fun times as the household chef

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My Most Used Small Kitchen Appliances

My Instagram feed seems to be full, lately, of people using these fancy glass air fryers to make their meals. I fully realize that the air fryer doesn’t make the meal, the chef does. But, what can I say, I fall under the spell of beautifully filmed meals with soothing voiceovers.  The other reason I am susceptible to the siren song of a new air fryer is that I haaaaaaate using the oven when it’s hot out. Did I hate it this much in our old house? I’m not sure. But I get so sweaty and uncomfortable, and it seems like the heat lingers forever, and our ovens have internal fans that kick in automatically and shut off automatically and they take FOREVER to turn off, so it’s always loud in my kitchen when I cook something in the oven.

Of course, we already HAVE an air fryer. It’s perfectly good, although it’s a little on the small side for cooking entire meals. If we got a new one, we’d need to make sure it fits. This house has a lot of storage, which I love, so most of my small appliances are tucked nicely away. Which appliances would I get rid of to make room for a new air fryer? (Especially a nice extra big one, with dual drawers?)

This got me thinking about which small appliances I use and which ones are expendable. I feel like I have a pretty typical array of small appliances: blender, food processor, toaster, mixer, crockpot.  Some of them, like the food processor, I use only rarely. But it’s handy enough that I want to keep it. I think I would jettison the wok. The wok used to be my most-used small appliance, but I haven’t used it even once since we moved into this house. It doesn’t fit into the dishwasher (grumble grumble) and I am very opposed to hand-washing things, so I typically make stir fries and curries in a big pot on the stove. Which works just fine. I have mentioned many times before that I am scared of our Instant Pot. It has lived in our basement for several years now, and I should probably just get rid of it. The only reason I keep it around is that once in a while we make these very tasty burgers. Is that reason enough to keep a rather unwieldly appliance around? I don’t know.

On the flip side, some of my small appliances are used so frequently I could NEVER get rid of them.

  • My electric kettle. I use this every single day to heat up water for my tea. In the dark old days before I had an electric kettle, I had a kettle I heated on the stove. It took too long to boil and the water was always too hot and I didn’t really like having a kettle constantly on the stove, but it was not easy to stow elsewhere. And then I went through a spate of heating my tea water in the microwave, which was fine, although the mug always got too hot. An electric kettle seems like one of those frivolous single-use items but it is NOT, it is magical. I don’t quite know why it’s better than the other methods, but it IS. My only wish is that it could be programmed to make my tea at a specific time, like my husband’s coffee maker.
  • My slow cooker. This is one of those things that, if it were to break, I would order a replacement immediately. (I know this from experience; once I dropped the ceramic insert and it cracked in half and I placed an order for a new one so fast.)
  • My stick blender. As you know, I love a good smoothie and I eat one almost every day. I used to make them in my blender, which came with a smoothie cup attachment. But the stick blender is smaller and lighter and just as easy to throw in the dishwasher. Plus, I can use it for making dressings and sauces and soups and all sorts of other things. I love it so much, I have two.
  • My toaster. My kiddo has been on a dual Eggo waffle and sourdough toast spate, so the toaster is called into service most mornings. I like this one because of its extra long slots, which can fit a lot of sourdough. It does seem to need to “warm up” a bit though; the first batch of toast takes forever, the second batch burns if you don’t turn it way down.
  • My mixer. You know I am a huge fan of making ridiculous cakes and cupcakes. How could I do either without my stand mixer?! I’ve had this workhorse since 2008, when we got it as a wedding gift. It’s a little more wobbly than it used to be, but still works great.

I probably don’t need a new air fryer. Clearly, I am already swimming in small appliances. But I would be interested in your most- and least- used small appliances. And in your favorite air fryer, if you have one.

Here is a gratuitous kitten photo, for those readers who enjoy such things.

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Cookie Swap Reminder, Dinners This Week

Carla and one of her friends and I made So Many Cookies this weekend. Like, a staggering number of cookies. So many cookies that I RAN OUT of regular flour (I had whole wheat flour, almond flour, self rising flour, and bread flour, but no all-purpose flour) and had to borrow some from the neighbors. 

