1. Made in China:
Relentless time chips away at all our common goals and ideals.
But we all want the same thing, no? All girls are brought up to hope for a set of fine china.
I was born in the '50s and grew up on dishes that captured the expression "One word -- plastics." Melmac didn't chip, or if it did, who cared? The "fancy" dinnerware that my parents trotted out for company did chip. It was made of rather coarse clay.
When I got married in 1979, my parents promised us that nice set of china. They'd finally bought theirs just a year or so before. And boy was I eager for those plates. But our nomadic life intervened, and I put off choosing a pattern.
Madness seized us in early 1984. We still owned most of the cheap Ironstone I'd bought in graduate school, which boasted a bold brown geometric pattern that did the disco era proud, plus the more sedate cream-and-tan stoneware that we'd plunked down 50 bucks for shortly after our wedding. The spouse and I thought our lives would be made if we only had a typewriter sporting a line of memory, making for easy erasing. Thus we bargained away the promise of Lenox for what we should have known was already an electronic dinosaur, had we bothered to do a little research.
I kicked myself for years. Time was indeed chipping away at our old dinnerware, and we couldn't find or afford anything decent to replace it. Our one effort at semifine stuff, pure white porcelain that we found at an import shop and picked up piece by piece, chipped even more quickly than our lower-class plates.
And then I saw porcelain heaven. I walked into the Salvation Army Superstore on a half-price day, and there it was: Some twit had unloaded six lovely dinner plates, eight giant soup bowls, at least 11 dessert or salad plates, and seven big mugs, all ringed with a rich, deep, satisfying blue. And all ll this for $16! Oooooh, I was in ecstasy. No fool I, not any longer, I hit the World Wide Web. I wrote customer service at Oneida to find out more about the porcelain, and then discovered that an online outlet store was selling sets for four very, very cheap. So cheap that the shipping costs matched the actual price. I had to pounce; after all, one needs 10 full place settings for civilized dining.
The extra china (and it's indeed made in China) came quickly, and I clutched it to my heaving breast. OK, we don't use it all that often, for who wants to jeopardize the health of something so dear?
Not long afterward, I heard from a nice woman at Oneida. "Oh yes, that line," she wrote, or words to that effect. "One of our companies used to make it for Wal-Mart."
My finest china, you see, was so common that Wal-Mart discontinued it.
***
The dream of children is to outdo their parents, or so I've heard. I'm just trying to run in place.
In the fraught few months before my wedding, I fastened on the same Gorham silver pattern that my folks were given when they got married. I don't know where they keep their silver, and the set the spouse and I own is still in the original plastic. Who wants to clean silver?
In 1979, I was also about to plump for the same china pattern as my parents just had. I'm rather glad that I didn't. I don't find the flowers around the edge as compelling as I once did. Worse, there's platinum on the rim, which means that you can't put the darn stuff in the dishwasher or the microwave. Who can live like that?
My parents' fine china sits unused in a low kitchen cabinet. Still, their fancy plates and cups are in better shape than the postwar crystal glasses. Resurrecting these pieces from decades of dust and other grime would probably cost more than all of us are worth.
When I'm at my parents' house, we happily drink from old jelly jars and eat off plastic plates that they collected from an early generation of microwave dinners.
This is progress.
My recipe for the day? The obvious choice is Chinese. But much as I adore Chinese food, or what passes for it in most of the USA, I've never mastered the art of cooking it. I've never even come close. Anyway, most appropriate for my best dinnerware is takeout.
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2. Letting off steam:
When I'm chilling with my folks in Austin, Texas, I'm sure as heck not chilly. I live in an inferno.
I hesitate to write about my trivial trials to an audience still suffering from post-traumatic shock after the recent ice storm. But here it is: While the spouse, stuck in Springfield for 10.5 days without electricity, felt the temperature inside our house sink to near freezing, I battled to keep my parents' thermostat at no more than 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
Is it a generation gap? Maybe not. Generalizations are dangerous, and too many counterexamples marred the facile one I worked up about the difference between people who grew up during the Great Depression and baby boomers whose characters were formed during the energy crises of the 1970s, when a favorite president of mine donned a sweater during a fireside chat.
Maybe it's primarily a matter of physics. Heat rises, and in the badly built house that they bought after they expected their children to have flown the nest for good, the temperature in the upper-floor bedrooms is 10 to 15 degrees higher than what those in the first-floor master bedroom experience. And the windows in the room I sleep in weren't designed to open. At all.
There are other bits of physics in play. When I'm with my parents, I gain weight. Consider the free-food factor. Consider also conservation of matter: Whenever anyone in the house gains any weight, the rest lose a compensating amount, and the losers are therefore colder.
