A New Skillet, A New Website

There is this cast-iron skillet I cannot bring myself to use. 

It just sits on my counter!

And I keep on using my old annoying frying pan, which goes back centuries. The picture above proves it. Velazquez painted my old skillet! That is it in the picture, I am sure of it.

Because of the book "The Artist's Way," I am starting to question my behavior and try to figure out why. And so I am taking a trip down this rabbit hole.

Why do I not season my skillet?

I am exploring this question today on Substack. Click here to find it there. I would be so grateful.

My Substack is free!

Substack is nice and organized and it is helping me to get on a better writing schedule. I do not plan on doing paid subscriptions, in part because I do not want a job -- I want this to be for fun.

Please follow me there. Please take out a free subscription -- I would love that! One reason I am doing this is, I plan on shortly publishing my book about Leonard Pennario, and this would help pave the way.

If you are reading this I appreciate you being here. Thank you -- and if you want to be in touch, great

Switchin' in the kitchen

The house is in upheaval because the kitchen is getting fixed and so is the peeling wallpaper.

Above is the "before" picture of the kitchen.

The "After" picture will have to appear tomorrow. It is not done yet. However it will be. The cabinets are being fixed and I am getting a backsplash which, this kitchen never had one. I will also be replacing the hardware on the cabinets.

Everyone says, paint your cabinets white. However these are what they are, which is a nice old-fashioned oak, and you just know that as soon as I painted them white, all these people would be saying, oh, never paint your cabinets white. So the natural oak stays.

I am getting butcher block countertops to go with the cabinets. I told my sister Margie a few weeks ago because she shares my excitement over things like this. However Margie said, oh no, go with granite! She said if you spill wine on the butcher block, it is all over.

You know what, I will not spill wine.

You also know what, I will not tell anyone else that I am doing this. Because everyone has something to say and I want to follow everyone's advice and I end up like that guy with the donkey in the Aesop's fable. 

"You can't please everyone," is the moral of that fable. That is the truth!

Looking at that picture, I love that fable, you know? What a great story. Still funny after all these millennia.

Back to my kitchen. The sink is also going. Perhaps I will end up with a double sink. There is also this hood over the stove that broke a long time ago and that is going.

Howard said this is genius because it is a short project. We have two or three days of upheaval. Right now dishes have to be washed in the bathroom and my only counter is this wheelie cart next to the stove.

But after two days it is done! Then I can get onto the trimmings such as getting the new cabinet hardware and changing up the lighting. I have these pendant lights I bought at a garage sale that will be going over the counter.

We are switchin' in the kitchen! Gettin' ready for the party tonight!

OK, maybe not tonight.

But soon!

The Bosch gets the kabosh

We put the kabosh on the Bosch, b'gosh.

The Bosch stove this is! Not the dishwasher. The Bosch dischwascher -- sorry, you just have to spell it that way, you know? -- is the light of my life. I treat it like gold and buy it expensive rinse aid because it is the one appliance that has not betrayed me.

How did Bosch make such a great dischwascher but blow it with the stove?

Anyway. The saga of the Bosch has been chronicled extensively on this Weblog. It kicked two years after I first bought it, and then, well, it just kept kicking.

Finally I kicked it!

The other day it began leaking gas and that was the last straw. Up until then Howard had been fixing it whenever it broke, which was often. We kept ordering parts. But a gas leak is no joke and so as of today the Bosch was out the door. While I was waiting for the new stove I gave the Bosch the ceremonial kick.

Not long after that the phone rang and it was my Aunt Marce. I told her about the Bosch and how it was finally outta here.

She said, "Well, I hope you gave it a ceremonial burial."

I said: "I did. I kicked it."

Aunt Marce is a wonderful cook and that conversation was a pleasure because I knew that she understood me on a visceral level.

The thing was, that Bosch, it would desert me without a moment's notice. I do my church coffee hour and I could not go on like this, the thing dying on  Friday or a Saturday right when I was prepping for it. It had gotten to the point where it kicked several times a year. What if it kicked on Thanksgiving? Fie on it! Fie!!

So the Bosch got the kabosh.

