them down to the next generation, should they be wise enough to want them.