Food, glorious food!: November 2010

I've got to be honest, the FGF kitchen is not exactly a cutting edge facility. I have one good knife (a large John Lewis chopping knife I got from Marshall's for like $9) - the rest came from Wal-Mart, and I bought them in 2001. I have a Toastmaster toaster, hand mixer, and blender - all about 10 years old, all also probably purchased at Wal-Mart. I have an old school can opener that is - again - 10 years old from Wal-Mart. I have a set of plastic kitchen utensils (you know, a giant ladle, turner, and like 5 slatted spoons) that must've all come together in some amazing economy pack at Wal-Mart, about 10 years ago. You get the point. What happened was, Michele and I broke up, she moved out and took everything with her - because everything was hers. At that point, I hadn't lived on my own yet, so I hadn't accumulated any of the things one accumulates when one lives on one's own *sigh*.

Over the past few years though (well, apparently since 2001), I've been slowly gathering items for my kitchen, and in the last 2 years I've done some major updating. For example, I got a set of KitchenAid pots and pans about a year ago (thank you, Heidi, for not allowing me to purchase the set of "Chef's Secret" pots and pans I had my eye on!). Kim and Jen gave me a Cuisinart coffee maker for my birthday this year (yep, that's right - the one that's in all the movies!). And I splurged and got myself a super fancy garlic press at IKEA and a snazzy set of aluminum dry measuring cups (with rubberized handles) at BB&B. Yep, the FGF kitchen is definitely moving up in the world - I even found a KitchenAid rubber scraper at Tuesday Morning for $3!!!

So, the obvious next step was to go all the way and get a KitchenAid stand mixer. Yes, obvious, so so obvious. Truth be told, I've been drooling over these KitchenAid stand mixers for a long time. And, as my longing became public recently, I found out from my friends that they were actually confused about how I could have such sparse and inadequate kitchen equipment when cooking, grilling, and baking are three of my favorite things! Well, NO MORE! I did a little research on the KitchenAid.com site and then did some ebay recon. I decided that I wanted to pay no more than $225 (including s&h) for the 5 quart, tilt-head mixer, new, with all attachments. The standard 325 watts was fine with me, but of course I would've been totally ok with the 450 watt KSM, too. :) Well, not too long after I started ebay stalking these things, I saw that someone had one, NIB, onyx black (one of my 3 acceptable colors) for a Buy It Now price of $240 OBO. So...I made an offer. They were saying shipping would be $17-something, so I just subtracted that from $225 and put in an offer of $207-something. I awoke the next morning to find my offer had been accepted, so TA-DA! That is how Ethel came to be a member of my family.

Wanna hear the coolest part? The seller is from Barrington, RI! How cool is that? I thought it was pretty amazing that we were less than 10 miles from each other (ok, maybe 15). The seller ended up just bringing it to my house, and he awkwardly started to make some horrible comment about how "that's a really big blender for a single...(embarrassing pause)...you can mix a lot of stuff in that mixer." Yeah...it was all sunshine and rainbows until that moment, and then I just wanted to sneeze on him and spread some of my gay germs!

Anyway - I named her Ethel after my grandma Summers. My car is named Eliza after my Grandma Tibbett, so I thought it was only fitting to name my mixer after the other one. :) The interesting part (to me) about this is that Ethel went by Connie, and Eliza went by Cathryn. Neither of them really liked their given first names, but I think they're beautiful! Of course, Ethel and I will document our experiments and projects right here on the FGF blog, and I'm looking forward to many many years of cooking bliss with the old gal!