my popcorn maker

One of the things that I have rediscovered, and Cartoonist love, is making popcorn by hand, or rather by pot. Her friends are all amazed at how easy it is to do, and have watched with open mouths as I put oil and kernels into a pot and shake it. They are all so used to popping it in the microwave that they have never seen it pop. Having a glass cover adds to the fun.

I put olive oil at the bottom of the pot, and then add a quarter cup of popping corn, which I buy in bulk at the local natural food store. It doesn’t take longer than five minutes, and you just have to be there while it is cooking.

I would show you the finished product, but I ate it up after it was done.

“Oh, it’s a squirrel proof feeder”, she said.

I told her it felt very heavy. I should have known it was really a present for me, when she told me to open it, even though I had no interest in a squirrel feeder. I told her I would do it later. She insisted.

Not a squirrel feeder

I opened it, and discovered one more gadget to add to my arsenal, a pasta maker. She had bought it for me because of the pasta I had cut by hand, that I served her when she last visited.  I was going to leave it in its box, but I did finally open it, and discovered that the instructions are in Italian.

I’ll have to sit down and read the English version, but that can wait. I have another mission, which I will talk about a little later this week, which is, how do I use up all the veggies and fruit I’ve been getting, before it goes bad.

One of my favorite places is Chef Works, which is downtown Santa Cruz. It is crammed to the walls with all sorts of things that one can buy, and you either have to know what you want to go there for, or go there without a goal in mind, and just go from shelf to shelf, which is what I did the other day.

The other place I shop, is on-line with King Arther Flour Company. Whomever is building and maintaining their site, I must say, I take my hat off to them. It is a lovely place, both with the blog, with their wonderful recipes and their great catalog.  Sometimes, like with Chef Works, I just like to browse around, and see what is being offered. My sweetie, knowing how much I love their stuff, got me gift certificate from them, and I had the joy of looking and thinking about what to spend it on.

Mini Food Processor, from the catalog

In the end, I got a mini-food processor, thinking that would help when the food mill wasn’t quite up to snuff. We shall see which one I use more. I also bought some gluten free flour, and another cookbook on how to cook gluten free.  More fun for me.

hand beater

So, when I moved into this house, despite the small kitchen, which was dubbed a one-butt-kitchen because only one persons butt could ft in it at once, I decided it was time to build up the stuff I had in there. One of the things I bought was a hand beater. Unfortunately, not the hand beater in this posting. This hand beater I just bought today. The last two hand beaters I had got ruined. I don’t recall how the first one died, but the second one was destroyed by my room-mate’s son who though it was fun to play with. He was cooking, to be sure, but also having fun with it.  My sweetie, since then, had bought me three mixers, all electric, each one better than the last, but each time, I have also just wanted a hand mixer so that I could use it for quick beating, for those times I didn’t want to haul out the electric mixer.

Food Mill

The next gadget I’m going to talk about today is the food mill. I had never heard of a food mill, until I was discussing making the tomato sauce. She pulled it out, and showed me how it worked. Wow, I thought, who knew there was such a thing. Here we had tried to mush things in the food blender, and that wasn’t working quite right.

I kept trying to order it on-line, but kept forgetting what it was called.  I kept calling ti a food grinder, and  a food processor, which didn’t give me the right search results. I wasn’t until I was at Chef Works, while just having a good time, looking for a souffle pan, that I saw it, and bought it, and decided, along with making a souffle, that I would make some more tomato sauce, which  I did.