On a perfect rainy Sunday afternoon (rare in Southern California), my perfect thing is to make sauce for a nice rainy-day dinner. The simmering smell takes me back and makes everything feel extra homey.
Cooking is fun for me and I love when I can do it. I like spending time in the kitchen, I love my enameled cast-iron (as constant readers know), and I get to thinking of things as I prepare ingredients. Today, it was of chopping onions. We have so many fun tools to chop onions, so that our hands don't have to smell. So that it's fast and easy. So we don't cry from the odor. I've had these things. They are made of plastic. When they break, we throw them away, because hey, they are cheap, and wow, you can't fix them AT ALL. Plastic things, when broken, are usually rendered useless. I would actually never remember to grab this thing. I like chopping onions with a knife. A good chef's knife is the best thing in the world for your kitchen. I don't care that my onions pieces are not uniform. I don't care that my hands smell like onions for a few minutes afterwards. I don't mind that it takes a few extra minutes.
Why this driving need for ease and convenience and making everything so darn mess-free? Why do we not give a second thought to what we are doing in the long run, simply because we think the worst thing in the world is to have to handle an onion for a few minutes? To me, activities are more worth-while if I have to spend time and care on them. So, why all this stuff? Choppers, cutters, food processors, every single one of them made of cheap plastic and designed to break after just a little bit of time, so that a new one needs to be purchased by the same consumer.
Isn't that kind of insane? Is it me? I think it's a little insane. How long do we keep a good knife over a lifetime, versus how many of these things? What are we doing with all this extra time we have from these things? Why don't we just value the time it takes to do things anymore?
Nothing.
Or you could buy a mandolin made out of stainless steel and will last a lifetime and get the best of both worlds.
ReplyDeleteI love my chef knives but sometimes uniform cuts and slices really add to the depth and presentation of a dish. So instead of using some made for TV profit tool, I use a quality mandolin that allows me to julien, slice, french cut and handle different ingredients so they are uniform. As it is stainless steel, it can be recycled as well. Of course, the initial cost is more but if you break a $20 tool, you need to buy a new one. Do this every year or so and the cost adds up. Or you can spend $200 once and give it to your kids when you're done with it.
NICE. And so true. If we stop to think, add up the cost of repeatedly buying junk versus something of quality that will last... but we don't.
DeleteI love your post! I'm trying to be more Earth conscious and do more to reduce my family's impact on the environment, so, these are questions I sometimes ask myself. Sometimes, I go through the store and see a 4 foot x 4 foot bin FILLED with plastic sippy cups and I actually feel a little sick inside. I'm not fanatical by any means, but I DO wish everyone would think twice about the "throw-away" society we have become.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Polly! We really have become a disposable society and all we can do is try to make people more aware...
DeleteI love my knives. I think prep work for cooking is very relaxing. And ok I will admitoyears ago (before I was the queen) I had one those cutter things pictured above. It sucked. I used my knives.
ReplyDelete