Cook takes a few missteps in the kitchen
The things some of us go through just to cook dinner.
Earlier this week, it was raining
– AGAIN – and it seemed like the perfect night to have a nice
warm bowl of clam chowder, accompanied by organic baby broccoli and
garlic bread.
It seemed like just the right thing to have, somewhat healthy
and somewhat indulgent at the same time, and best of all, something
hot on a cold, rainy evening.
Cook takes a few missteps in the kitchen
The things some of us go through just to cook dinner.
Earlier this week, it was raining – AGAIN – and it seemed like the perfect night to have a nice warm bowl of clam chowder, accompanied by organic baby broccoli and garlic bread.
It seemed like just the right thing to have, somewhat healthy and somewhat indulgent at the same time, and best of all, something hot on a cold, rainy evening.
I make clam chowder a lot. It’s something everyone in my family likes to eat, and I now have the recipe memorized, so that it’s an easy meal to fix. At least, easy in the sense that I know exactly what to do and none of it scares me.
I make my own version of it that skips the bacon bits, and I substitute low-fat milk for the heavy cream, and it is pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.
At any rate, I ran down the mental checklist of items I needed. Butter, check. Flour, check. Potatoes, check. Onions, check. Clams, check.
For some reason, I entirely forgot that I had only about a teaspoon of milk in the refrigerator.
Maybe I wasn’t remembering what I was supposed to because I was mad at the weather. When the rain started pouring down in the afternoon, I grew increasingly annoyed with Ma Nature.
“It’s May! It’s not supposed to be raining and 50 degrees,” I muttered, shaking a mental fist at the sky and simultaneously worrying about my tomato plants, which have not gotten a break since I planted them a few weeks ago. The poor things are just plain confused by all this cold.
Then my boyfriend called, and we talked. I invited him to dinner.
“Oh good, clam chowder,” he said when I told him what we were having.
Glenn likes just about everything I cook, which is one of his wonderful qualities. But he does, in fact, really love the clam chowder.
I start making the chowder, which in reality should be called potato-and-onion chowder with tiny bits of clams thrown in. That’s because it is, in fact, mostly potatoes and onions.
Chopping the potatoes and onions takes a while, because the pieces have to be fairly small, and because my knife sticks to the potatoes, I am constantly wiping off the knife.
Glenn arrived, and I was still chopping. About halfway through the potatoes, I realized I had no milk.
“I’m going to start cooking the potatoes and then run to the store to get milk,” I told him.
I then finished chopping and went to open my cans of clams. That’s when I realized that my can opener didn’t work.
I’ve had this manual can opener for years. It’s always worked, and in fact, has worked extremely well. For some reason, it decided to stop working just at this critical moment.
It punched into the can as usual, but when I turned the crank, it wouldn’t go around the rim. It just spun.
I managed to punch a few holes in the cans so I could drain the clam juice into the potato pot, and then left for the store.
We have two little markets in Aromas, and for this occasion I chose the Firehouse Market, called that because it’s inside the old Aromas firehouse building. It has all kinds of things, from fresh produce to DVDs, and I felt certain there would be a can opener there. And certainly milk.
I bought a gallon of milk and a can opener and headed back home.
I removed the can opener from its packaging and fit it onto a can of clams. And guess what: the new can opener broke. Actually, literally broke into several pieces.
I must have made a noise of disgust, because Glenn asked me, “What’s wrong?” probably thinking I had burned or cut myself. “I’m fine,” I said, trying to figure out what to do.
So I then took the old broken can opener and started punching all around the rim with it, one punch at a time, until I could open the can. This took a while.
Eventually, we did have clam chowder. It was a struggle, but at least it was not in vain. But now the question remains: Am I hard on can openers, or do they just not like me?