Because of bad experiences I had had with Orville's over this Bosch, I went with Lowe's this time. Burned by this luxury stove that did me dirt, I am now going with a bare-bones model. It is a no-frilled General Electric with not so much as a clock. Something like this ...

It is just this big blank white stove. No controls. Not only that, it has a broiler drawer. Down at the bottom! I could not believe that.The last time I had a broiler drawer down at the bottom of the stove, I think I was in college.

When I realized that what I thought was the warming drawer was actually the broiler, I could not stop smiling. It is like memory lane! In my college apartments, we had these ancient Laurel and Hardy appliances, and the stove always had the broiler in this bottom drawer. I had forgotten all about that.

Well, you must excuse me now, but I have an Italian pork loin braising slowly on the front burner of my new stove.

A new day dawns!

The incredible edible egg

This morning, a miracle!

I opened the fridge to get out an egg, and it was kind of early and I was really sleepy so I dropped the egg.

Oh no! That is one messy task. I am preparing myself for this messy clean-up but then ...

The egg did not break!

It was sitting on the floor whole!

I picked it up, gingerly, astonished. What had happened was, the shell had chipped away just a bit on one end. But the membrane underneath somehow held the egg together.

I've never seen anything like it in my life!

My one regret is that I did not take a picture. If you do not take a picture nothing has really happened. You would think I would have learned this lesson by now. But I was sleepy and so I did not take a picture. I picked the egg up and marveled at it and then I think I was afraid it would break more and so I cracked it into the skillet and cooked it and brought it to Howard with his oatmeal.

He ate the magic egg!

Maybe the egg was a sign because the rest of the cooking and coffee hour baking went magically.  The folks at coffee hour tomorrow will be happy! I made Cranberry Buckle and Jewish Apple Cake and a creation of my own, Chocolate Strawberry Coffee Cake. I made cinnamon buns. Everything went really fast.

One thing that was funny, there was a stick of butter I worked on all day. Besides other sticks of butter I was throwing into baking creations, there was a stick that sat on the counter and I chipped away at, tablespoon by tablespoon. One went into this, two into that. Finally in addition to everything else I was making dinner and that, too, called for a tablespoon, and then another tablespoon.

It was like a clock, that stick of butter. I could mark time with it.

Anyway, a productive day, in and out of the kitchen.

Thank you, Betty Crocker!

Saturday is baking day as I prep for church coffee hour. Today I tried a new coffee cake. It is titled Sweet Bread Wreath. It is from Betty Crocker and it came out looking great.

I like to do something new every week. That is the game! Ideally it is something that teaches me some new technique or makes me do something different. In this case it was making a braided wreath. I had not done that since I made a braided Christmas Stollen a long time ago from the Monastery Cookbook. Now that was a project. One day I will have to revisit that.

That was not a wreath. Today's bread was.

You had to divide the dough into three pieces and roll them into 26 inch ropes.

Then you braided them loosely and shaped them into a wreath. It was all easier than I thought it would be.

The wreath was kind of rough at the bottom edge where the ends of the ropes were pinched together. However, I figured, that is where I can cut into it when it is on the coffee hour buffet. If you do not cut into a cake nobody cuts into it and it just sits there. That is what I have learned!

Likewise if you do not take the cover off something, be that cover foil or plastic or whatever, experience teaches me that nobody takes the cover off. They might reach under the plastic or foil and take a slice but they do not remove the covering, oh no.

Got to love it!

Back to the Sweet Bread Wreath which, by the way, you can find the recipe here.

I put it in the oven to proof at a balmy 100 degrees and here is how it was after maybe an hour and a half. Eventually it emerged.

So pleasingly plump! I gave it a lot of time because I used white whole wheat flour. I was out of plain white flour and too lazy to go to Albrecht Discount.

Before it bakes you are to brush the Sweet Bread Wreath with beaten egg and then sprinkle it with spices. Here is where I did not read, and I mixed the spices in with the beaten egg. Oh no. Oh no!

I brushed the mixture on as it was, fingers crossed, and into the oven it went.

Ta da!

