Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

The Coq au Vin was delicious. I served it for dinner after a kayak and trip to the grocery store, all of which I negotiated without incident - no exchanges with produce clerks. No uncontrolled bouts of emotion. Well, I'll admit to a pang at Trader Joe's when I picked out my pre-packaged lunch salads as I realized I would no longer have to jockey for shelf space in the refrigerator - but minor, really, by comparison to my earlier trips.

Progress.

Now the dish towels are another story. We have difference of opinion. I tend toward the aesthetic. I like color coordinated, themed towels - you know, red and green for Christmas, hearts for Valentine's day, Shamrocks for St. Patrick's day. I have a penchant for buying t-towels when I travel. They fit easily into a suitcase and bring back happy memories when I pull them out of the drawer. On any given day, it is an artistic decision which will hang from my oven door.
GIllian on the other hand is all about function and absorption. I'm a dishwasher kind of gal. She, a hand -wash and stack on the sink on top of a white flour sack towel to air -dry type.

Many nights, she would shoo me out of the kitchen to prevent me from loading the knives and pans into the dish washer. This conflict has haunted me for years - going back to the days when my mother would take over my kitchen on Pine Street to whip it into shape. She didn't like how I loaded a dishwasher either. I'll admit to laziness when it comes to washing up the pots and pans. If you are going to hand wash everything, why have a dishwasher? The dullness of the blades is apparently the issue. I do, however, insist on hand washing my china and crystal, something my mother poo poo'd. Hence, the cloudy haze on her Murano Italian cut crystal. I do put the silver into the basket of the dishwasher and am careful not to place it near the stainless. We all have our priorities.

I thought about this as I pulled out my gold colored dish towel - a souvenir from Tuscany. I draped it over the handle of the oven. It looks pretty.

Dividing up the kitchen utensils was something like a friendly divorce. The dispute arose over the tongs. As she pulled them from the red pitcher that serves as a utensil holder on the counter, I gasped. "Wait a minute. What are you doing with those?" She reminded me that she had bought them at Prep with her own money and she just knew this was going to be an issue when the time came. She tossed them into her box as she packed up the Cuisinart. I didn't care about that. I frankly don't like food processors. Too hard to clean. I prefer my little hand held mixer.

Speaking of mixers, the one I got for our first Christmas twenty-seven years ago drove her nuts as she whipped up her berry cobbler batter.
I thought of this as I began to reclaim my kitchen - putting things back where I wanted them regardless of the logic or function. I moved the egg beater inserts from the drawer under the stove where they didn't fit to the lower drawer under the oven where I'd put them when we originally moved in.

She left the white rubber spatula with the wooden handle. I put it into the pitcher and moved the long handled zester from the pitcher into the drawer. I was sure I'd paid for that and she hadn't disputed it. The zester is a necessity these days. I use it surprisingly frequently. But I had never had one prior to GIllian moving back home.

How is it that my daughter taught me to cook? My mother didn't. And I didn't teach Gillian. I thought of the movies, Like Water for Chocolate and Babette's Feast and Chocolat and some of those other soulful stories of the passing on of the culinary traditions and family recipes from mother to daughter and thought how funny it was that our story was generationally backwards.

During my cooking apprenticeship at Chez Savona under the tutelage of my daughter, I'd learned to cook with kosher salt, sea salt, shallots, fennel, leeks, and ginger. My library now contains three of Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa cookbooks and atop my butter dish rests only unsalted butter.

Tonight, I'll use my stock pot, another item I only acquired in the last two years.

I do miss those tongs, though.