Friday, August 10, 2007

Time is a changing.





If you were to ask me what the most valuable tool for my use in the kitchen is, you might be surprised at my answer. It’s not the whisk, the namesake of my blog, the mixer or the cuisinart..nor is it the zester, the rubber spatula or my candy thermometer. Don’t get me wrong, these things are pretty handy day to day…and, really, I couldn’t live without any one of them, but the one thing that really keeps me ticking..literally, is my handy timer. I actually have a pretty good internal clock. One that, every morning, wakes me at 6:09, a minute before my alarm clock goes off. In the kitchen, it comes in handy though, to have that back up nagging voice. I admit, at times, when I hear the beeping, I think to myself before I go searching each oven, “now what did I set that for again?” My trusty timer has saved many cookies from the brink, and it has reminded me when I have crumbles bubbling and crème brulee’s cooking slow and low. So, yesterday, when I stood in the kitchen and the timer starting beeping at me and counting upwards at a large clip, I was a little alarmed. (I hadn’t set it to do that or even touched it for that matter) At first I figured it was the resident restaurant ghost playing tricks on me, but when I thought about it, I realized that my timer was trying to tell me something else. He was tired and he was full of grime and oil from being dropped into the fryer (his trusty magnets have worn..thank goodness the fryer wasn’t on.) He had nagged me for 6 long years, with only 1 battery change, and, he wasn’t going to take it anymore, even if I gave him a fresh battery and wiped his parts free of oil and grime. That was it.
So, today, I retired Taylor Timer, and I reminisced about the good times and bad, through the kitchens of Greystone, Ithaca and back to Seattle. I think of all the millions of things we produced, me and him, together.
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