FOOD ON THE FOOD

Do You See What I See?

Baby mushrooms!  I think I squealed when I saw them.  I think I actually squealed.

It’s been about a month since I “planted” my oyster mushroom spawn, and it didn’t really look like anything was happening at all.  But then I poked around in there and I could see all these white fibers spiderwebbing their way through the material.  Mushroom mycelium!  That’s the real body of a mushroom—that fibrous network that colonizes whatever material is being broken down.  This hidden matrix can extend for acres in nature, I’ve read.  The caps we eat are just the fruits of the larger organism, the gills of which house and disperse the spores for reproductive purposes.  Yes, once again, we humans have been tricked into propagating the genes of another species.  Color me happy to oblige.

Since we’ve had so little rain lately, I supplemented my daily misting with a few extra cups of water just for kicks.  Mushrooms appeared the very next day.  It shouldn’t be long now before the bucket is filled.  Once the fruits are established, they grow by cell enlargement rather than cell division, meaning they basically balloon out in direct proportion to the available water supply.  Within reason.  I restrained myself from leaving the hose on all night for the good of the neighborhood.  Property values are down enough as it is without having to explain the towering fungus.

I’ll tell you all about the shiitake logs next week.

Stalking the Wild Rhubarb

I’m learning how to forage and spring is the best time to practice because there’s really not that much growing, yet.  The spring edibles practically jump right out at you, bright patches of green against a still-brownish background, which is useful when you’re not terribly observant. 

So far, I’ve correctly identified and not died eating wild garlic, mugwort, dandelion leaves, violets (flowers and leaves), and garlic mustard, most of which I just found in my yard.  I made pesto out of the garlic mustard tonight.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.  But the weirdest thing I’ve foraged by far was the Japanese knotweed.  It was pointed out to me on a nature walk with the Waltham Land Trust not as something edible but as an aggressive invasive species that Frederick Law Olmsted planted all around Boston’s green space on account of its beauty, but which has since out-competed many native species and is now generally despised by ecologists. 

Back at home, I double-checked my Russ Cohen foraging book (remember his wild edibles walk?) and, upon confirming its possible deliciousness, returned the next day to harvest some of the young shoots since I didn’t think anyone would mind.  Even though Japanese knotweed is a member of the buckwheat family, the shoots look like asparagus meets rhubarb meets bamboo.  The stalks are actually hollow like bamboo, so you need to pick twice as much as you think you’ll need and not peel it too deeply.

Raw, it tastes crisp and tart.  Cooked, I had read that it resembles rhubarb in character, so I threw together a quick crumble like this one with a few apples, three of four stalks of sliced knotweed, and maybe ¼ cup sugar.  Then I cobbled together a mixture of flour, oatmeal, almonds, pine nuts, maple sugar, and cold butter, dumped it on top, and baked it in a 375°F oven for 45 minutes.  It was very good.  Even Husband approved, who has not necessarily been enthusiastic about the foraging concept.  The only downside is that unlike rhubarb, which cooks down to a rose color, knotweed cooks to an unappetizing light green.  Snotweed is more like it.  But if you smother it in enough vanilla ice cream, you won’t notice.  I have some stalks in the freezer I’m saving for strawberry season.

Day Off

Can’t blog today.  Too much gorgeousness.  Tomorrow maybe.

A Few Items of Interest…Or Not

• Food for Everyone is the theme of the Spring 2009 issue of Yes Magazine, and there are a bunch of articles worth checking out, including a look at the next generation of young farmers across the country.  Two from The Food Project here in Massachusetts got a nice mention.  (BTW, I love the old school-bus-turned-greenhouse they use at Nashville Urban Harvest.)  

• Also, the Chicago Tribune called out this very blog as a must-read for the health-conscious, according to the nutritionists that were interviewed.  Which just proves that nutritionists have a sense of humor whether you realize it or not.  So, a big thanks to whomever gave them my name.  (This doesn’t change my love of lard, though.)

• I may or may not have hideous cramps right now.  Bulleted lists are usually a good indicator.

