Kitchen Confidential

Hi, my name is Amie.

(Hi, Amie!)

And I have too many kitchen appliances.

(Ooooohhhhh.)

I live in a small house in Southern California with a tiny kitchen and a nonexistent pantry. 80% of what i make is pasta for my three small children. But, fellow kitchen hoarders, I have 11 -- ELEVEN -- small appliances in my kitchen. I have more appliances than forks.

My friend Shama linked to this recipe for Bacon Meatballs, and I was intrigued. But then I read the instructions, and it requires a Cusinart. Now, I have a Cusinart -- a really nice hefty one that was a wedding gift. But two moves (7+ years) ago, I lost the detachable stem which attaches the slicer to the feed tube, so I packed it away and added to my mental List of Things to Do: Replace Attachable Stem, right between Replace That Missing Paddle for my Zojirushi Bread Machine (are you sensing a theme?) and Make the Wedding Albums for Our Parents (11 years and counting. I am ashamed.)

But then it was a rare chilly day in Southern California, and I had a hunk of Gruyere in the cheese drawer, screaming out to be melted in some onion soup. I love onion soup, and I have a great recipe, which is part my SIL Kim's recipe and part Julia Child. You can find a close approximation here.

Here's what the recipe calls for: 10 cups of sliced onions.

Here's what I hate doing: slicing onions.

Here's what I couldn't find: my trusty cheap mandolin that slices right into an attached metal bowl. It's cheap, it's easy, I still cry all the way through it. But it's better than hand-slicing onions.

So, I went online (sadly, there is no Kitchen A La Mode here). I could replace my cheap mandolin for 30 bucks or hey! I could replace my long-lost detachable stem for 12 bucks including shipping! Hooray for Amazon Prime! So I placed the order and waited a couple days for my stem.

I got it, I went to the farmer's market and bought 4 pounds of onions right off the truck, and sliced up good bread to dry out in the oven. I pulled my Cusinart out of a box in the garage, scrubbed 7+ years of accumulated dust off of it, and readied my onions.

The stem was the wrong size.

Reader, I was in a pickle.

My husband loves onion soup and had been hearing about the Saga of the Missing Detachable Stem forever. We were both looking forward to the soup that evening and it was a Saturday, the last night of the week you can make onion soup if you have the digestive systems we have. (Co-workers, feel free to thank us for this policy the next time you see me.)

What could I do? I hand-sliced 4 pounds of onions. It was miserable. The soup was delicious. I ate it for breakfast the next morning.

But! I discovered that I had the chopping blade for the Cusinart, and that it could make its way back into my kitchen affections. Last night I made those Bacon Meatballs. and they were moist and garlicky and delicious. Will they replace the special beef-pork-lamb meatballs I make with Sunday Gravy and sausages? Nope. But they will be on our Weekday Easy Meal Recipe Rotation, especially when I have my 7-minute tomato sauce or the three ingredient tomato sauce in the freezer and only have to dirty one pan? Yup.  (I don't like that it calls for "3 cups of marinara sauce" when they could have just as easily given simple instructions for a sauce to be made at the same time. The only jarred sauce I buy is Trader Joe's Organic Vodka Sauce, which is, honestly, better than and vodka sauce I could make, and my kids prefer it to my sauce -- mine has GREEN THINGS in it.)

So, my fellow kitchen hoarders, here's the rub. I have eleven small appliances in my kitchen and I Am GOING TO USE THEM ALL IN ELEVEN DAYS.

Will you take this challenge with me?

Today I used my KitchenAid to make chocolate chip cookies with The Goose.

I used to joke with my then-future-mother-in-law that I only wanted to get married so i could get a KitchenAid. To her credit, she gave me one for Christmas the year before we got married. My mother-in-law is awesome enough that I took it as a "hey, this is something I know you want" and not a "here's your KitchenAid, don't marry my son."

My mother-in-law also gave me her vintage copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It has clipped-out reviews of the book from the NYT tucked into it, and very sedate splatters on the pages that she used to cook fantastic meals for her husband's colleagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  I used it to plan a 100% Julia Child dinner party when I only had two kids and could do those sorts of things. 


You know what's awesome about Chocolate Chip Cookies? They are the perfect thing to hide things like steel-cut oatmeal  and ground flaxseed in.

 Me and The Goose.

 Aforementioned Cusinart.

 Zojirushi Bread Machine. I'm planning on making bread tomorrow morning.

 Serious blender. We don't make a lot of mixed drinks these days, but Evan made a smoothie the other day that repelled the kids. We'll see if we can use it for something they like.

 Our toaster. This is kind of an easy one -- I love toast. Years ago our toaster oven died, and Evan gave me a fancy toaster over for Christmas. It was awful. It made things hot, it looked nice on the counter, but it didn't make toast. I returned it and bought this toaster and have been a huge fan ever after. It's an expensive toaster -- I think it was upwards of 60 bucks five years ago -- but it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing else. I love it.

 This is my slow cooker. I use it for one thing: making ribs that we then finish on the grill. I would love some suggestions on branching out.

 My rice cooker. The new kid in town. I love it. I will probably make sushi rice in the next couple days, pair it with teriyaki salmon, and steam some veggies and shumai in the steamer basket.

 WHIRLEY POP! Next Family Movie Night, we will make our own popcorn instead of going through a million bags of Trader Joe's microwave popcorn.

 This is the ice cream maker Evan got me for my birthday right before he left for CA. We did indeed have a lot of fun with it then, but now I need to find room in my freezer for the internal tub, which is gigantic. Don't the ice-cream maker people realize I have a freezer full of Trader Joe's lunches?

 Hiding behind the ice cream maker: our apple peeler. Every fall we went apple picking and had a nice party with our friends where we peeled a million apples, made pies, and Arlo, strangely, scarfed down all the apple peels. There's no apple-picking season here. And that is a perpetual source of sorrow for me. I will try and find a picture of Evan and I, 13 years ago, being all datey and going apple-picking together, He was a good sport.

So I used one today. I am giving myself 11 days to use my 11 appliances. The 11th is the mircowave.

Anybody with me?

ps: The one appliance I didn't mention in my Sodastream. It's been tucked away in the garage until I replace the CO cartridge we needed to toss because our movers didn't want to deal with it. Trust me, it's on the list.