I was tempted to also put this in the cooking forum, but I thought I really want this
thread to be about my peeves and my kitchen. I like the idea that folks that have spent time in my kitchen add to this, most importantly, Jocelyn and Katelin (our current kitchen commander - and I've never seen this kitchen kept this clean).
I noticed that my old friend, the perfect spatula, is gone. When I asked about it, I was told that it was sacrificed a couple of months ago to cleaning my cast iron pans the wrong way. So, I present, my
video about cleaning cast iron pans the right way:
Here is my full
cast iron article. Near the bottom, I wrote a good couple of pages worth just on the value of a really good spatula. The importance of a flat edge that doesn't just look flat, but really is flat. Plus rounded corners and a wooden handle. Here is a picture of my old friend.
These are sickeningly hard to come by. When you shop for these, the edge is typically not actually flat. After far too much searching, here is what I bought to replace it:
And I bought it
here.
So, my peeve is: caring for
cast iron, and the tools that go with cast iron, is a little different. And there is a lot of false information out there about caring for cast iron. This is definitely one of those things where a little bit of knowlege goes a long ways.
This slides into my next peeve: kitchen
wood in the sink. I have two issues. One is to never soak kitchen wood and the other is to never leave kitchen wood in the sink.
I've seen a temporary stack of dishes where the idea is to soak stuff. Maybe just for ten minutes until they get washed. And there is kitchen wood in there soaking. So what goes through my mind is icky stuff is being soaked into the wood.
Sometimes the kitchen sink is really clean and sometimes the kitchen sink is .... not so clean. And when kitchen wood is sitting in the sink, I think it is just soaking up the not-so-clean stuff that is in the sink.
Once in a while,
feed the kitchen wood a bit of walnut oil. Here is my article about
caring for kitchen wood.
For a large part of my life I have experimented with living in community, or, more simply, living with other people. About nine years ago I lived with Pamela and a few other people. Pamela and I had opposite views on nearly everything and, yet, we still got along. And, there are many things I learned from Pamela (her views on curing cancer are probably the most important - I've written about that elsewhere). But I remember at the time I was an advocate of a sponge with something scrubby on one side. I was wrong. She pointed out that the sponge is petri dish for gross things. And then you wipe gross things all over what you later want to use for eating food. Instead, use something that is sponge-like, but will dry out quickly. She advocated the use of the green-scratchy-pad-thing. I was convinced. And later I evolved to something I consider "better". I would buy a pile of lufas and then cut pieces off on an as-needed basis.
amazon
Although folks here bought something a while ago that apparently everybody likes (although it hasn't quite grown on me yet). A stainless steel scrubby:
amazon
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