Sauerkraut Scorecard

Okay, so the results of my third batch of sauerkraut are in, and here’s what the tally looks like so far:

Batch 1: Awesome.  Amazing.
Batch 2: Rotten.  Total crap.
Batch 3: WAY TOO SALTY

Curses!  It’s become abundantly clear just how much of a role beginner’s luck played in my successful first attempt.  The second time, I’ll admit, I got cocky.  True, you can be somewhat negligent with sauerkraut, but not that negligent.  This most recent time, though, I thought I had done everything right.  I followed the same script as the first time, with the exception of adding more caraway seeds and stuff, or at least that was my memory of it until Husband started asking questions.  Questions meant to help, he insisted, but which I was sure were actually intended to incriminate and/or persecute, and so I was very careful to be as evasive and defensive as humanly possible.  Until he disarmed me with some clever joke, which caused crucial information to slip and he was able to determine the source of the problem like a big jerk.  (Jerk.)

As you may recall, the reason my second attempt at sauerkraut failed was because too much water evaporated from the crock.  The protective brine receded and left the cabbage exposed and ripe for spoilage.  And spoil it did.  This time, I was careful to monitor the brine level and when it appeared to be getting dangerously low, I proceeded to add more salt water to bring the volume back up.

Scientific types will recognize my mistake right away, as did Husband, who had to refresh my memory on the principles of evaporation.  When water evaporates, the salt doesn’t evaporate along with it.  If it did, then rainwater, evaporated from the world’s oceans, would be salty, and April showers would bring dead flowers and screams of “MY EYES, THEY BURN” when you get caught in the rain, post-piña colada.  No, the salt remains where it is, which is how we have come to enjoy the various forms of crystalline sea salt from hither and yon.

So, in the Case of the Evaporating Brine, the volume of water had gone down, but the salt remained in a now-much-higher concentration.  You want to add fresh water to dilute it back to its original concentration and bring the volume back up to cover all of the cabbage.  If you add more salt water in the amount of 1 tablespoon per 1 cup of water, as I did, the result will offend even the most salt-loving taste buds and, even if you manage to choke some of it down, will turn you into a shriveled prune for the remainder of the evening.  For future reference, Self, once you establish a baseline level of brine in the first few days of fermentation, meaning enough to cover the cabbage by a good half-inch or so, any water loss over the subsequent weeks should be replaced with fresh water only. 

I tried to rectify this disappointing turn of events by cooking the sauerkraut with a ton of potatoes to try to spread out the saltiness.  It didn’t work.  Then, I tried soaking the sauerkraut in several changes of cold water and then draining it.  Still, the salty torment continued.  I still eat it, though.  I just line up five big glasses of water in a row in front of my plate.  The actual flavor is really good, if you can hone in on it through the electricity coursing through your head. 

But if you think I’m through with fermentation, you’re more than a little mistaken.  I plan on fermenting the crap out of my CSA produce this year, including but not limited to any extraneous bok choy that may find its way into my possession.  After all, how many more ways can there possibly be to screw up this process? 

The count continues.

At Least I Still Have My Virginity

Cheering on today’s marathoners put a smile on my face, as it does every year, and almost made me forget the injustices of the previous two weeks.  Notice that I said almost.  Shall we review the timeline?  Do we care?  Too bad.

Let’s start the story the week before last when a variety of strange illnesses struck three out of four family members (myself included), eventually resolved themselves, but then mutated into more virulent strains resistant to antibodies, elixirs, and reason.  I’m beginning to think you can catch this stuff via Twitter because that’s the only place I’ve heard about these multi-week fevers.  I just assumed people were making things up for 140-character sympathy.  My bad. 

The 3YO suffered the worst of it, by far, and though he has recuperated just fine, over the two weeks he missed four out of six pre-paid preschool days.  If you have kids, then you know what kind of toll this takes on even the most patient parent, but especially one who can only work nights and preschool days.  One who works somewhat speculatively in an already tenuous marketplace and who doesn’t have the greatest history of securing lucrative freelance work as it is.  Hence the blogging.

But it was okay because I had my monthly Ladies’ Night Out to look forward to mid-week and I was really more desperate than I should have been for wings.  I mean, wings are great and everything, but I was literally dying for wings.  Eating locally means you rarely get to eat more than two wings at any given time, and that’s if you’re being really selfish.  And, I’ll admit it, those 23 honey hots made me feel one thousand times better.  Until I found out that my car had been towed sometime around the 14th, I’m guessing, though the timing doesn’t matter. 

