A Few Of My Favorite Things

Like any 28 year-old on a Friday night, I just spent half an hour washing a leaning tower of dishes. My fingers have gone all pruney. Is that not a normal Friday night activity? Huh.

Regardless, I bought a new dish set! I am very, very excited about this. It was way past time for me to get grown-up dishes. Not only did I have to borrow dishes in order to host Thanksgiving this year (because I had none), but I am also starting to get tired of my pink hula girl bowl (and matching plastic glass)… although my Tony the Tiger bowl will never get old. I am now the happy, pruney-fingered owner of a simple, all white dish set with eight place settings.

Getting said dish set into my apartment was far more difficult than picking it out, unfortunately. The box that some geometry and jigsaw puzzle genius shoved the dish set into weighed a *ton*. It was a miracle of physics, really, how something relatively small could weigh so damn much. Did I mention that I live on the top floor? Without an elevator? With a car trunk, three doors, three locks, and three flights of stairs separating me from a well-earned collapse onto my floor? Well, now you know.

Now that my dishes and I are both clean and safely stowed, I can take stock of my kitchen (pun intended). I have the tools and toys necessary for 98% of all recipes I attempt, my pantry is stuffed to the gills with obscure and interesting food stuffs (four different types of salt and four different types of rice, to start), and I have two book shelves filled with cookbooks and food-related books. I am happy with the current state of affairs in my kitchen. It’s full of the meaningful, the functional, the unnecessary, and the fun.

The meaningful: my grandmother gave me this wooden mallet when I first started cooking in college. I am not entirely sure if it’s meant to be decorative or functional but I have been giving the benefit of the doubt for a while now. I am sure the porous wood is harboring the worst kind of chicken-borne bacteria, the head tends to fly off the handle like a small missile, and it doesn’t really weigh enough to flatten anything but it has sentimental value. So there.


The functional: one of my most favorite appliances of all time - electric tea kettle. I drink absurd amounts of tea. I have an entire kitchen drawer devoted to teas. That’s really all there is to say. Functional isn’t terribly entertaining.

The unnecessary and/or fun inhabitants of my kitchen will be covered in future installments of “my favorite things”. Now I have to go to sleep and dream about what it would be like to spend an entire day without going into lab, not even once.