Gear
July 17th, 2007 by 
Madeleine Robins
One of the things my father and I have in common is a love of kitchen equipment. Pots. Pans. Pie crimpers and ramekins and really handsome mixing bowls. When I was a kid we had a catalogue of kitchen supplies and gear that my father and I would pore over it together, admiring things we were unlikely ever to possess. A couple of times when we were both in New York we’d go downtown to restaurant supply stores and wander through the aisles, examining the stainless steel and the cast iron and the industrial-strength mixers and pasta machines. “Look at the design on this!” “That’s one hell of a handsome bowl.” “Who thought this up?”
Now that we’ve sold the Barn, we can afford to redo our kitchen, which was last fixed up sometime in the early 70s. Can I tell you how I rejoice at the notion of four reliable burners and an oven that reaches and holds the desired heat? But redoing the kitchen will take time and thought and aggravation as well as money. Oh, and patience, never my hallmark. So, in the meantime, I’ve bought myself a toy, a sort of Promissory Token of my someday kitchen: a stockpot. A twenty-quart stockpot.
When I make chili or soup I like to make a lot at once so that I can freeze it for those evenings when I have to feed people and am uninspired. Until I got the new stockpot, I used the largest pot I had–my canning pot, a 24-quart black-speckled-enamel steel pot meant for immersing multiple jars in a hot water bath. It’s a fine pot for its purpose, but not so good for chili, since the thinness of the metal pretty much insures scorching, which adds an unintended and unappealing flavor. So yesterday I made enough chili for dinner for the family, plus five more dinners (all tucked away in the freezer in the basement). No scorched flavor! I was moved to make bread to go with the chili, and the house smelled several varieties of gorgeous all afternoon long.
I do drive my husband a little crazy, since (except when baking, which has certain chemical requirements which, unmet, will guarantee failure) I am an extremely improvisational cook. Chili, chez moi, includes meat, chilis, beans, onion and garlic. It can also include, in no particular order or amount, green pepper, carrot, dried apricots, basil, cumin, thyme, beer, wine, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon peel, olives, and whatever else happens to be around the house. So the taste of my chili (sans scorch) varies from batch to batch. I am married to a gustatorial conservative: if he likes something, he wants it the same way it was last time and the six times before. No matter how much he likes each batch of chili, he has to grapple with the fact that the next batch may well be different. Not wildly different–I’m not making calves-liver-and-grape-jelly chili, the fundamental things still apply–but it’s different. So the upside of the new stockpot is that I can make more unscorched chili at once, and the man can have five or six meals of the same chili before he has to get used to a new batch.
With my shiny, new stockpot everybody wins! How often in life can you say that?
Posted in Daily Life, Food | 
6 Comments »
July 17th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Oh Mad, please keep us updated on your kitchen remodel. I can live vicariously through you. I’ve been thinking about a kitchen remodel in our new house (we have a perfectly fine kitchen except for the stove, which like yours has basic functional issues–I just want a six burner Viking or Wolf and beautiful countertops.)
Are you thinking about a six burner? Do you have space for one?
Nice stockpot. Mine is only four gallons. I have stockpot envy.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Maureen, at the moment we have a countertop range (ick) and a wall oven too small to fit a standard-sized cookie sheet. I want a range with an oven large enough to fit a good-sized turkey or a full cookie sheet. If I can get a six burner stove into the kitchen that would be grand. I also really want a microwave that’s built in to the range vent–at this point we have a wheezy old microwave sitting on the counter, with a huge footprint. And yes, gorgeous countertops. What sort of countertops do you want?
July 17th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Oh! And a dishwasher! We don’t have a dishwasher, and easily a third of the parent-child explosions around the house come from trying to get all parties to take their turn at the sink.
July 17th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Countertops! I have such dreams of countertops. Although a dishwasher would come first. Of course, I have a suburban kitchen, not a city kitchen, so space is much less of an issue.
The dream is for granite countertops. But there are these composite quartz countertops that are really nifty. I have a huge skylight in my kitchen, and if it ever stopped raining in central Texas I would have blinding amounts of natural light, so the current fantasy is white cabinets and black countertops.
But I’ll see something somewhere that will make me change my mind.
July 17th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Our kitchen is currently painted butter yellow (it used to have white wallpaper with green vines on it–the sort of thing you’d find in an old hotel coffee shop). I like the color, and would either like to have butcher block counters or a dark brown or green granite. With a tomato red backsplash (I may rethink this…it depends on the lighting). Our cabinets are so old and weary that they don’t always close, which is not a good thing in earthcake country.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:30 am
It’s time to redo the kitchen at Casa Spector, too. When we moved in, about fifteen years ago, the kitchen had been updated about 6 years earlier. They did an okay job. (The only okay job they did in the house.) I’ve already replaced every appliance in the kitchen.
The coating on the bottom of the sink has worn off. I am sick to death of cleaning the grout between the countertop tiles. And I hate the floor. The Dude is despondent because he knows the remodel is coming.
Like, Maureen, I dream of granite countertops. (And the composit granite has some bitchin’ colors. I lust after a deep marine blue with mosaic glass tiles as the backsplash.) I have visions of great sweeping vistas of granite — smooth and easily cleaned.
Home porn.