I just stood there in the middle of the empty parking lot for the longest time, staring at the No Trespassing sign in front of where my car was supposed to be.  I tried to muster indignation, but it was no use.  I sheepishly made my way to the ATM to make one of the largest cash withdrawals in recent memory and here’s where things get a little fuzzy.  I either unknowingly dropped my bank card somewhere or, more likely, left it in the machine as I was counting the stack of crisp twenties that would soon go to supporting my local towing company.  It’s possible that I couldn’t hear the insistent beeping over the din of me berating myself in my own mind:

Me: What, do you think you can just park your car anywhere you want?  The sign said “Patrons Only.”

Me: I am a patron.

Me: A patron today.

Me: The sign wasn’t specific.

Me: You know, this isn’t the carefree late-nineties before kids when we all sat around and made big bonfires out of our disposable income just for fun.  Use better judgment. 

Me: But you can’t park anywhere, ever around here and yet sometimes you still need to park your car.

Me: In Boston, yeah.  But this is Newton.

Me: Shut up.

Long story short, my bank card vanished, too.  I’m probably not supposed to admit that I cried the whole two miles to the tow yard, I was so beaten down.  I’m probably not supposed to admit that I walked the whole way there in darkness because I refused to hail a cab not only because it would cost maybe another $8, but then I’d probably have to stop crying for a half a second and that really wasn’t going to happen.  I pulled it together in the last quarter mile.  There’s no crying in tow yards.

So anyway.  Yeah.  I think I need to get a job.

Spring is Finally Here!

Everyone has their own yardstick for spring’s arrival: buds on the trees, warmth on the skin, pollen in the nose.  Me, I only have eyes for the turkey vultures (not to be confused with the turkey non-vultures who paid us a St. Paddy’s Day visit).

Each spring, the vultures come to roost in the trees and rock outcroppings of the backyard cliff our house is perched upon.  It’s a very scenic view we have here, what with the giant water tower at the top of the hill, and the highway at the bottom, and the turkey vultures swooping down to survey the carnage in between.

I remember the first time I saw one flying overhead, casting its dark shadow across our postage-stamp-sized yard, I thought it was a solar eclipse.  Naturally, I looked directly at the sun.  That’s when I saw it (before the blinding pain, I mean).  The silhouette of what I thought was a bald eagle.  It seemed so majestic from far away, I couldn’t help but start humming “America the Beautiful.”  Weeks later, when my sight returned, I got a better look at him and his cronies lurking around some prime road kill by the side of the road and, just like that, the majesty was gone. 

If you’ve never seen a turkey vulture up close, boy are you in for a treat.  The shiny black feathers are okay, but the bald, red, shrunken head is a little disconcerting.  Same with the hunched, stooping posture.  Despite their hideousness, scientists are interested in these birds on account of their unusual digestive tracts that enable them to stomach high levels of bacteria and rot, something the good folks at the FDA might be interested in now that most of our meat has become nothing more than glorified road kill itself.  I’ll be anxiously awaiting the results of those studies and their proposed applications.

Still, as my harbingers of spring, I welcome the vultures.  They seem to be multiplying.  I think cell phone usage is working in their favor.

A vulture-eye view of the Watch City.

Oysters: The Pearls of Wellfleet

Look what my in-laws gave us a few weeks ago:

Local oysters raked up by Grandpa P on the beautiful shores of Wellfleet.  (You may remember his Cape Cod lobstering pictorial.)

I love oysters and I derive a lot of satisfaction out of shucking them, too, for some reason.  Now that I have the appropriate tool, an oyster shucker with a dull, curved blade and a wide grip, the task is a lot easier.  Do NOT ever use a paring knife to shuck oysters.  It’s tempting, I know, as you may not have an oyster shucker handy and the knives are right there.  But unless you want some of your more useful fingers to go flying across the room in a bloody spray, don’t do it.  If you have to make some kind of substitution, a screwdriver might potentially work.  A flathead, not a Phillips head.

