A few of my favorite (kitchen) things

Anyone who spends time doing kitchen prep has favorite tools or appliances, and no two people’s will be the same. Three of mine are so low-tech as to be laughable, but I would be lost without them. Here they are in no particular order.

1. As with many folks, I like to start the day with a cup of coffee, but I am not a coffee snob. I drank instant for years and grew up on Northwest Iowa percolator coffee so weak it looked like tea.

Now, I just need a jolt of joe in the morning and I’m good. I don’t have a fancy coffee maker, just a pour-over cone. The pour-over cone takes up little room in my cupboard, it doesn’t need to be plugged in, and it has an elegant simplicity.

You put a filter in the cone, add the coffee, pour hot water over the grounds and enjoy.

Apparently, this is wrong. You’re supposed to wet the filter, then “bloom” the grounds with a bit of hot water, then pour the remaining water s-l-o-w-l-y in concentric circles in the cone. As I said, I’m not a coffee snob. I want it hot, and I want it now, bloomed or not.

2. Behold the lowly vegetable peeler which peels my spuds, my carrots, my cucumbers, even my ginger. This simple tool has remained unchanged for generations; it’s what I grew up with. My Grandma Z., my mom, and I have all used the same design.

If mine breaks, and I can’t replace it, I’m going to be big sad. This is what feels best in my wimpy hands, and it connects me to my past.

The best thing about this apparatus is that even when I discovered I was doing it wrong (all these years!) IT STILL WORKED! Rather than peel away from my body in a pulling motion, I scrape them towards me.

Are you sensing a pattern here? Can’t make a correct pour-over, can’t peel a simple potato the right way.

This is not to say that others don’t see the need to improve upon the vegetable peeler. Some manufacturers add beefy handles for those with beefy hands. Some models look more like tongue scrapers. Others look like straight-up weapons, as in, if your child took that peeler to school, your child’s school would be calling you. And maybe the police.

 Walmart calls my choice of peeler an “old-school professional vegetable, potato, carrot peeler.” I call it simply wonderful. Again, tiny drawer footprint, no electricity or batteries required.

3. I love real hash browns, not the frozen pre-made stuff. While peeling potatoes has never stopped me (because I have a great tool for that. See Point 2 above), slicing the potatoes into thin strips makes me cranky. Cranky, I tell you!

Many decades ago, I saw an ad in Parade magazine for a device that was supposed to slice, grate, and shred vegetables, cheese, and day-old bread, with the turn of a crank.

It looked like an orange spaceship, but the Mouli-Julienne’s simple design hooked me. You slide one of the five blades into the spaceship, then you fit the crank handle in the top of the spaceship and slide it through the hole in the blade. Put your food in the hopper, crank, and turn out hash browns, grated cheese, or bread crumbs.

I’m on my third Mouli, and I’m getting nervous. I did without one for awhile, but life without homemade hash browns is no life for me. I can’t have my current Mouli go down, so I may buy another one as a backup. That’s how much I love this thing.

The legs fold under for easy storage. The only way to improve it would be if it came with a case to hold the handle and blades with the spaceship. Again, no batteries, no electricity. 

 Interlude: I think about the Zombie Apocalypse a lot, about how we’ll get along without our electric gadgets. Then I start to feel a little superior. I have these non-electric tools! But then I stop. Sure, I could peel potatoes, if I could find potatoes, but how would I cook them if I had no pan?

Sure, I can make coffee, if I had coffee, but where would I get clean water in Iowa? Come to think of it, I’d need water to boil potatoes, too. Hmmmm.

4. My final favorite kitchen tool does require electricity. I first thought an electric kettle was dumb. For most of my life, I used a tea kettle or the microwave to heat water, but on PBS shows those cozy British were always “putting the kettle on.”

It planted a seed.

Now I’m hooked. The lid of my Hamilton Beach kettle no longer stays down, so I set an empty mug on top while it heats my water. Is it faster than a tea kettle? A bit. Is it faster than a microwave? Unsure. Every microwave is a little different, and I’ve either overboiled or never quite achieve maximum boilage in the microwave.

An electric kettle gets it just right AND shuts itself off when the water boils, so I no longer ruin tea kettles by boiling them dry. Mine is a stripped-down no-nonsense kettle. Some of them have fancy settings for a fancy price. 

Clearly, I don’t care about fancy settings given how badly I make my pour-over coffee (Refer to Point 1 above).

Life is hard, and we keep getting told it’s going to get harder. I’m just celebrating some of the little things that bring me joy — and the fact that three of them don’t need batteries or electricity. Zombie Apocalypse or no Zombie Apocalypse.

Joan Zwagerman doesn’t really believe in a literal Zombie Apocalypse. She does worry about wide-spread natural or manmade disasters that could cause the electrical grid to utterly fail. But calling it a Zombie Apocalypse feels less threatening somehow.