I made three batches of dough (cream cheese sugar cookie, regular sugar cookie, chocolate snickerdoodle) and Carla’s friend’s mom made a batch of gingerbread, and I divided all the dough in half and froze half for later, and we STILL had thousands of cookies.

The kids had a blast, making cut outs and rolling snickerdoodles in cinnamon sugar and smashing Jolly Ranchers into smithereens and decorating baked cookies. And I have plenty of dough leftover to make more cookie plates this weekend. 

Also, after Birchie mentioned saltine toffee, I made a batch of that. Our house is cram jammed with sugar, y’all!

Anyway, this is all to say that if you are baking this week, or have baked recently, and want to be included in the Cookie Swap, send me a) a photo of your baking project(s), plus links to the recipe and/or b) a link to your own blog post about your cookie project. Please send your photos and/or links to  lifeofadoctorswife [at] gmail by midnight Eastern time on 12/20. Then I will assemble all the links and photos in a post this weekend and we can all virtually enjoy one another’s delicious creations. 

Now on to the less festive, more grueling side of food prep and consumption: dinners. I continue to be burnt out on dinners. This week, my husband and I have TWO date nights to look forward to, which will be fun in so many ways, including that we will go OUT to dinner. So I’m on the hook for five dinners and I am taking the easy way out.

Dinners for the Week of December 16

  • My Favorite Fall Salad with Roasted Chicken: My grocery store had giant blueberries on sale, so those are for sure going into this salad along with apples, goat cheese, pecans, and red onion.
  • Ham Sandwich: Heck yeah. Ham sandwich time. (“Ham sandwich” is our family shorthand for “make your own dinner.”) (I did buy some ham for my husband, but I also bought him some roast beef and I got ingredients to make black bean tacos.) 
  • Pizza: I also bought ingredients to make homemade pizza.  

Last week before Christmas! Let’s goooooo!

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Party Planning Committee Postmortem: How the Dinner Party Went

Let us rejoice! The dinner party is over!

I think it went well! People stayed until nearly ten, so that’s a good sign, right?

The biggest success of the night was using Meaghan’s GENIUS idea to put a plastic tablecloth down for the kids and then just scoop it up and throw it away once the kids were done.

Dinner Party Kids' Table

Unfortunately, I did not have a real cloth tablecloth long enough for the table-with-leaf. But that’s okay. We put down placemats instead. And I forgot to put the flower arrangements back on the table after we turned it. But OH WELL I think it was still okay.

The biggest flop of the night was the kids’ sandwiches. I think the ham and cheese sandwiches went over slightly better than the BLTs, but even my bacon-loving child refused to eat the bacon.

I don’t know why! It was good! It seemed like maybe three of the seven children ate ANYTHING. My child – for whom, you will remember, I made the sandwiches in the first place – ate only fruit. But what the sandwiches lacked in appealingness-to-small-children, they made up for in adorability. Also I will never make them again because it does not take a small amount of time to cut out a million circles of bread and lettuce.

 

Dinner Party BLTs 3

Let’s talk about the grown-up food.

It was a good idea to do a signature cocktail, I think. We made Dark and Stormies. Rather, my husband made them for people, and those who had one enjoyed it. (I had a gin gimlet.) We also had plenty of beer and wine.

Dinner Party Bar

We had a TON of appetizers. The hummus – from Costco – was barely touched, despite (or maybe because of?) the lovely paprika-oil I sprinkled on top of it per Lauren (I think I could have been more artful in my drizzling; next time) (my husband says the hummus was just Not Good). Barely anyone ate any of the veggies (which I bought and cut myself, except for the carrots; there were NO VEGGIES TRAYS to be found during any of my three trips to the grocery store!). Several people seemed to enjoy the cranberry relish (I sure did) and one of the guests brought chips and salsa, but we didn’t put much of a dent in that either. Basically, the appetizers weren’t a huge hit, I guess. Oh well. We had a whole bowl of cranberry relish to ourselves the next day, which isn’t a bad thing.

Dinner Party Cranberry 2

I know this combination of ingredients sounds weird, but it is SO GOOD.

The problem with having a secret blog is that it’s a little weird to take out your phone and get pictures of all the food before you serve it. Also, I wanted to get things on the table. So I have Before Pictures, but only one After Picture (courtesy of my husband).