Even when using an oyster shucker, you’ll need some hand protection.  They have these stabproof gloves you can wear, but as I only shuck oysters once or twice a year, I use a thick dishtowel folded a bunch of times or a crappy oven mitt.  Whatever you use, be prepared for it to smell like low tide when you’re done.  Sometimes I also wear a rubber glove to get a better grip, but I find it gives me a false sense of security, as if it offers some measure of protection against the stabbing motion of my other hand.  It doesn’t. 

And now that I’ve scared the bejesus out of you, let’s get to the shucking.  The first thing to do is scrub the bivalves well in cold water.  Then, firmly grasp the oyster in your dishtowel so the hinge is facing you and the flat side of the shell is face up.  You want the curved side of the shell to be on the bottom so there’s a reservoir to contain the delicious oyster juices instead of having them spill out.  Then, you take your shucker, angled down, pointy side up, and sort of wedge it into the hinge.  There’s a weak spot in there.  It may take a few tries to find it.  Once you’ve got it, give the tool a twist and sort of wiggle it around to loosen the shell.  Then, run the blade across the underside of the top shell to sever the adductor muscle and pry off the top shell completely. 

The interior should look moist, and smell clean and briny.  I toss anything that's questionable (shells that don’t close, loose hinges, dried out membranes, or any kind of funky smell).  The shells often stink, but the oysters themselves should not.

You can eat them like this, raw on the half shell, or you can slide them out, gently nudging them with the shucker off the muscle that holds them onto the bottom shell, into a bowl along with the liquor for any number of preparations.  I made creamy oyster soup and a bunch of crispy, fried oysters.  These were so so so so good and just about as local as it gets.  Thanks Grandpa P!

Oyster soup

This soup is simple but very rich.  As such, it’s best served in small, shallow bowls which will also keep the fried oysters from sinking to the bottom.

2-3 dozen oysters, liquor reserved
2 Tbsp. butter
1 shallot, finely minced
1 inside rib of celery, finely diced (1/4 cup)
1 Tbsp. flat-leaf parsley
1 bay leaf
¼ tsp. fresh thyme, chopped
Dash of cayenne
2 Tbsp. flour
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Scrub and shuck the oysters, saving the flavorful liquor.  Chop oysters into pieces on the small side of bite-sized. 

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat.  Add the shallot, celery, parsley, bay leaf, thyme, and cayenne, and cook, stirring constantly, until the veggies are soft but not brown (about 5 minutes).  Add the flour and cook a few minutes more.  Add the oyster liquor and stir well to thicken.  You may need to add a bit of water if you don’t have enough oyster liquor.  You want a thick cooking liquid, not a paste.  Add the oysters and simmer until cooked (about 5-7 minutes).  Remove the bay leaf.  Off the heat, add the milk and cream, stirring constantly.  Return to the flame and heat slowly being careful not to boil, which will curdle the cream.  Taste for seasoning.  You may not need much extra salt.  Garnish with a fried oyster.

Fried oysters

You could always skip the soup altogether and just make fried oysters.

1 part flour
1 part cornstarch
Beer from the bottle you’re drinking
Canola oil

Heat oil in a small saucepan to a temperature of 375°F.  Meanwhile, mix together flour and cornstarch in a small bowl with a bit of salt and pepper.  Add just enough beer that the batter is thick enough to coat the oyster without being gloppy.  Fry on both sides until golden and crispy.  Drain on paper towels.  Season with salt.  Eat them while they’re hot.

Local Sources:
Oysters: Nature, Wellfleet, MA
Milk: Our Family Farms of Western Massachusetts, MA
Cream: High Lawn Farm, Lee, MA
Butter: Cabot, Cabot, VT

A Heart-Warming Easter Conversation

We drove down to New Haven for Easter to spend some quality time with Nonni and stuff ourselves silly with manicotti, porchetta, and Italian cream pie.  We discussed many things including why the demise of newspapers has to mean the end of good journalism (it doesn’t), the insurmountable deficit and how we’re all China’s bitches (maybe not in those exact words, though), and whether or not I could steal off with my dad’s much better digital camera for a week to see if my photography improves (he said yes, but don’t get your hopes up).

