Q-U-*-L-I-*-Y *-F L-*-F-E

Sometimes, all it takes is the spin of a wheel to improve your quality of life:

That's not what I meant!  I'm talking about a SALAD spinner:

You'll understand where I'm coming from if you've ever tried to blot washed lettuce dry using paper towels — an environmental nightmare, as it takes about 54 of them — or a tea towel.  "Tea towel" — that's such a dainty name for what in our home tends to look like something your auto mechanic used to wipe off your carburetor gasket valve tubes.  (I know: it's not pretty when a cook attempts a sentence in car-talk.  I'm trying to refer to those little greasy metal doodads coming out of the doohickey.)

Mind you, this schmatte (Yiddish for "rag") or shonda (Yiddish for "embarrassingly stained tea towel") is a CLEAN towel, straight out of the linen closet.  Why do our tea towels look like this?  Well, whereas most cooks value a tea towel under the "indispensable" rule for their dish-drying faculty, around here we value them under the "wide-applicability" rule.  Not content only to dry dishes with them, we find them equally useful for wiping up spills, cleaning the table after dinner, and wiping our hands.  Not "drying" our hands, folks, wiping them clean.  Don't ask what kind of schmutz (Yiddish for "don't ask") we have on our hands; just be glad we don't use the tea towels to blow our noses.  

In any case, you wouldn't want to daub your salad greens with this rag, would you, not even if that were an efficient method.  (You're not blowing your nose on the tea towels, are you, Sweetie?  God forbid.  Even Yiddish doesn't have an expression to cover that.)  

Oh dear, I seem to have gotten side-tracked.  I was getting ready to propose the salad spinner as an exemplar of tools that qualify for a place in my kitchen by virtue of their food-quality enhancement.  A salad spun is simply better than a salad left damp.  (And more hygienic, in our house, than a salad daubed with a shonda.)  Dressings don't cling well to damp greens and bacteria cling TOO well to shonda'd greens.

Salad spinner = better food = higher quality of life.  A keeper!

▢ Q.E.D.

THE QUALITY-OF-RESULTS TEST

A tool qualifies for retention under this test if it performs a task that improves the quality of food beyond what would be possible without the tool.  Such tools may not be indispensable — I have, after all, produced edible salads without spinning them — but they enable me to raise the quality of my food a notch or two.  This is important when you are as finicky as I am about food.

Here are a couple of my prized quality-enhancing tools:

I was skeptical at first, but you know what?  This thing really works!  My Vacu-Vin wine bottle pump, by removing the air from the partially drunk bottles before storing them, really does keep the wine fresher.  There is often no noticeable degradation of quality even over 2 to 3 days or more of storage, even without refrigeration, if it's not too hot in the room.  The only downside is that now I can't use short shelf life as an excuse to polish off the rest of an opened bottle.

Except that this decidedly non-ergonomic garlic press sets off a neuropathy in my right hand every time I use it, I love how easy it makes adding crushed garlic to a dish.  Chopping garlic with a knife doesn't release the juices in the same way and results in detectable pieces of garlic rather than a paste.  Grating garlic produces a very nice mush, but said mush usually ends up containing bits of my DNA, since holding on to something as small as a garlic clove puts my fingers perilously close to the teeth of the grater.  So hooray for this lovely gadget, which increases the quality of my cooking and my fingertip health!  (It's self-cleaning, too.)

Background cloud of tulle courtesy of Male Pattern Boldness

Well, that about completes my week-long analysis.  I have appreciated getting some clarity around why my kitchen is equipped with its particular assortment of apparatus, and I hope you have enjoyed reading as I figured this out.  Many of you wrote in generously about your own favorites and not-so-favorites — it's been fun comparing our experiences and discovering our differences of opinion as well as a few common threads.

A number of us, it seems, put a lot of stock in our cast-iron frying pans.  No, no, not the soup kind of stock— that would be silly — I meant that we use these pans a lot and have developed a certain fondness for them.  And it tickled me to find out that I was not the only one with an underemployed baster on hand!

Getting clarity this week has included recognizing a few items not qualifying under any of my rules that I have been holding onto for various (or no) reasons.  Two extra sets of flatware underneath my counter await a dinner party for 30 that probably will never happen, unless one of the Chihuahuas gets married.

Don't tell Peter I borrowed his practice tulle ruffle for this bit of animal abuse.

A few things I suspect I am keeping around because they seem like things a serious cook should own.  But I have not zested a lemon in decades, so perhaps I could let that little tool go.  (But it takes up so little space!)  And — sigh! — is it time to bid farewell to my pretty little double boiler?

I picked it up at a Salvation Army a few years ago because it matches my favorite all-purpose pot, which I use several times a week:

Isn't this a gorgeous object?  I just love the graceful loopy handles and the copper-toned lid.  I think I paid 50 cents for it at a Salvation Army in New Paltz, NY, in about 1998.  

Well, maybe I'll hang onto the double boiler just a bit longer.  If I do decide to take up baking again, I'll need it for custards and for melting chocolate.  And everyone is entitled to own an object or two for which no explanation is forthcoming and no apparent function exists.  (Sounds like some of my former boyfriends.)  Do you have anything in your kitchen that you never use but can't bear to part with?

The double boiler may have earned a reprieve, but I have definitely determined that this preposterous tool is going back to the recycling room for someone else to take pity on:

The G.G.S. did serve a function — it inspired the thought process that led to this week's series of blog postings — but now I'm afraid its usefulness is at an end.  I'd have to be a schlemiel (Yiddish for "shlep" or "schmegege") to continue to dedicate space in my kitchen to such an inferior tool.

Have a great weekend, everyone.  I hope you are looking at your own kitchen tools with new appreciation.