Such a tool, take 2
Jan. 4, 1998
I looked to be in deep trouble. Maybe.
An hour or so after a raging torrent of chopping, grating, mixing, sauteeing, beating, crumbing, and reeling and squealing, I actually thought of cleaning up a little, and saw circumstantial evidence of disaster. There on the counter a set of mixing spoons was no longer a set — they lay scattered drunkenly where I’d left them last, now liberated from the metal ring that had kept them in line.
Decay and collapse I can deal with — I’m 43, after all; I live with it daily. But the quarter teaspoon, I found, was gone, gone, gone. And that raised an awful possibility: What if the measuring spoon had taken an unceremonious dive into my labor-intensive creation? Surely not!
Yet the spoon was nowhere. Not between counter and fridge, or on the floor under the cabinets. And not mixed up in or behind the jumble of spice jars — I actually undertook the superhuman effort of straightening up that stretch of counter, but no spoon surfaced to give me peace of mind. I expanded my search area to the whole kitchen, but I came up emptyhanded. Gone.
I had some decisions, some careful calculations to make. Do I tell the spouse about the chance of mischance? Watch him sear me with a painful look of amused contempt? Or just feed him the dish and pray for divine mercy? I put off the decision, only to hear the spouse, in a burst of good feeling, invite my sister-in-law to share in our feast.
Now this was getting serious. It’s one thing to prove oneself a total idiot in front of one’s life partner, or even to endanger his or her life through foolishness. Happens all the time. I read a news story recently about a romantic Russian fellow who put a ring into his love’s champagne; she choked on it and died. Oh, well.
My sister-in-law was another matter. I like her a lot. And what if she sued me — if she were in any shape to sue? Or worse, what if she laughed at me?
In my defense, let me note that the spoon in question is a full 3-3/4 inches long, and one would expect it to announce its presence on a fork; a glutton shameless enough to stuff a hunk of fork food that massive into his or her mouth deserves shame at least. Anyway, that dish ate up a lot of my time. Granted, the darn thing shouldn’t have taken me three hours, but it did. And it wasn’t cheap.
I didn’t have fun at that meal. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the food moving from the spouse’s and the sister-in-law’s plates to their respective mouths. I must have been a little jumpy. “What? Me? Looking at? Oh, nothing!”
I’d imagined all sorts of horrors: the clash of cheap aluminum and expensive tooth enamel; gagging and gasping and keeling over; or, worst of all, the sister-in-law’s wry remark, “How clever, Alison: a casserole with its own little serving spoon baked in.” Didn’t happen. And I didn’t confess — until now.
A couple of days afterward, when the creation was safely gobbled up, I slyly brought the subject around to the case of the missing spoon. “That?” the spouse said. “I took it to use in the cat medicine.”
You’d think a man would understand the concept of tools of the trade. How unprincipled can you get?
I looked to be in deep trouble. Maybe.
An hour or so after a raging torrent of chopping, grating, mixing, sauteeing, beating, crumbing, and reeling and squealing, I actually thought of cleaning up a little, and saw circumstantial evidence of disaster. There on the counter a set of mixing spoons was no longer a set — they lay scattered drunkenly where I’d left them last, now liberated from the metal ring that had kept them in line.
Decay and collapse I can deal with — I’m 43, after all; I live with it daily. But the quarter teaspoon, I found, was gone, gone, gone. And that raised an awful possibility: What if the measuring spoon had taken an unceremonious dive into my labor-intensive creation? Surely not!
Yet the spoon was nowhere. Not between counter and fridge, or on the floor under the cabinets. And not mixed up in or behind the jumble of spice jars — I actually undertook the superhuman effort of straightening up that stretch of counter, but no spoon surfaced to give me peace of mind. I expanded my search area to the whole kitchen, but I came up emptyhanded. Gone.
I had some decisions, some careful calculations to make. Do I tell the spouse about the chance of mischance? Watch him sear me with a painful look of amused contempt? Or just feed him the dish and pray for divine mercy? I put off the decision, only to hear the spouse, in a burst of good feeling, invite my sister-in-law to share in our feast.
Now this was getting serious. It’s one thing to prove oneself a total idiot in front of one’s life partner, or even to endanger his or her life through foolishness. Happens all the time. I read a news story recently about a romantic Russian fellow who put a ring into his love’s champagne; she choked on it and died. Oh, well.
My sister-in-law was another matter. I like her a lot. And what if she sued me — if she were in any shape to sue? Or worse, what if she laughed at me?
In my defense, let me note that the spoon in question is a full 3-3/4 inches long, and one would expect it to announce its presence on a fork; a glutton shameless enough to stuff a hunk of fork food that massive into his or her mouth deserves shame at least. Anyway, that dish ate up a lot of my time. Granted, the darn thing shouldn’t have taken me three hours, but it did. And it wasn’t cheap.
I didn’t have fun at that meal. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the food moving from the spouse’s and the sister-in-law’s plates to their respective mouths. I must have been a little jumpy. “What? Me? Looking at? Oh, nothing!”
I’d imagined all sorts of horrors: the clash of cheap aluminum and expensive tooth enamel; gagging and gasping and keeling over; or, worst of all, the sister-in-law’s wry remark, “How clever, Alison: a casserole with its own little serving spoon baked in.” Didn’t happen. And I didn’t confess — until now.
A couple of days afterward, when the creation was safely gobbled up, I slyly brought the subject around to the case of the missing spoon. “That?” the spouse said. “I took it to use in the cat medicine.”
You’d think a man would understand the concept of tools of the trade. How unprincipled can you get?
posted by aparker54 at 10:07 PM
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