Kitchen cleaning #1

One of my major issues in Mama's kitchen is that the kitchen is so small.  Worse, there is very little counter space.  I don't know what genius designed this house in the 1950s, well before the Women's Liberation Movement moved a lot of women out of the kitchen and into an office, but the guy was definitely well before his time.  This tiny kitchen would do well on a modest-sized boat.  It doesn't help that a fair chunk of counter space was lost when a den was added to the house my senior year in high school, lo, these many years ago.

To be fair, the kitchen as designed and even as remodeled fit Mama's needs.  Mama was working outside the home long before Gloria or Bella or even Betty would fight for her right to do so.  Teaching full time and coping with her handicap was more than enough for Mama to handle in those days.  She needed a small kitchen that reduced her steps.  She prepared comparatively simple Southern-style meals that suited my late father's appetite and her skillset.  The tiny kitchen was enough.  I am pretty sure she never missed the lost counter space when it was replaced with a large den just as I am pretty sure she never missed the loss of a big chunk of lower cabinets when a dishwasher was installed. 

I, on the other hand, want to chop things up and then mix them together and even cook several dishes at once.  There just isn't enough room to do that when food and equipment take up already limited counter space.

My first kitchen cleaning strategy has been to clear the counter tops so that I have more work room.  That's easier said than done, but here's what I've managed to do so far--for only half of the counter space.  (I said I was slow.)

• Removed the old knife holder and the blender.  Both stored on a top shelf in the kitchen.  This may need re-evaluation when/if I get to that shelf.
• Limited on-counter equipment to toaster, coffee maker, and coffee grinder.  The coffee maker is a small 4-cup item, so it and the grinder still take up less space than the old full sized coffee maker.  (Did I mention that these kitchen counters are tiny?)
• Replaced rusting metal tray with "silver-toned" tray.  Set tray on top of old plastic cutting board (to avoid rust).  Stored vinegars along with knife sharpener and battery powered jar opener on tray.
• Limited on-counter food storage to the aforementioned vinegars, cooking oil (too tall for shelves), and about 5 large containers of seasonings.  
• Re-purposed napkin holder used to hold cutting boards upright.  Replaced old plastic cutting boards with new ones.
• Left napkin holder, salt/pepper shakers used in cooking as before.

The end result is cleaner (after wiping and scrubbing) and more efficient (tools and condiments are handily available) and less cluttered (only items used frequently are given counter space).  I also have two, maybe three, times as much clear counter space as before. 

Sadly, there is more to be done, because I haven't found a home for all of the things I had to remove in order to get these results.  The work goes on . . .

Cleaning house

I think there is some superstition or tradition hanging out there that tells me that the house needs to be cleaned before the new year begins, or else I will have bad luck  Oh noes! 

I never can get the house cleaned before the new year.  Eeek!

I don't actually believe not having the house cleaned by New Year's Day will bring me actual bad luck, but I do manage to feel somewhat guilty and a bit of a failure when New Year's Day rolls around and I can still see dust bunnies frolicking in the corners.  Oh, heck, let's be honest:  They play soccer in the middle of the room.  You wouldn't believe all the racket they make when one of them scores.

Perhaps that's why January always brings the urge to do some spring cleaning (Spring itself never does that to me, so I have to wonder why this urge hits in January).  This January is no different.  I've been working (in my own slow pokey way) to get the Christmas decorations put away and . . . here's the food point at long last . . . to get the kitchen here at Mama's house somewhat better organized. 

I went through this process soon after I started staying with Mama full time.  Over time, I managed to get through most of the kitchen, clearing out some of the clutter and making room for better food supplies.  As time has passed, more clutter has accumulated and the food supply issue has changed from convenience and hurricane preparedness to better taste and nutrition.  

Accommodating this change will no doubt take some time.  Still, it needs to be done.  Aren't you glad to be sharing all the details of the really fun time I'll be having cleaning Mama's kitchen?  Thought so. 

When the garbage disposer dies

We haven't always had a garbage disposer.  I can remember moving to this house when I was 9 years old and, not long after, Daddy installing a disposer.  I still remember being told not to put bones or paper in the disposer, the concept was that new to us.  Over the years, I've had to cope with a few hours, maybe even a whole 24 hours, of life without a disposer as we waited until one of our very handy men procured and installed a new one.

Imagine my delight when the garbage disposer here at Mama's house died a very sudden death recently, and there was not a man, handy or otherwise, in sight.   


I did what troubleshooting I could.  Cleared out the disposer, punched the resent button, looked for something strong enough to try to "stir" the turn-plate of blades.  No joy in any of it.