My main panic of the evening was timing. (This is always my main panic. When do you start cooking something? When do you take it out? How forcefully do you push people to sit down? When do you clear the table? When do you serve dessert?) Everyone arrived about thirty minutes late. Which… fine. We all have small kids, things happen, not a big deal. (Except that in my plan, people arrived at one time, the kids would eat 30 minutes later, then the adults would eat 30 minutes after that. HA.) Of course, then the kids wanted to play, so they were really hard to wrangle for dinner. And then they kept slipping away from the table instead of eating their adorable but unappetizing sandwiches. Sigh. I have no idea what time we finally got them out of the kitchen and flipped the table, but by then the chicken was WAY overcooked.

Dinner Party Chicken

Not cooked at all yet… So much potential for nice, juicy meat… 

I ate it – even though I am still Avoiding Chicken – and it had a good flavor. It was dry though. I put it in the oven a bit early because my oven tends to take a little longer than recipes say it should… but that extra time plus the tardiness of the guests plus the herding-cats of children issue led to dry chicken. I wish I had thought to pour the pan juices into pitchers so people could use it as gravy. But I didn’t. OH WELL.

The potato salad was dry, too, which was hugely disappointing. I guess my potatoes weren’t cut into small enough pieces? It didn’t prevent people from eating it, at least. I am a little fearful that our guests (especially the four who’ve never been to our house before) might think that I am A Cooker of Dry Food, but… what can you do. It is how it is.

Dinner Party Potato 1Dinner Party Potato 2

The salad was very good and got compliments. I did not take a picture of it because I assembled it right before serving.

Carla had asked me to make a treasure hunt, so I did. That’s what the kids did while we were eating dinner. They had a BLAST, with only a couple of argumentative incidents. (Future Me: Do NOT tell Carla about the treasure hunt until it is time to BEGIN the treasure hunt or she will tell the other children and they will sneak around trying to find the clues without context and mess things up.) The actual treasure was: 1. Little rabbits that you put in water and “grow” from the dollar section at Target. 2. A washable Melissa & Doug tattoo. 3. Two mini Hershey’s kisses. 4. A fruit snack.

Dinner Party Treasure

The kids — ages 3 to 7 — really enjoyed this treasure hunt. And they did a great job of working together to figure out the clues. I made them go up and down as many flights of stairs as possible in hopes of wearing them out. I hope they slept well for their parents.

The fallen chocolate cake was the best part of the dinner. (It wasn’t terrible to cook, either, although I had an Egg Incident that necessitated me buying another dozen eggs and tossing eight perfectly good eggs that I’d screwed up during the separation process.) It fluffed up just as it was supposed to, and fell while it cooled just as promised.

My husband made whipped cream and I piped it into the middle of the cake and topped it with raspberries. It was delicious. Moist and chocolatey with a nice crunch to the outer crust. The whipped cream and raspberries were the perfect complements.

Dinner Party Cake 5

At least SOME cake was left to photograph.

I had to double the recipe to make enough for a ten-inch springform pan, and I made cupcakes for the kiddos with the leftover batter. The cupcakes turned out a little weird: the bottoms somehow evaporated, so that when you took the wrapper off, there was only the top half of a cupcake inside. Oh well. The kids enjoyed them anyway. I put a blop of whipped cream and a raspberry on each one. Absolutely the only issue with the cake was that I was afraid to “frost” it before the guests arrived; it was a good thing, too, because the whipped cream fell and we had to re-whip it. But piping it and topping it with raspberries was a little stressful. Overall, WORTH IT.

Dinner Party Cupcakes

I did not get a photo of them with their whipped-cream-and-raspberry toppers before the children descended upon them like locusts.

Next time, I might do the following things differently:

  1. Have fewer guests. (Although, really, it worked out FINE.)
  2. Find something (the only option is tacos) that Carla will eat that I can also make and serve to company. Or maybe pasta (as long as I save plain noodles for her)?
  3. Fewer appetizers????

For future entertaining, I would definitely repeat:

  1. The plastic tablecloth over a real tablecloth option for big groups/two seatings.
  2. The treasure hunt (but a SECRET treasure hunt, next time).
  3. Signature drinks.
  4. The cake.

That’s that, Party Planning Committee! Thank you for your service and for attending this postmortem. Next time, we’ll do even better!