Nerd to the rescue

With the assistance of my new helper I was able to turn out a Betty Crocker sour cream coffee cake for our church coffee hour, and also, ahem, Lacy Oatmeal Cookies. They went, too!! We had a big crowd.

This is what happens when you bring in a Sunbeam Mixmaster. People gather!

I love that ad up above, the seasoned cook gazing admiringly at the appliance. Being a novice I had so much fun, standing over this antique whirring machine. Here is something I love about the Internet: You will always have access to some nerd who delivers arcane information you desire.

Researching my Sunbeam Mixmaster I found this site where, this guy has obviously devoted his life to Sunbeam Mixmasters. He is the biographer of the Sunbeam Mixmaster the way I am of Leonard Pennario.

About the Model 9, the Mixmaster I own, he wrote:

This model appeared in August of 1948. Some of the new features include a plastic tip on one of the beaters to help turn the bowl. Also the decal changes during the model 9 production run. Early model 9s have the early style decal and the later ones have decals like in the picture.

I am reading that fascinated.

I had been puzzling over the plastic tip on one of the beaters! I was thinking: Oh well, it probably got worn off the other one, but that's OK. Now I see it is as God intended.

The chronicler also wrote of a previous model, Model 7: "This model is first with the beater ejector. A simple twist of the handle and out come the beaters."

And I go: "Oh! That's how the beaters come out!"

I could not figure that out on my own! I had begun to think I had an earlier model because I could not find a beater ejector.

Live and learn.

Thanks to the nerds on the Internet!

The Mixmistress

I haven't written in a while but now that will change. It is fitting that I check back in today, because remember the Sunbeam Mixmaster? I got it going!

A turntable for it arrived from eBay. I spent something like $10 on it including shipping, zut alors. On the other hand, I got the mixer for nothing. On still another hand, it really works!

That bowl flies!!

I don't know what I was expecting, I guess for it to move around sedately. The slow and sedate speeds do not work on this mixer. It kicks in at setting 5, Mashed Potatoes. And it goes from there. I had it mixing cookie dough and it made quick work of the butter and sugar, I will say that. Just to see what it could do, I took it up to the higher speeds. It felt like being in a high-performance car and taking it up to 100 mph.

After I took the picture up above the mixer looked a little smudged so I polished it up. I am kind of sentimental over the $2 price sticker, is one thing. That was a nice deal. This World War II mixer that chugs along like the Memphis Belle. And it has the two bowls. That is lucky because glass bowls tend to break over the years. I will have to learn to recognize these and grab them at St. Vincent de Paul.

Anyway. Good job, mixer that dates to when Leonard Pennario was 24.

Well mixed!

The mixer mix-up

Because I have been baking more for church coffee hour, I did a wild and adventurous thing and I went down to the cellar to find my Hamilton Beach mixer.

I do not think I ever mentioned that I owned this particular small electric. I bought it at Salvation Army for I think $10. Since doing a little research I have learned it is a Model K! Here it is posing on the kitchen counter. If you look closely you can see the 1960s Osterizer in the background.

The Model K dates to the 1950s as I understand it. This mixer runs like a dream -- however zut alors, I am missing the turntable! That is what I have learned the part is called that the bowls sit on.

I know that my nieces Rosie and Millie were working this mixer once when we made Christmas cookies. So I knew it had been in service. Alas and alack and Alaska, I searched the basement but found no mixer turntable. I wonder if it ever had one, I mean while I have owned it. I have dim memories of us jerry-rigging it.

I must needs find a replacement turntable. That should not be too hard to do. And good news: While I was searching the basement I found a World War II-era Sunbeam Mixmaster I did not know I had! This is why it is fun to be me.

The Sunbeam runs very well too! I plugged it in. It is sluggish for the first few settings, but those are Mashed Potatoes and stuff, which I would never use it for. By the time you get to the beating it is going great guns.

However! It too is missing its turntable! Which must have been why I got it for just $2. The price sticker is still on it.

The beaters were wrapped in newspaper dated June 2008, so that must have been around when I bought it. I have dim memories of being at a sale with my mom and picking this up. Knowing my mom we talked it down to $1. Ha, ha!

I love the front of it. It is a Model 9 which dates to 1947 and was known for its grille. It looks like a World War II airplane!

Finding a turntable for this baby should not be that hard either. It seems people charge more for the bowls, which are beautiful white milk glass. The only thing that bothers me is the outside chance that I could have thrown one or another of these turntables out without knowing what it was. I have said it before and I will say it again: NEVER THROW ANYTHING OUT.

NEVER!!

Leonard Pennario agreed with me on this. We had both thrown things out and regretted it.