We then entered the stage of having no disposer while we considered whether (a) Next Door Cousin and I could replace the thing, (b) to call a plumber, or (c) to have My Prince make a mad dash to Houston.

• I seriously considered (a).  NDC is single, tough, and semi-handy.  Between the two of us, we might figure it out.  Our problem was upper body strength.  There are pipes and other screwish things involved in replacing the disposer, and neither one of us have a lot of muscles.  Indeed, I actually have a battery operated jar opener for when pickles get to be too touch. 
• The thought of (b) was both a matter of cost and skill.  Neither of the important men in my life were ever big on paying for labor when they could do the job themselves.  My late father was always DIY and the go-to guy in the extended family for help or advice.  Ditto for My Prince.  Not that MP always approved of how Daddy did some of his jobs.  (Painting the eaves with a broom for a brush was a late-in-life solution to getting the job done when it was too dangerous for him to be on a ladder.)  And that is the crux of the issue for (b):  can anyone do the job well enough to meet MP's standards?  Prolly not.
• That left (c), although I put my foot down and said there would be no mad-dashing.  We could survive without a disposer for a while, and MP was instructed to plan his trip to Houston with some consideration given to all the things he was already trying to do.  Eventually he agreed, and decided to come a few days later.

In the meantime, we had to survive without a disposer.

Doing so called to mind all the mishaps that can come from lack of a disposer.  I'm thinking of the fellow who decided to chop up watermelon rinds small enough to flush down the toilet.  (Not a good idea, said the plumber.)  Or the gals in the office above mine who washed coffee grounds down the sink.  (Not a good idea, said the plumber, who cleaned up my flooded office.)

Needless to say, we didn't need anything like those events, so nothing unusual was flushed down the toiler or washed down the sink.  We kept a mesh wire strainer over the disposer opening and dumped whatever landed there into the garbage.  All of this dumping, however, made the garbage a tad more aromatic, so more effort was given to making sure that things were covered.  We also had to worry about greater attraction for flies and, well, cockroaches.

The days without a disposer were less carefree than those Good Old Days of having a disposer.  There was much "food for thought" (no pun intended) regarding composting and all the labor that that might entail.  There was a reminder every day about vermin control and the spread of disease.

We live wasteful lives here in the US.  We consume and trash and deplete natural resources at a phenomenal rate compared to much of the rest of the globe and even to the potential for replenishing most of those resources (slim to none).  I thought, for a while, that perhaps we should make the effort to live without the garbage disposer permanently.  After all, it was an addition to this old house, and there are still some houses in the neighborhood that don't have them.  It is surely possible.  It is, however, not so healthy.  I'm going to emphasize that reason in my thinking about the disposer right now, but I will also give more thought to how we can cut down on the need for using the it. 

In the meantime, yea!  My Prince came to fix it!

Buried in cup towels

Mama's kitchen is not organized for cooking. Slowly but surely over the past year, I have been cleaning out the various nooks and crannies and trying to reorganize things. While I have covered most of the territory available, I still have a few crannies to go. In truth, I despair of ever having enough storage space or any efficiency in food prep.

My latest adventure was to clean out the cup towel drawers. Mama has only one more drawer in her kitchen than I do, but hers are deeper and all in one column. Mine (3) are shallow and scattered about the kitchen. Still I have drawer envy both for number and for depth.

After getting the new supply of kitchen utensils from Next Door Cousin, I needed a place to store them. The utensil drawer is jam packed and so is the counter top container that holds essential items like wooden spoons and such. The only choice was to start clearing out some cup towels. I had no idea what I was getting into.

Three drawers were smash jammed with towels. One had as much miscellaneous junk as it did towels, and one had quite a few aprons (who uses those nowadays?). But all three drawers were overflowing with faded terry cup towels. As you know, I no longer used terry towels at home. (Indeed, it would seem that some of my own old terry towels wound up in Mama's kitchen drawers.) Whatever I might use, I did not think that I needed that many towels as much as I needed the space.

My first step was to throw them all in the washing machine. Actually, it took four loads and twice as many dryer loads to get them all done. In truth, I still have one that is mostly aprons yet to go. I was well and truly sick of cup towels by the time I got through washing, sorting, folding, and storing them.

Among the observations:

• Mama had a lot of Christmas towels and aprons.
• Mama showed a marked preference for towels that tied to the drawer handles. These were more ragged and faded than some of the others.
• A lot of her towels had hand-crocheted work, some of it, at least, done by my late Aunt G. But which ones?

I now have room for more utensils (a good thing), but have not yet had the courage to tackle the junk in the bottom drawer (a cowardly thing). I am also left with an abundance of perfectly good toweling with faded images. What to do with it?

