FOOD ON THE FOOD

Shiitake Haiku

Velvet parasol
Unfurled by autumn rain
Shiitake mushroom

Parsnip Soup and Righteous Clichés

I have a milestone birthday coming up this year, like many of my friends. And as much as I'll be glad to reach it, I'm also bummed out about this whole aging thing.

You know what I'm talking about. Back in high school, everything is poised to get better. The braces will be pried off soon. The glasses can be traded in for contact lenses, maybe even the kind that turn your muddy eyes a cool shade of aquamarine like a mood ring. You're finally easing up on all the Aqua Net (step away from the can of hairspray, Tammy). The ugly duckling becomes a swan and all that crap. Meanwhile, you're making a little cash throwing together sandwiches on the weekends and you feel real smart with that diploma in your hand.

The world is yours for the taking!

In high school, you can't wait for college. In college, you look forward to getting out of college because all this studying is putting a damper on your social life. Plus, you want a fun job with a decent paycheck. You want a mode of transportation besides your own two feet. Dates at fancy restaurants. A place to live that's not a dump. Vacations. Soon you have some stuff, and you like your stuff, but you want something more. You want love. You want a family of your own. Then you get a family of your own and, for the whole first year, you can't believe what a horrible mistake you've made. No more dates at fancy restaurants. Your place becomes a dump. Vacations take on an entirely new and unwelcome meaning. Sometimes you wish you'd just stayed home.

But then you learn to stop being so selfish all the time and things gets better. Your family becomes your whole life. Does anyone else have kids as awesome as yours? NO WAY! IMPOSSIBLE! And then you realize something. Your kids are halfway through their childhood already. They're going to spend the whole second half hating you. And then they're going to leave.

They say you get better with age, but in what way specifically? Nicer? I don't think so. If anything, I'm getting more crotchety and even less charitable behind the wheel of a car. Wiser? Uh-uh. By my calculations, I'm getting stupider by the day. I've always been a wee bit forgetful, but this is ridiculous. I left my coat somewhere last week. At the library? At Walgreens? Where? How did I not notice my coat was missing? True, it felt colder, but all that ran through my head was: That's New England for you. One minute you're toasty warm in your nice winter jacket and the next minute you're shivering by the parking meters fumbling for change while the icy wind sucker punches you in the spleen and there's no logical explanation for it whatsoever. (I still haven't found it, by the way. My coat. It's puffy and gray with a big hood.)

The other night I looked in the mirror and realized that it's all downhill from here. This is as smart/healthy/attractive as I will ever be for the whole rest of my life. And, I'll be honest, the bar didn't seem very high.

Is this what a midlife crisis looks like?

Spring Parsnip Soup     

This recipe is stupefyingly simple. I don't even use stock anymore, just water. It's silky and surprisingly sweet. Snip a few chives on top and you have something tasty and healthful to warm you up on a chilly spring day when your coat is nowhere to be found.

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
3 cups water (or veggie stock)
1 pound parsnips, peeled, cored*, diced
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Sauté the chopped onion and celery for 4 to 5 minutes until soft and translucent. Don't let the vegetables brown. Add the garlic and sauté for 15 seconds until fragrant. Add the water or stock and the parsnips. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the parsnips are soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Let cool and purée in a blender or with a stick blender until perfectly smooth. Season with salt and pepper. Serves 2 or 3. The recipe can be doubled (just be sure to purée the soup in half-batches if using a blender).

*Some parsnips have a woody central core that runs from top to bottom. To remove it, I usually just slice the peeled sides right off the core, which is a slightly different color. (Then chop up the sides and discard the core.) But if you're not sure exactly where or how big the core is, you can also quarter the parsnip the long way. Then you can see it a lot better. Just trim along the interior edge of each quarter with a paring knife to remove it.

Magic Pencil Hiccup Cure

Anyone else out there plagued by relentless hiccups? Or hiccoughs, if you prefer? In my younger life, I tried every possible cure: holding my breath, spoonfuls of sugar, having someone jump out and scare the shit out of me. Nothing worked until eventually I'd pass out from exhaustion.

But surely, I thought, surely there must be some way to interrupt the infuriating cycle of spasmodic insanity short of tasering my diaphragm into submission. Lo and behold, in the spring of 1994, I found that solution in the most unlikely place: A hostel in the northwest corner of Spain. There, a stranger noticed my plight (and by noticed I mean she was hideously inconvenienced by it). I believe it was the owner of the hostel, though I honestly can't remember because I dismissed her advice almost immediately. She said to clench a pencil between your teeth while drinking a glass of water and voila: hiccups gone.

I mean, really, what kind of medical advice is that?

Naturally, I assumed it was quackery, but every hiccupping person has his or her breaking point. Eventually I gave in. What could it hurt, right? I located the nearest writing implement and bit down on it as instructed. Then I took a swig from my water bottle. Or tried, at least. It's surprisingly hard to drink water when you're unable to fully close your mouth. Water streamed down the front of me until I burst out laughing, spraying the whole mouthful all over the room.

The hostel owner was obviously in on some kind of practical joke. Is there anything more fun for Europeans than tricking dumb, potentially drunk Americans? Probably not. Or maybe my Spanish wasn't as good as I thought. Maybe she had simply said "drink some water" and had offered me a pencil to write down this important advice. Perhaps the pencil was all in my imaginings. STUPID PENCILS!!!

That's when my friend noticed that my hiccups had stopped. I froze for 15 seconds. She was right! They were GONE!!! I was so happy, she snapped a photo of the momentous occasion:


See the relief in my eyes? And the water-splattered bedspread? (I knew this photo would come in handy someday!)

Over the course of that trip, my hiccups returned a few more times, as they are wont to do, and each time the trick worked immediately (if messily). Since then, I've gotten no closer to mastering the art of drinking water with a pencil in my mouth (or pen or magic marker), but I don't care because it never fails me. I'm sure there's a logical explanation for why it works—something more to do with physiology than fairies—but I'm no scientist. All I know is the past 20 years have been virtually hiccup-free. Not bad for an obscure Spanish home remedy.

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.