I think I will sprinkle powdered sugar on it immediately before serving. Another lesson I have learned is people like a bit of sweetness but not a load of it. Well, the kids like a load of it, which is why I made brownies as well. But most people don't want anything with too much sugar. Still they like some. They do not want no sugar. You must strike this happy medium.

Which I hope I do with the Sweet Bread Wreath. I will try to take a picture tomorrow before Mass so we can see how it looks with its pious dusting of sugar.

Meanwhile I have nothing but praise for this particular Betty Crocker cookbook. It is "Come Home To Dinner" and it utilizes your appliances like the bread machine and the Crock Pot.

Its bread section is the greatest. I have done a bundle of the recipes and they all work out great.

As opposed to this other bread machine cookbook -- this series of cookbooks really -- that I used to use. Here, I found this picture of them. I had three of these books.

The breads on the cover look yummy! And they usually came out well. But not after an eon of fussing and tweaking. I would look in the machine and they would be too crumbly or too wet or too heavy and the machine would be huffing and puffing and finally just stop.

I was always adding something or amending something but somehow I never blamed the books. I always blamed myself. And at the end when the breads came out well I would write "VG" or "Made for church everyone ate it up" or something like that, and forget about all the work I went through.

Whereas with this Betty Crocker book, the dough always comes out of the machine perfect and easy to work with, no muss no fuss. I marveled at it for several weeks until it finally dawned on me: Those cookbooks I used to use were just plain bad.

Fie on them! I do not think I will even give them to Amvets. I do not want some other cook baking for her church coffee hour to be pulling her hair out. I think I will just throw them away!

Betty Crocker is my new best friend. Sometimes you need someone who has been around since your great-grandparents' era, you know?

She knows her stuff!

Switchin' in the kitchen

Today is Demo Week.

I am demo-ing my kitchen!

My kitchen is awful. It was OK when I bought this house. It had a kind of '80s look, but you know me, I have nothing against the '80s. Leonard Pennario achieved some neat things in the '80s. However.

The kitchen has just fallen apart!

The cabinets have just broken. The fronts fell off several of the drawers. There is this funny cabinet over the stove, over the hood. One of those cabinet doors actually split in half. You can see some of these details in the picture up above.

Home kitchens are not made for people who actually cook!

I do. I cook breakfast and dinner and I pack lunches for Howard and me. For years I packed lunch only for myself but then Howard got wise to it and now I have to do for him, too. And I have always liked having people over. When the house was in better shape and before everybody got married, people would come over from work. No big deal, no planning, we would just hang out and drink wine and make dinner.

Now I still cook for other people. My brother comes over for breakfast on Saturdays. I cook for the St. Anthony's coffee hour.  I took this picture one week before running over to Mass.

Long Web log post short, the kitchen is just .... well, it has just collapsed.

No matter. By next week it will all be gone. Those weak old cabinets, gone. I am going to put in restaurant stuff. Stainless steel tables, big ol' stainless steel restaurant sink.

That is my plan.

Wish me luck!!

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!

The iron pot

On this snowy day, pictured above, as I made dinner I found myself thinking of this iron pot that turned up in my apartment years ago. This was my apartment on Delavan Avenue.

I am not sure why I had inherited this pot. This was back in the crazy time of my life when roommates were always leaving under cover of darkness and leaving me with all kinds of stuff. It was this big iron pot with a big heavy lid. Back then I did not appreciate iron pots as I do now. And so this pot mostly gathered dust in the pantry. Once in a while I cooked beans in it. Somehow it occurred to me that it was good for cooking beans.

But other than that, long story short, I did not appreciate this pot. And one night before garbage day I decided it was time to get rid of it. I took it out to the curb.

Son of a bean-boiling sea cook, I hate remembering that!

I wish I could go back in time and not take that pot out to the curb! I am so ashamed.

But anyway, I took it out to the curb, and I put it in the garbage.

However. Here is where it is good to be me.

I cannot throw anything out!

Late that night I thought better of it. I put on boots over my pajamas and I ran outside. And there was the pot, still sitting there. I lugged it back upstairs and inside. I hated myself as I did that. I thought, I am such a jerk, I cannot throw anything out. Why am I saving this iron pot?