As it always does, the conversation deteriorated to who would be leaving with what leftover food items, and how much of it would be shipped to my dad’s younger brother in Seattle.  As far as my dad’s concerned, it’s always too much.  Here’s what passed between him and Nonni:

Him: So I’ll take the porchetta, the manicotti, the meatballs, the potatoes, the bread, the ice cream, the pies, any cappellettis you have in the freezer, the kids’ Easter baskets, aaaaaaand Tammy can have the leftover peas.  Oh, and I want the crescia, too.

Her: The crescia’s for Eddie.

Him: Go ahead, send him all my crescia.  He was always the favorite.

Her: No, I don’t have favorites.

Him: Gimme a break.  Even Sis knows it.  (To me) She once asked Mom what would happen if all three of us were drowning and there was only enough time to save one of us.

Me: (To Nonni) And what did you say?

Her: I said I would rather drown with all my children than save just one.

Me: Wow.  That’s a good answer.

Him: Yeah, except for the part where we all die. 

And that, my friends, is the problem with society today.  Precious few would make such a grand gesture on principle alone.  Once again, Nonni puts me to shame because I don’t think that option would have even occurred to me.  Of course, we won’t talk about the stash of stolen plastic bags from the grocery store I found in Nonni’s cabinets, still compressed and stuck together from being grabbed from the bagger’s station and stuffed into her purse.  That wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.

Easter Egg Ice Cream

Easter preparations have begun in earnest.  Hard-boiled eggs have been dyed, benevolent rodents have been plied with unreasonable gift requests, and at least one food blogger we know has put a serious dent in the Greater Boston Cadbury Crème Egg supply.  And while I know deep down in my heart that Easter isn’t only about the candy, I think Christ would agree that it’s totally all about the candy.  And it was only a matter of time before I wised up and started freezing some of it away to extend the season.  (See?  I’m a good little locavore.)

Ordinarily, I try not to take my culinary cues from the fast food chains, but what can I say?  Every once in a while, McDonald’s has a good idea.  Namely, the Cadbury Crème Egg McFlurry, which is all the rage in the British motherland (thanks, Jo!).  Basically, it’s crushed Cadbury Crème Eggs in vanilla ice cream.  The speed with which I was able to recreate this at home was limited only by the speed with which I could sweep an entire shelf’s worth of crème eggs into my shopping cart.  Which is to say, not long.

The evidence:

(This is what it looked like after I excavated most of the candy out of it.  Notice the yellowish pools of fondant goo?  Guess I missed a few spots.)

I could draw this story out longer than it really needs to be, but I’m sure you have other things to do.  The results?  Were disappointing.  Shocking, I know, coming from someone who conducts elaborate experiments and writes Plath-like poetry on the subject.  Who wouldn’t love Cadbury Crème Eggs in ice cream besides the 98% of the world’s population that hates crème eggs? 

I’ve concluded that it’s a conceptual problem.  You’re diluting the crème egg so less of it comes into contact with your tongue at once.  That’s not the spirit of the crème egg at all.  The crème egg is all about killing yourself softly with sweetness, but then resurrecting yourself because you have to have another crème egg even if it kills you.  Which it will.  Again.  That’s the moral of Easter, I’m pretty sure.  The sub-moral is: Crème Egg ice cream sucks.

But it got me thinking about Robin’s Eggs, and how much I love those malted milk balls.  And malt goes so nicely with dairy products, as the fifties proved.  Plus, the speckled candy shells come in several festive Easter hues, which, though not altogether true to nature, would give the ice cream appropriately hideous visual interest. 

Now this?  This is a good idea.

Robin’s Egg Ice Cream

Good with Whoppers, too.

2 eggs
¾ cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
10-oz. bag of Robin’s Egg malted milk balls

Whisk the (chicken’s) eggs for a few minutes.  Add the sugar, little by little, whisking all the while.  Add the cream and milk, and whisk until sugar dissolves.  Pour into ice cream maker and follow manufacturer’s instructions (usually to spin for 25 minutes or so). 