One suggestion is to make sure that My Prince has as many as he needs for working around the garage. Will do. Another discovery is that the towels make nice jewelry rolls for the necklaces that I have been making. Will use more of them. But there are still a bunch that we won't be able to use that way. Any suggestions?

Pot scrubber thread

I continue to use (and wear out) those wonderful pot scrubbers that I talked about before. I've been looking and looking for the thread that is needed to make them. No luck. #2MIL thought it might be something like "teflon thread," but the only thing I could find in that vein was used for plumbing and is really a tape (as it turns out, pipes have threads).

Today I think I found it. This pot scrubber looks like a close relative to the ones that I am using, and the supply list calls for "nylon plastic canvas yarn." Ima go get some the first chance I get and hand it over to Big Kid Cousin. Let's see what the girl can do. ^.^

What day of the month is this?

That's a sample of recent conversations with Mama, and that particular quote represents progress. She's had a tough time of it in the past few months when she didn't know what day it was nor care. It has--as you can tell by the long gap in posts here--also been quite hectic for me. Today she actually looked at a calendar and tried to figure out the date. This places us as close to normal as we've been in a long time.

I have myself been finding more and more time to think, including thinking about food and this blog. I'm taking a risk by trying to post again, but let's see how far we can get. I certainly have lots of thoughts to key in.

If we have stability and time for a while, here are some of the thoughts that have been occupying my mind lately: fiber, peristalsis (that's as polite as I can make it), weight loss, more cup towel, slow cookers, old kitchen tools, and more. Wish me luck!

Pot scrubbers

While I'm thinking about washing dishes (not), I may as well talk about my favorite dish scrubber. It's hand crocheted from some sort of stiff plastic thread (maybe this?). It can scrub dishes, pots, stoves, and apparently even skin.

I got my first one by inheriting it from My Prince's late mother (#1MIL). I got a used one and a new one. I used them until they were falling apart. In the meantime, I looked and looked in stores, hoping to find one. No joy. Then it occurred to me that #2MIL lived in an area where she might have access to crafty items.

Indeed, she did! And, dear woman, she went right to the drawer where she had several of these little jewels stored. I got two and have treasured them ever since. This year, I got two more for Christmas.

As pot scrubbers go, these are the cat's pajamas. They are effective but also non-abrasive. I'm thinking that even I know enough about crocheting to make a circle. Now I just have to run across the right thread and go for it!

"What are those diapers for?"

I mentioned dish towels in one of my ramblings about food safety and have been thinking ever since about how different my kitchen is in that regard these days. Once upon a time, my one drawer that is assigned to kitchen cloths (both dish cloths and towels and other minor necessities) was stuffed so full, I could hardly close it. It was full of terry cloth dish towels. Not a lot, mind you, but as many as the drawer could hold. I rarely needed to use all of them between launderings, but I could certainly thin the drawer out if I took a while between times of turning on the washing machine.

Things got a little harder when the aforementioned cousin stayed with us for a while. She could empty that drawer in nothing flat. I began to think that she mopped the floor with them, except, of course, that you can't mop my kitchen. *sigh*

Anyhoo, I happened to mention to #2MIL one day that I needed to get more cup towels and then whined about how full that drawer was. Where would I even put more cup towels? Some time later, we got our Christmas presents from My Prince's dad and stepmom (#2MIL). For some reason, My Prince brought the gifts to our house, so I must have been elsewhere when they were handed out. That meant that I needed to call #2MIL and thank her for the gift, but what, I wondered, were those diapers for? So I asked her.

"Those are cup towels," she told me, laughing. My basic response was: Huh? Everyone knows that cup towels are made of terry cloth and printed with more or less domestic themed pictures (and flowers, of course). How could these plain white squares of woven cotton be dish towels?

I quickly found out.

Sometimes called a flour sack dishtowel, these babies can be used in a zillion ways. When wet, they dry quickly. When folded, they take up much less space in my crowded little drawer. They are suitable for all seasons.

Once I tried these towels, I none too slowly got rid of almost all of the terry in my little drawer and bought more of the sacking ones. I even appliqued a few as a later gift for #2MIL, just to show her how very much I appreciated the introduction to these little jewels. Now terry cloth dish towels feel so clumsy, and I am stealthily trying to introduce my favorite towels to Mama's kitchen.

Kitchen Food Safety

The dishcloth has me worried right now. Looking for more information about "dishcloth safety," I ran across this list of no-no's for kitchen food safety from the University of Nebraska.