Here is why.

That iron pot sits on the stove now, filled with polenta.

Hardly a day passes when it is not in play. I cook in it constantly. It has held thousands of stews. It has cooked hundreds of pounds of beans. When I make a bean soup, this is my preferred pot, because of how it is shaped. I love how the lid fits onto it. I admire it as a work of art.

File this -- again -- under Never Throw Anything Out. Pennario agreed with me on this.

It is ironclad wisdom!

Your servant, ma'am

Every time I allow my Crock Pot to make dinner I wonder why I do not grant it permission more often.

It is like having a servant in the house!

You walk in and there is this aroma of your dinner cooking. Every time I do this, which as I said is not often enough, I always manage not to be thinking about it when I walk in the door. Then that aroma hits you.

Today it is Black Bean Soup. I used this basic recipe out of the 400 Calorie Fix diet cookbook. Diet cookbooks by the way have great recipes, in my (extensive) experience. They knock themselves out to impress you. The South Beach Diet cookbooks are excellent.

Anyway, this Spicy Black Bean Soup, to use its formal name, pretty much has you toss together dried beans (2 cups) chopped up onion, carrots or whatever, and a cup of salsa, plus then you cover it with water. I waited until I came back home to add the salsa because I had not soaked the beans as the recipe asked, and I was afraid that with salt they would not soften correctly.

After tossing in the salsa I spiced it up according to another recipe I love, Caribbean Black Bean Soup out of the Vegetarian Times cookbook. I threw in cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper and -- the piece de resistance -- a quarter cup of dark rum.

Ah!!

"Your servant, ma'am." That is the Crock Pot speaking!

The black bean soup is cousin to the white bean soup I wrote about a while ago. My friend Ryan made that white bean soup! That made my day.

Today  it was rather disorienting, because I had time to play the piano and work on my book and whatnot. Clearly I must explore and exploit the Crock Pot more often.

It is not often you find a Crock Pot recipe that is just excellent as I have kvetched before. We will have to make an index of recipes that work.

When you find one, it makes your day!

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!

Curtain up!

One small step for anyone else, one giant leap for me with my chaotic life. I have purchased kitchen curtains.

Ever since I moved into my house, and I am not kidding, the kitchen has had these ugly blinds. They have gotten dirty and I cannot clean them. And they block out the light.

Because I have been preoccupied with a lot of things, putting up curtains always seemed like a big impossible deal. I do not know how to do it, is one thing. And the preparations for this step was amazing. I think it was three months ago I stopped by K Mart and bought curtain rods, made in China. They are the adjustable kind with the suction cups.

Then I went to Amvets to look for some cute vintage curtains.

Well.

That is more easily said than done. It is hard to find cute vintage curtains! You have to buy them on Etsy or something. I am too cheap.

But I did not give up. For weeks, when I went to Amvets, which I often do after church, I kept watch. Never anything. I would move from the curtains on to the record department, which adjoins it. Finding Leonard Pennario records is rare but not so rare as these curtains.

Then, Sunday. This past Sunday.

My friend Lizzie and I met up with each other at Mass -- remember, she baked the zucchini bread -- and then I magnanimously invited her to join me on my weekly trip to Amvets.

And my ship came in!

Sears Perma-Prest.

I was nervous and did not trust my taste so I went and found Lizzie in Bric-A-Brac. I asked her how she liked these curtains and she approved! Later she did that sketch up above of me hanging my new curtains.

Oh, what the heck, I am ashamed at how messy my kitchen is but here is a bigger picture.

The old blinds are still at the top -- as Howard said, abandoned in place. But I will tear them down and put up valances. I have two valances! One is longer than the other but you cannot have everything. I can fudge things so you do not notice.

Now I am excited about finding other curtains. It is an easy way to change the entire look of your kitchen even while finishing the biography of a great concert pianist. Speaking of which, I also washed the kitchen windows. On an 85-degree day. I know how to make a September heat wave absolutely unbearable.

The sense of achievement...

Unbelievable!