Meanwhile, pour the robin’s eggs into a plastic storage bag and crush with a mallet or hammer.  Once the ice cream machine is done with its magic, pour soupy mixture into a freezable container, and fold the crushed candy in as you go.  Freeze until stiff.

The Verdict on Meat: Less Cowbell

There’s a nice piece in the Globe by Devra First about this seemingly collective resolution some of us share to eat less meat.  Also, for a slightly less mature look at the subject, specifically the recent health study that was done, here’s my (re-edited) post up at BlogHer, which I forgot to link to last week:

Findings from a study published last month in the Archives of Internal Medicine concluded that regularly eating red meat increases the odds of premature death.  Pork, too, was lumped into the red meat category, unfortunately for me.

Now, I’m the first one to make excuses when the news is something I don’t want to hear, but I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: science is tricky.  You don’t always know the whole story and how all of the variables were accounted for.  For example, was it the actual meat that was killing people, or was it the stuff we’ve been feeding to the cows that’s killing people?  Did the esteemed scientists build a time machine to go back and do the experiment when cows ate only grass and didn’t get injected with shit to make a fair comparison? 

What about the social dynamics between the test group and the control group?  Maybe the people who didn’t get to eat meat were jealous of the people who did, and they sent threatening e-mail messages to the others and the stress put the meat-eaters at a higher risk of heart disease.  So the carnivores ended up making thrice as many cell phone calls to their friends and family for comfort, which put them at a higher risk for cancer.  Did the researchers at least bug the rooms of all the test subjects?  Maybe people genetically predisposed to premature death are genetically predisposed to love meat?  Can you prove that's not true?

Here’s the thing: I like meat.  I feel it’s an important and traditional part of my own particular diet.  But I do agree that, like anything, balance is key.  Skimming the study, I was heartened to read that the experts didn’t go so far as to recommend eliminating beef and pork entirely from one’s diet (unless you want to), but suggested that people avoid eating it everyday.  That seems doable, except for the fact that I tend to fill up the empty space on my plate where the meat should be with eggs.  What do the studies say about eggs these days? 

The truth is, we’ve been cutting back on meat during the past year, ourselves, in the name of moderation and frugality.  It hasn’t always been easy or free from controversy.  Some of my strategies have included swapping in a bean or lentil dish for the meat.  Thus far, this has not met with approval from the man of the house.  Beans are a side dish, I was told.  A more successful approach was cooking up a steak and slicing it thinly, then fanning the pieces out to make them look more impressive.  Or on a salad so they look virtuous.  This has worked well because it turns out that both Husband and I feel immense relief that we don’t have to eat an entire steak by ourselves.  Who knew?

Another tactic is to look to ethnic cuisines for inspiration, particularly the ones with religious dietary restrictions, and see what kind of awesomeness the Indians, for example, bestow on vegetables and legumes.  I love this cookbook for the beets and stir-fried cabbage alone.  I recently made a very tasty lamb curry for the family with less than one pound of meat.  It looked pathetic, I’ll admit, a few meaty chunks in a great pool of sauce.  But the meal ended up being all about the sauce, anyway, as it soaked into the rice, and everyone wanted seconds of that and the greens braised in ginger cream.  The meat was just gravy, so to speak. 

Here’s another article worth reading by Mark Bittman that offers some good suggestions for how to reduce your meat intake should you be so inclined.  Any meatless or almost-meatless meals you swear by?

A Very Nice Potato Salad

Spring has been a little slow to warm up for my taste.  It always is, though, and who am I to judge, she who makes cold starts a way of life. 

Here’s a nice potato salad that’s lighter than my summertime standby, with a mustardy vinaigrette and some teasing greens.  It’s the seasonal equivalent of showing a little leg.  A pale, goosebumpy leg that could benefit from a bit more sun and little less of the raw, chafing winds.  Is all I’m saying.

Anticipatory Potato Salad

Like April, this is best served lukewarm.

8-10 small Yukon gold or fingerling potatoes
1 small yellow onion, halved and sliced thinly
1 small bunch watercress, leaves only
¼ tsp. Dijon mustard
¼ tsp. whole-grain mustard
1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme leaves
3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

In a large pot, cover potatoes with water and bring to a boil.  Add some salt to the pot.  Simmer until tender, 15-20 minutes.  Drain and let cool a bit.  Peel and cut into ½-inch cubes.