Last "winter" in Texas, my increasing adipose tissue started to bubble and squeak. I met up with diaper rash even without diapers, NASA issue or otherwise. I won't say I keep up the appearance of civilization, anywhere, but while I insist on wearing clothes, especially when I'm fat, any unneeded apparel is a downside upstairs in Austin.
I've begun to fight back by finally mastering the basics of the electronic thermostat.
One morning this January, my father wailed, "It's freezing in here!" Yes, I checked the temperature inside the house, and it was 72. Dad was wearing designer-label red-white-and-blue boxer shorts, and nothing more. "Clothes?" he said. "What a novel concept."
After a short standoff, he put on a bathrobe, and I kicked the thermostat up a few notches. Until his back was turned.
***
My use of the word "chilling" today was a first for me. Not long ago, a bubbly young woman selling something or other door-to-door asked to come inside. "It's so cold out," she claimed. It wasn't, but I let her in. The salesperson looked at my mother and asked, "Just chilling?" Mom was flummoxed. "She means something like 'hanging out," I offered and was rewarded with another uncomprehending gaze. Intergenerationally, a lot is lost in the translation.
A recipe for a Tuscan bread salad follows [but not here]. It requires no heat.
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3. Biting the dust:
In a scene central to the postapocalyptic cult classic "Cherry 2000," Six-Fingered Jake praises to the skies a small appliance that's been at the heart of my adult life.
"Toast is just the beginning of your new toaster oven. You can make open-faced sandwiches, baked potatoes. And best of all, the tray is removable for easy cleaning."
I met my first toaster oven early in married life. The nine-dollar toaster I'd picked up at the beginning of grad school had up and died on us. Using the real oven for toast was cumbersome, and back in 1980, who wanted to overheat the whole house when reheating leftovers? Between the toaster ovens and the frying pans, and with the help of the increasingly inexpensive microwave, the spouse and I have sometimes gone for years, it seems, without using the big oven.
My parents' current toaster is a lot classier than my old one, but it doesn't hold full slices of good artisanal bread, and it sure as heck doesn't make cheese toast. I decided to bring the family up to speed. In 2005, I popped a DVD of the 1988 Melanie Griffith movie mentioned above into Dad's iMac, and I played the scene in question to him and my little brother. Then, I dragged them out to Sears and shelled out a painful $44 for a name-brand appliance I was certain would change their very existence.
Decent toaster ovens, I've since learned, usually cost at least twice that much. My father e-mailed me a newspaper article on the subject. Yes, the little oven that I'd set up had gone over like an aluminum balloon. It takes brute force -- at least two thumbs at just the right angle -- to get it to toast at all, and the darned thing takes twice as long as the traditional toaster to deliver worse toast.
So the thing sat there, eating up counter space but gathering no crumbs. Last month, I was seriously considering stowing it away in an appliance graveyard. Along with the air popper, perhaps.
After all, I was using a real oven again. My parents didn't believe it still worked, and I had to clean off dust of more than 10 years' accumulation, but the old trouper fired up just fine. Twice.
The third time wasn't charmed. When I carried the bread pudding I'd stirred up for dear old Dad, who's a bread-pudding aficionado from way back, I encountered a pilot light but no heat, plus the smell of gas.
Sheesh. I'd wasted eggs, milk, sugar, spices and stale bread. What to do, what to do? Flush the whole liquid mess?
My eyes happened to land on the dust-encrusted toaster oven, and I discovered that the two-quart casserole would fit inside.
It was a revelation and a personal triumph. With a cheap and cheesy toaster oven, I staved off unimaginable kitchen catastrophe.
***
I cannot tell a lie and get away with it. My personal triumph wasn't really a triumph.
My husband, whose heart I likely won with custard pie, would have loved the bread pudding. I also found it tasty. But Dad is into bread, and this version wasn't bready enough. Of course he pretended to like my concoction, but when a man lauds a recipe with the word "delicate," you know you've failed. The morning after, he gamely asked for a slice, but he sprinkled it with cinnamon sugar.
The pudding sat in the refrigerator until it was solid enough to dump it into a trash bag.
Heat distribution can be a problem, so I don't recommend that you make the following recipe in a cheap toaster oven. Maybe good toaster ovens perform a lot better, but I have no experience of them. Too cheap. I haven't even called a repair person to fix my parents' gas oven.
The spouse had advice on fixing it. Look at the little holes in the back, the ones nearest the pilot light. They're probably clogged.
No, dear, I said. I'm not sticking my head in an oven. Not even for you.