I pretty sure that I'm okay on most of this, but I'm still thinking about some of the others. F'rinstance:

• I don't use brown paper bags or garbage cans for cooking, although I have used a paper bag to coat fish with cornmeal. I think we tend to think of our own kitchens as clean places, but maybe saving that Sonic bag to use for coating some fish is not the best approach to food safety. Still, I hate to think that I would have to use a fresh ziplock bag to do the coating right when I'm trying to figure out how to recycle the ones that I am using already. On the good side, I haven't used film canisters or plastic garbage sacks for food storage. The latter, however, are great for storing Christmas pillows and some of my winter sweat suits. I'm just saying.
  
• I am so-so on re-using the one-time use items. I re-use the plastic utensils to serve cat food (and thereby avoid using people utensils for the cat food). I have also re-used drinking water bottles for water and tea mixes. I now wonder about washing and re-using chopsticks. I know that bamboo is a renewable resource, but some of my chopsticks are pretty (like the ones BKC gave me for my birthday). I want to keep them around AND use them for a long time. There are some issues with disposable food service items that need to be balanced with food safety, but it does involve risk. Risk for oneself is, to be sure, different from risk for others, so re-use should, at the very least, be limited to personal use and not presented to others.
• OK, I'm good on materials in the microwave and getting rid of old mercury thermometers. It only takes one or two microwave fires to learn those lessons, and My Prince is our family hazmat expert. He disposes of old batteries and other dangerous things in the appropriate manner. *proud look*
• "Mis-using hard to clean items" has some pitfalls. I rarely use a whisk, so I will have to go have a look at what is on hand and how it works for cleaning. The basting brush, however, has long been a challenge. I have never liked them. They just look like the perfect place to grow crud. For years, I just used a spoon to dip and spread, instead of basting. Then I found some silicone basters that look like one of those squiggly ball things that kids play with. I got a bunch at the dollar store, toss them in the dishwasher after using, and no longer worry about the crud. Vegetable brushes go in the dishwasher also. I avoid sponges like the plague they surely carry. The dishcloth, however, remains a worry.
• "Re-using items that should be laundered" might have addressed that dishcloth worry, but it doesn't really. I use a dishcloth and dishtowel several times before tossing it to the laundry. Yes, I do dry them out before hand. I even dry them between uses. My Prince has lately installed one of those old timey racks that my great grandmother had over her sink; it has three arms that swing back out of the way and allow you to hang three cloths for drying. Instead of spreading the dishcloth out over the sink divider to dry between uses, it now hangs there. This allows it to really dry out and inhibits the growth of mildew (when I use soap to give it a quick wash and then rinse before hanging). I'm not entirely sure that this is entirely safe, but it is safer than the way I had been handling the matter.
• Cutting boards, we've discussed. It all goes in the dishwasher.

What I'm wondering is, how dangerous am I in the kitchen when I reuse the dishcloth or the dishtowel? Do you change them out after one use or one meal or one day? I have a cousin who managed to get loose in my kitchen a couple of times. She used up every single dishtowel that I owned--in one meal prep. Those were the days when I used terry cloth towels, so there were fewer in the drawer than now, but still I was amazed at her ability to use them up so quickly. The same thing happened with all of my hand towels in the bathroom. There might have been a little OCD involved--or there could be something that I am missing. I'm still wondering.

I should point out that one reason I wonder is that the recent energy crisis is not really going away. We have to think about how much paper we are willing to use to dry our hands or wipe up spills and such and then toss away. How do we balance the need to conserve against the need to protect ourselves from the risk of disease?

Home again, home again

After two weeks with Mama, it was time to come home again. Seems like I barely get here before I have to reload and return to Houston, but it is always good to come back home.

That fact really hit me last night when I was cooking us a late supper. The kitchen counters were cluttered with things My Prince had not put away and more clutter that we had just dumped in the kitchen while unloading the van, so I had to do a little shuffling to make room to work. Suddenly the thought just popped into my head that I was glad to be back in my own kitchen.

The kitchen is small. Not enough cabinets. Not enough drawers. Not the best arrangement in the world. Don't even get me started on the tatty old carpet on the floor. (I would prefer bare concrete to that carpet!)

BUT . . .

I know where stuff is, and the stuff is arranged more for convenience in cooking than for how it looks. Porque it is my stuff, my space.

When My Prince and I finally got hungry enough to stop talking, it was easy enough to go in the kitchen and start grabbing utensils and vegetables and whack away for a little stir fry. I had been gone for two weeks, had been cooking in someone else's kitchen, and had to move some clutter out of the way--but the basic arrangement that I had created and was used to working in was right there, accessible, easy, and--yes--comforting.