In a small bowl, whisk the mustard, vinegar, thyme, salt, and pepper.  Whisk in the oil in a slow, steady stream.  Toss the warm potatoes with the onions and watercress.  Add dressing, toss, and taste for seasoning.  Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.

Source: Inspired by Amanda Hesser’s The Cook and the Gardener.

How To Repair a KitchenAid Mixer Yourself

Do you want to hear how my KitchenAid story ended?  Sure you do. 

To catch you up if you’re new, my KitchenAid mixer broke while I was using the dough hook, and it made me very, um, mad.  Because those things are supposed to last forever.  I’m a reasonable person, but, last I checked, eight years is a few months shy of infinity. 

Well, KitchenAid got in touch with me after my post and said they were sorry but they couldn’t send me a new mixer.  I told them I didn’t expect them to send me a new mixer.  I wanted my mixer.  To work.  It’s not like I’ve been mixing small- batch cement in there for foundation repairs.  Just normal batters, frostings, and the occasional dough. 

As a courtesy, the KitchenAid people offered to send me a box and a shipping label to send the mixer back to them so they could give me an estimate for how much it would cost to fix it.  In other words, they weren’t going to fix it for free, but they would cut me a break on shipping.  And let’s not forget the complimentary cookbook they sent.  Which I placed lovingly next to my broken mixer to fully enjoy the irony.  Come on, Tammy, don’t be catty.

While I did appreciate the attempt at a gesture, this just didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.  I’d just as soon pay a local place to fix it and skip all of the ridiculous shipping of a 30-lb. appliance.  The hundreds of food miles I’d saved by eating locally would be undone in one fell swoop.  Plus, who knows how much their estimate would be?  And I’d probably be so fed up by that point that I’d pay anything just to get my precious mixer back.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands, literally.  I’m not super-handy, but I can generally figure things out with an Internet connection and enough time.  After all, the motor was working fine.  What was broken was the rotating part into which you plugged the attachments.  How hard could it be? 

Luckily, two web sites I found have pretty good instructions on how to take apart your KitchenAid: one for standard kitchen mixers with the tilty heads, and one for the commercial kind that I have.  Between the two, I was able to cobble together something resembling a game plan.  I’ll only gloss over things here in my “scorned woman” version of the process.  If you want to attempt the dissection yourself, you should head over to the other sites now. 

I started unscrewing things, banging the hell out of other things, and prying still other things apart.  Why, yes, that is a white sweater I’m wearing for the occasion.  I will regret that. 

Once I got the whole thing open, there was a ton of grease inside there.  Moving parts require lubrication for maximum pleasure performance.  After much scooping off and wiping down, I could see the problem.

A plastic gear that got shredded.  This is actually the fail-safe gear that reader Margot had mentioned in a previous comment, which is built to fail in order to prevent the motor from self-destructing.   Cost to replace it: less than $20, shipping included. 

Here we are waiting impatiently for the part.

Apparently, I could have used this time to replace the old grease with new.  I’ll let you guess whether or not that actually happened.  Once I got the new worm gear, though, I lubed everything up really well before putting it all back together again.  And did it work? 

YES!!!  Here it is, good as new.  Okay, maybe not as good as new, but good enough (and just in the nick of time to make Husband’s birthday cake). 

All in all, I saved myself a lot of time, money, and aggravation.  Okay, maybe not time and aggravation, but there was also a certain amount of satisfaction involved, which balanced it out.  Why do I think this isn’t the last time I’ll be taking this thing apart? 

I hope this helps somebody else, too.

Wine Has a New Attitude

Ever notice how I don’t talk about wine that much?  It’s because I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I know it’s wet.  I know it’s grape-y.  I can usually tell the difference between red and white.  I recently spit out a pricey Chardonnay everyone else insisted was perfectly good, yet I’ve never met a red Spanish table wine I didn’t like.  Generally, though, it’s fair to say that if you offer me a glass of wine, any kind, I won’t refuse it. 

If you like wine, too, then 40 of the more creative, less stuffy wine bloggers out there have an April Fools surprise for you.