In Tribute to my Spoons...

When I was a little girl, my sister and I had a children's cookbook. I don't know where on earth we got it, whether it was a gift or what, but it was a spiral-bound bunch of colorful pages with a thicker, laminated cover. I think it was a picture of a bear on the front. Maybe it was a person. Either way they were wearing the quintessential chef's hat and a toothy smile. Holding up a wooden spoon with one hand as if in greeting.

In this cookbook, there were recipes simple enough for children to make with limited adult supervision. In fact, I particularly recall the repeated warnings to let the adult handle the knife whenever something had to be chopped (or peeled or the stove turned on or, well, everything but spreading peanut butter on celery). I know the book got a lot of use. It was coated with sticky things and flour fingerprints to prove it. My memory recalls only one recipe, however: chunky applesauce. A limited ingredient list and skins on the apples--still some of the best I have ever tasted in its utter simplicity and reverance for the apple (my juicy and crisp friend, you!). I still feel bad about one of my mother's beautful clay bowls. As far as I remember, it was thick, cool to the touch and mottled with a few earthy colors. We forgot (well, I guess at that time I didn't know) about pouring the hot apples into the bowl without tempering the bowl first. The heat was too much of a shock and the bowl split. I felt very bad about that bowl.

I had a few things that I made in the kitchen and, after I got the applesauce down pat, I made most of them without adult supervision. The Tollhouse chocolate-chip cookie recipe was so familiar to me that I knew it by heart--though I always added an extra 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla. More dangerously, I also made suckers/lollypops to sell for fundraisers by melting sugar to blistering temperatures and pouring it into molds.

It is that cookbook, though, that sticks in my memory and today I will say goodbye to a part of that childhood self. You see, that spiral-book book came with a set of plastic measuring spoons, white plastic with labels in primary colors. It is only today, at the age of 26, that I am finally saying goodbye to these well-worn, well-loved spoons. Their labels are long gone--I can identify these close friends without their nametags anymore. They have lived in the drawers of endless apartments and have survived falling to the bottom of the dishwasher (next to the heating element) on more than one occasion.


Now, it is time to say goodbye. I bought a new, stainless-steel set at Sur La Table yesterday. I wanted to buy out the whole damn store (I could spend hours, I tell you, hours!) but I came home with those shiny beauties. So, I bid the spoons of my youth adieu. You have served me well, ladies, and your loyal service will be remembered. While my new spoons are shiny and sleek, they do not have your history. They did not bring me from child to chef like you did. Thanks for the education, darlings, and best of luck to you. I hope you meet up with the big, happy chef-bear in the great beyond, or wherever old kitchen equipment goes after death. You have certainly earned your wings.