Anyway. I look forward to baking for my church with one or both of these vintage instruments whirring away.

What fun!

Mr. Fix-It

Another thing that happened besides the market madness is that the repairman showed up and finally fixed the Bosch stove. Above is a picture I snapped of the repairman doing the job, to the tune of $219.

Jeoffry helped the repairman.

That was the caption Howard wrote on Facebook for the picture I took and it is most apt. We were talking about how nice it is that Jeoffry is sociable. So many cats run and hide and there is nothing wrong with that, but we like that ours comes out, says hello and sometimes even offers assistance.

In celebration for the stove being done I roasted some of the cauliflower I had bought at the market on my spending spree, plus I roasted and stuffed an eggplant. This morning I made peanut butter/ oatmeal bars for church coffee hour. The recipe is from an ancient Pillsbury Bake-Off competition. The booklet shows the winning entries being judged by Pennario's friend Greer Garson so I know the recipes are good.

Wow, look at this. Naively I go looking to see if I can find the recipe online and I cannot. This is what I found on the Pillsbury site .. a bunch of recipes built on convenience foods and prepackaged mixes. One of them even starts with "a roll of Pillsbury refrigerated chocolate chip cookies."

Clearly with Greer Garson gone this contest has hit the skids.

Oh well. Aside from that life feels right again with the oven working.

Now, if I could only stop baking!

Bosch, bosh

How the time flies! It has been 10 days and still my Bosch stove is kaput.

The deal was, Orville's repair shop does not tell you if the repairman, on the appointed day, will arrive in the morning or the afternoon. I did not realize that. Innocently I called the day before the appointed day, which was yesterday, to ask if the repair would be in the morning, which I hoped, or in the afternoon.

Ms. Orville said, "We can't tell you that. You will get a phone call between 3 and 5 telling you."

I said, "Between 3 and 5 tomorrow?" Tomorrow being my repair day.

She said: "No, today."

I looked at the clock. "It's 2:58 now," I said. "It's two minutes till three. Can't you tell me? Maybe you could look it up.,"

She put me on hold.

There was a long pause. I waited.

Finally came the bad news. The repair was in the afternoon.

I, ahem, work. I had an assignment in the afternoon that could not be broken. So there I am, out of luck. Unfortunately I was nice as pie, please and thank you. Nice as pie gets you nowhere, you know? I always think of the last time I went to California to see Leonard Pennario. The rental car place lost my reservation and showed no compassion and I actually lost it to the extent that I complained and then I cried. Publicly. End result, as we say here in Buffalo: Compassion. Satisfaction. Finally!

I asked them if they could move me to the morning and you could tell this bureaucrat really enjoyed herself as she told me no.

It didn't make sense, when you thought about it. If all the calls went out between 3 and 5 that meant I was ahead of the pack. Why couldn't they move me and then call one of the previously scheduled morning appointments and simply told them the afternoon?

Rage, rage against Orville's.

The repair had to be rescheduled for Saturday, zut alors.

But meanwhile there can still be fresh bread, thanks to the bread machine! People wonder why you need a bread machine. This is why.

The loaf has risen very high and a wonderful aroma is filling the house.

There is always a bright side!

Baking Bad

I am appalled at my appliances.

Remember when my Bosch stove went kaput? Who could forget it? It was Aug. 8, 2012. And I had bought the stove only two years before that.

Now it is kaput again! Das Bosch ist kaput!! Again it is the oven.

What, is this going to keep happening every two or three years?

It has me angry. And it got me thinking about when the fridge kicked after just a couple of months.

What is with our appliances?

I cannot help thinking of my mom and her old gas stove. We got that stove when I was a tween and we had it for decades, as a matter of fact my brother and his family still have it and cook on it every night. Never, ever, do I remember a repairman being summoned for that stove and believe me, I cooked on it over the years hundreds of times. All those posts I wrote about cooking for my mom, I was cooking on that stove.

This stupid Bosch, I have had it barely five years and here I am having to eat a second repair bill. I am supposed to be eating some yummy pie or something and here I am eating this bill.

These are the wages of all these extra electronic settings. Instead of being simple and good and elegant like the piano playing of Leonard Pennario it is like those lesser pianists who try to get all fancy and reinvent the wheel.

This has all got me so disgusted that I just want to cook in the fireplace. I would be better off doing that, you know? Like the woman in the top picture. It is from the website of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Of course I have been there, hasn't everyone?

This gal has it right, too.

Fie on the Bosch.

It is bosh!

The new dishwasher

Remember Hieronymus Bosch, and the Bosch stove? 

We now have a Bosch dishwasher.

I had to shut Jeoffry into the front room when it arrived.

