vie a la table

it’s always so fun shopping with christmas money. i’m all about someone being a great gift giver, who makes or finds something fabulous and wraps it like it was on the cover of a magazine. but i am equally excited about gift cards and money. most people frown upon a gift card or a check, like it was the last resort, but it’s so thrilling for me to go out and spend it on myself! maybe because i am a very thrifty person by nature… i can talk myself out of buying things so easily… ‘i’ve already got a blouse that color’, ‘my purse still holds up’, ‘i can figure out how to rig something instead of using this gadget’. if you ever need help limiting your spending, take me along.

but wil and i were blessed with some generous gifts this holiday, and where else would we go but to a kitchen store! the more time we spend at home, the more we think about the kitchen doodads that we want and need, as food is just as much a source of entertainment for us as the tv.

with my on call shift at my new job not needed, and with wil’s classes cancelled due to a power outage hitting all of north portland and some of the downtown area, we bundled up to go buy some goodies. we stopped into sur la table…our consensus is that alton brown might not approve. this store is so full of one trick gadgets that the small kitchen has no room to store…gimmicks like brownie pans that looks like a mouse maze so that every piece is an ‘edge’ piece. : P

but it is full of some great quality things, and wil got stuck a couple times in the back corner with fancy balsamics and at the wall of chef knives behind glass. we came away with some good loot…and when i emptied our bag, my selections were fun…wil’s all seemed very necessary. a meat thermometer to replace his broken one, a pepper grinder to replace the one that wil has been tempted to throw out the window once or twice, and a funnel, as we’ve surprisingly enough had multiple instances wishing we had one. (we are on a ’save old glass bottles/jars’ kick as a side note)

one big purchase was the 1300 page larousse gastronomique. wil enthusiastically exclaimed that this is THE resource to be a serious french chef, and where all of his modern day textbooks lack, this book shines through. he’s learned about this in school…all i could think of was when paul gave a copy of this to julia child and she laughs because it is all in french (in the movie of course!).

i will not be attempting to read this, but it was fun to flip through, as it is a comprehensive encyclopedia of anything culinary. as for me…i did not achieve my goal of reading the baking book by the new year. come on, who was i kidding! the book got opened maybe two or three times over our vacation, each time not longer than about 45 seconds since more often than not i was being summoned by siblings, parents or more likely, nieces and nephews. it has been interesting, but not entirely applicable to me. as a home baker, i can’t quite make anything from it based on the large scale formulas it provides meant for professional equipment. but i do love still reading about everything, and i am keeping at it. i’ve read about breads, pies, cakes, cookies, creams, frostings, pastries…and still have about a quarter to go. but wil, being a good man, still told me to buy something inspired by the book, and so i bought a mini spring form pan and some cool smooth sided ramekins.

we attempted to go to powells to buy a cool wall calender, which is literally across the street from sur la table, but they were out of power! our side of the street was lighted and bustling…and all in the other direction was dark with handwritten signs on their doors. we migrated to whole foods to grab a quick lunch and headed home…a good, short shopping trip…with someone else’s money.

Filed under:
books, food, kris, life by kris