A small kitchen is
necessarily kept simple. There is no room for a dishwasher, for instance, and
nowhere to stack all the bowls and utensils for one big wash-up later on.
Instead the cook is motivated to keep dishes washed up, a few at a time, by
hand, during the food preparation and cooking process. Washing dishes by hand
can be meditative. For me it’s often time to begin planning out a blog post,
writing and rewriting in my head before sitting down to look at words in
sentences.
Limited counter and storage
space keep electric appliances to a minimum. Having dishcloths, towels, spices,
and utensils close at hand is a higher priority, and often, from years of
simple habits, I reach automatically for a hand whisk rather than hunt up the
electric mixer.
But there is no substitute
for a waffle iron.
My mother, my earliest
teacher of kitchen wisdom, knows this well, and it was she who gave me my
waffle iron. Most of the time, it’s hidden away in the back of a cupboard, but
a couple times a year, on special occasions, out it comes, and New Year’s Day
morning was one of those special occasions. A holiday, of course, meant a
relaxed morning at home, but besides that, I’d fallen behind in my bread baking
over a stretch of unusual holiday scheduling at the bookstore. No eggs without
toast for David! But he loves waffles.
For some home cooks,
simplicity means mixes and frozen entrees. For me it usually means cooking
slowly, from scratch, with fresh and organic ingredients, but I have to admit
that on New Year’s Day I had a box of pancake mix in my cupboard -- pancake mix, not pancake and waffle mix, though. So out came my oldest and most trusted
cookbook, because I was going to be improvising and needed to check several
recipes, both for pancakes and for waffles, to see what I would need to add to
the mix. And if not for that need to improvise, I would never be writing about
my New Year’s Day waffles at all. From a mix? Please!
The most basic difference
between pancakes and waffles is that the eggs are separated in the making of
waffles, the egg whites beaten stiff and gently folded into the other
ingredients at the very end. A bit of shortening is also called for in waffle
batter. So I melted a couple tablespoons of butter and separated three eggs (I
was flying by the seat of my pants, but two just didn’t feel like enough), and
also substituted whole milk for the water called for on the pancake mix box. It
all seemed reasonable, but would it work?
The moment of truth is
opening the waffle iron to take out the first waffle. It is an anxious moment!
Will the hoped-for waffle stick to the iron? Will it tear apart? Or will it
retain its integrity but be disappointing in texture or taste?
Practically perfect! The
kitchen new year is off to a good start!
Number 2 kitchen project of
the day was hoppin’ john. Good ham, chopped finely, cooked up with chopped
onions. (How can any dish fail when it begins with an onion?) Chicken broth
from the freezer. White and wild rice. Organic (yes, canned) black-eyed peas
from a company right here in Leelanau Township.
Black-eyed peas always make
me think of my mother’s stepfather, who grew up in northern Florida. Wild rice
carries my mind up to the Upper Peninsula, the birthplace also of the maple
syrup on the morning’s waffles, gift of a writer friend. And of course I’d
already been thinking of my mother, who gave me the waffle iron. So you can see,
what with all those memories, it was pretty crowded in my tiny kitchen on New
Year’s morning. Fragrant, too.
We were invited to a
neighborhood party in the late afternoon, inspiring me to undertake NYD kitchen
project #3, sour cream pumpkin cake, made entirely from scratch, with no canned
ingredients or mixes. I had frozen the excess cooked, mashed pumpkin from my
Thanksgiving Day pie and had everything else in the refrigerator or
cupboards.
I rarely bake cakes. Pies,
yes. Cakes, seldom. Consequently, every cake project is a learning experience
for me, and one lesson I learned the last time around was that mixing cake
batter by hand with a whisk or wooden spoon is more than I can successfully
manage. My arm would fall out of its socket before the batter achieved desired
smoothness, the necessary prelude to a light finished cake.
Out came that electric hand
mixer, after all. Oh, my god, the roar! I felt as if I were standing on a
helicopter pad, in a war zone, surrounded by menacing airborne machines! The
front of the mixer even looks
menacing, doesn’t it?
But the batter grew smoother by the minute.
I love the moment, not captured here on camera, where cake batter is poured
into a pan, falling from bowl to pan in a series of graceful folds. That is a
moment of grace, full of promise. And then the pan goes into the oven. A twist
of the timer. (Simple, in the Paris kitchen!) [photo of timer] And gradually a
spicy aroma emanates from the tiny kitchen and fills the old farmhouse.
Waiting, writing....
The toothpick (test for
doneness) comes out clean. The cake smells delicious. It looks a bit pale and
plain, but I don’t feel like making streusel topping. Perhaps a dusting of
brown sugar? Or cinnamon sugar? Let is cool and sift on powdered sugar? How
about sifted powder sugar and cinnamon. I think I’ll go that last route.
Well, it’s been a good
morning in the kitchen. Now it’s early afternoon and time for tea.
Postscript: Was that
cake not strangely pale? Oddly flat? When it was cut into at the party
(luckily, I had also taken my hoppin’ john), the peculiar texture was not at all what
I’d hoped or expected. People liked it anyway, most for being “not too sweet.”
But what went wrong? Baking powder too old? Around 5 a.m. the answer came to
me. I remembered photographs, in that oldest of my cookbooks, of popovers at
different oven temperatures. I must have bumped into the dial on one of my
passes through the doorway. Oven temperature too low would give exactly the
result I got.
Which goes to show that no
kitchen is so small that it will not yield failures as well as successes. In
that the kitchen is a microcosm of life. And in the kitchen, as in life beyond
it, failure usually has something to teach. Good reminder for the first day of
a new year, which will no doubt bring new challenges on many fronts.