The Bosch is now installed but the problem is, we are afraid to use it. It requires fresh powdered detergent which, all I have is Sunlight liquid detergent. Also you need a Rinse Aid. At this rate it might be quite a while before we actually fire it up.

Perhaps it will sit for years while cooking magazines, measuring cups and Leonard Pennario albums accumulate on top of it. And while I spend hours washing dishes.

Bosch, bosh!

Meanwhile though it is earning its keep because it is fun to look at.

Already the kitchen seems more under control. Working on a book it is easy to let your life slide but here, look, I have fixed one thing.

This is Step 1.

One step at a time!

He's my handyman

One of the many benefits of having a cat (pictured above, in a portrait by Howard) around:

Remember the fridge that I bought a couple of years ago? I was always hearing a kind of scratching sound behind it. A rustling and a scratching.

Could it be mice? I hated the thought. I have always dealt badly with mice.

So I decided it was not mice. It was this fridge, something with the mechanism. I tuned it out the way I would tune out an inferior pianist, a pianist who was not Pennario. It was just my lot in life, I decided. Out of all the new refrigerators in the world I happened to get the one that made funny noises.

Well.

These funny noises? I just realized today that they have stopped.

I have not heard them in I do not know how long!

As Howard said we do not know what the cat is up to when we are not around. It could have chalked up a kill, who knows.

Either that or the mice have simply packed up and gone somewhere else.

"Holy #$*&. You would not believe what has moved into this house."

Either that or that cat is a handyman.

He has fixed the fridge!

Back in hot water

Yikes, remember what we talked about last time, about how some people, ain't nothing on their desk, ain't nothing in their head either?

That is what I must look like! Here I cleaned my desk And then I wrote nothing for days.

Well, I wrote stuff. I did a lot of work on Pennario. But then there were a bunch of complications including Internet problems. (Admittedly that did not hurt the book.) And on Friday the hot water heater blew! See, this is what happens when you make any kind of weak attempt to impose any kind of order. The house rebels. It is like when you go on a diet and your body rebels.

The body wants its weight! And the house wants its clutter and chaos.

End result, to use our Buffalo phrase, I have been living like a Frenchwoman not washing my hair. It looks OK but it is a strange feeling. The French can carry this off but I cannot. We are used to washing our hair every day here in America, we just are. I remember years ago reading that Farrah Fawcett would wash her hair twice every day. "I like really clean hair," she said.

It is so funny how you are used to hot water and never think about it. You are just so used to turning this one faucet and not another. Three days into this and I was still turning the wrong faucet and all I would get was this gurgle.

Yesterday the guy from Zenner and Ritter came over and put in a new hot water heater. This being Buffalo we talked, and he turned out to be this wonderful guy who loves winter and loves his work and goes skiing and ice fishing. But you know what, they could have sent the Swamp Thing into my house and as long as he fixed this heater he would have been like this prince.

The process took hours but it was worth it. Now the hot water heater is fixed and every time I turn on a faucet there is all kinds of drama. Once it gave a big bang. Another time there was nothing and then there was this mighty rush and water came spewing out. Then I ran the water from another faucet and it was yellow and had to clear up.

I knew the shower would be a grand adventure and sure enough! Gurgle ... spew! Gurgle ... cascade!

Welcome back, hot water!

You don't miss that hot water till your well run dry.

We air our dirty linen in public

One of these days I have to learn to do laundry the way Howard does laundry. The other day he did something unbelievable. He threw a pound of butter into the laundry along with his clothes!

And the clothes came out fine! The only thing that happened was that he found the butter box and all four of the wrappers the sticks had been wrapped in.

Me, if I threw a pound of butter into the laundry it would be a disaster.

It is not fair because yesterday, I did laundry, and in my haste to get back to my Pennario discography I failed to check all the pockets because a Kleenex got into the mix.

One Kleenex, and you would not believe the mess. The tights I was trying to wash, forget it. They are covered with lint! Anything black was hopeless.

The fie-ness and unfairness of it! Howard can wash clothes with a whole pound of butter thrown in and I forget one Kleenex, just one Kleenex, and, disaster.

Appliances understand Howard. His bread machines treat him better than my bread machine treats me. Coffee percolators like him better. Now it seems he has that gift of communicating with washing machines as well.

His laundry comes out great and look at mine.

It's a wash!

The toilet triumph

It is a great day because Howard fixed our historic toilet.

The toilet has been running funny for a couple of months. All it took was 10 minutes to fix it! 

There is no triumph like fixing a toilet. When I win a Pulitzer Prize for my book on Leonard Pennario it will not match the triumph that Howard felt today. 

I did, too! I greeted the news with delight.

Perhaps I will celebrate by buying a Toilet Paper Tree.

For the woman who has everything.

Which, now, I do!

A heated discussion

The Bosch bashing turned out to be not such a big deal. Orville's is sending a repairman to fix the thing this week on an agreed-upon day.

Not at an agreed-upon time, but at least we have the day nailed down.

I was laughing on the phone. I said, I cannot bake anything for three days?

What if I lose weight?

I will sue Orville's!

It is funny being without an oven. You cannot make pies or gratins. Or galettes! That is a hip thing in cookbooks, galettes. They are like pies only sloppier. You fold the crust over the filling.

No galettes for me.

On the other hand it made me affectionate toward my oven that I had a few jazz people over last week and was able to bake a peach cake. The oven was iffy by then but it rallied to bake the cake. It did not stick me. For that I am grateful.

The peach cake was its swan song!

And a beautiful one at that.

Bosch bashing

Zut alors, my Bosch stove is kaput.

I should say Ach, du Lieber, not zut alors. Because it is a German stove. But at least I got the kaput part right.

The oven will not heat up. It has been iffy for a few days now and today it is taking forever to heat up to 450 degrees, the temperature required to cook this cauliflower gratin for my mom. I looked on the Internet and I see other people raging about that problem. Apparently it is common for these stoves.

I came home from my mom's expecting this quiet nice evening when I could work on Leonard Pennario and prep for the next day's dinner as I did so. And now look.

Here is where Web logs come in handy: It is a kind of diary of your life and I see that I bought this stove two years ago. Still too early for it to break if you ask me. But it does not matter what I think.

How am I ever going to get this fixed? And how insulting is this? Here I have been talking up this stove and it goes and does this to me.

Above is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch of the maker of my Bosch stove meeting his just deserts in the underworld. He is the one being devoured by the big creepy beast in the chair. 

Wow, what is going on with those other people in the picture? All I can think is, such is the fate assigned to those who besmirch the good name of Bosch, and make ovens that go on the fritz after only two years. 

It is not pretty!

My new appliance

Shame, shame! I have been so busy -- with Leonard Pennario-related work, of course -- that I ordered a new washing machine from Orville's and went for a whole day without even going down to the basement to see it.

It is an Estate washing machine! I chose it because I like estate sales. Anyway, I saw the box in the back yard and knew it was here and I was going to go down and look at it but then I got to playing Schubert on the piano and forgot.

The next day I finally got it in my head to go down and see it. It was sitting there with the operating booklets on top of it, brand spanking new.

It fell to Howard to break it in.

He put in a load today. Before I even got a chance to!

This is one aspect to getting the washing machine that drives me crazy: The other day, two days before the new one was scheduled to arrive, the laundry had been piling up and so I got desperate and decided I would try the old one. It has just been crazy and temperamental and it would not wring the clothes out properly plus you could not turn it on without a lot of trouble. I had had enough of it. But I thought, one more time would not hurt.

Son of a sea cook, that old washing machine sprang to life and worked fine!

It knew it was being replaced!

I am waiting for a study to tell us that appliances are like German shepherds, that they can become as smart as a five-year-old child.

That would explain a lot!

The fridge kicks

Remember a couple months ago when I bought my Bosch stove and Maytag fridge? I just looked it up. It was April 13.

My refrigerator kicked today!

This fridge I had just bought three months ago! At Orville's!

I got home after Zumba class and took a drink of milk and I did kind of think the milk was not as cold as it ought to be. Well, whatever. Then I stuck my hand in the freezer. And everything had melted.

The fridge kept kind of grunting to itself. Well, it is still doing that. It clicks on and runs for about 10 seconds and then it clicks off.

Naturally the service center is closed so I have to wait till tomorrow. And I have all this stuff to do tomorrow. I do not know how I am going to manage this.

The good news is that Howard and I had this feast because stuff is going to go, you know? We had rack of lamb and shrimp cooked up with summer squash and tomatoes and basil.

I made a pot of chili too because as luck would have it I had just cooked up some black beans and they were in the fridge. So we have lunch tomorrow.

Those lamb chops, yum! And shrimp, perfect! I wish I had managed to cook a dinner that great for Leonard Pennario when I was in California. I mean, I tried my best but the planets line up for you like this only once in your life.

My fridge in California should have kicked!

All the same I am angry at this fridge. I have had it what, three months? Meanwhile my old one was not perfect but it never stopped dead in its tracks like this.

We are going to be seeing this more and more in Obama's America as our country turns more and more into old Communist East Germany. We will be driving Trabants.

We may as well get used to fridges that do not work.