Tales of excessive utensils

My mother has eight wooden spoons.  For whatever mysterious reason, she has accumulated eight wooden spoons, and they’re all kept in a drawer with a multitude of other utensils, perhaps even another wooden spoon I didn’t count.

I am amazed at the amount of kitchen utensils my mother has managed to collect over the years, and yet, she seems to have only one silicon spatula to flip over pancakes.  Since it’s all kept in a drawer, a bit of a dig is involved to find the right utensil needed–gigantic wooden chopsticks, one of a number of wooden spoons, a wooden spatula or three, a potato-masher, etc.

The new place I’ll be living at has ample drawer space for Clark and I.  I don’t have nearly the number of kitchen items my mother has, but I actually have one or two duplicates of things, if I remember rightly.  Much of my stuff is either sharing space with my parents’ stuff or in boxes, so I can’t remember exactly what I have.  However, I do have a rather excessive amount of pastry blenders, because I used to keep one at my old apartment, and another at the apartment of my former boyfriend, and this keeping of two sets went on with a few other things, like silicon spatulas and mixing bowls.  I gave some of these extras away to my friend Mike when I moved out of the apartment on Lakeview, but not the pastry blender, which then was taken to my parents’ place.  Yesterday, when I took my mother to Michael’s, I got sucked into the display they had for Wilton baking products.  When I walked away, I had a stack of items consisting of measuring cups, a liquid measuring cup, a “baker’s blade” and another damn pastry blender.

I haven’t used the “baker’s blade,” which seems to be a fancy way of saying a bench scraper, nor the new pastry blender, but I’ve used both the measuring cups and the liquid cup today for pancakes and for the failed attempt at thumbprint cookies I’ve made–failed because I squished the cookies when I shouldn’t have, and I don’t think I cooked the jam all the way through so that they’d harden properly when added to the tops of the cookies.  Bah!  In any case, I don’t think I should buy any more utensils until I’ve moved into the new duplex, so that way I can have all my things together and accounted for, and to see what I might need, if anything.  I won’t need wooden spoons, though, as I think I might relieve my mother of the army that she has.

Oh, Honey!

Yesterday was my big Honey Run up to Renninger’s in Mount Dora.  I took my esteemed associate and colleague Jeannette through the long and, in this case, rainy trek to the flea market.  My modus operandi was Henry Parker’s honey booth, where I bought huge mason jars of tupelo, orange blossom and, my favourite, saw palmetto honey, and a couple of smaller mason jars of the palmetto honey for friends.  The honey is worth the drive–an average-sized mason jar full of orange blossom honey is only five bucks.  When I gave my friend Kate the jar I bought for her later on yesterday, she commented, “It’s a lot bigger than I expected it to be.”  The prices for tupelo honey is a little bit more expensive, with the massive-sized jar being $13 and change, but it’s yum.  Per TupeloHoney.org:

Pure Tupelo honey is produced from the White Ogeechee Tupelo (nyssa ogeche), it ranges through the Ogeechee River, the Apalachicola, and the Chattahoochee River Basins of northwest Florida.  These river valleys are the only place in the world where Tupelo Honey is produced commercially.  Bee hives are placed along the river’s edge.  The bees fan out through the surrounding Tupelo blossom rich swamps during April and May and return with nectar to produce their liquid treasure.

Pure Tupelo honey has a light amber golden color with a slight greenish cast.  This honey is a choice table grade honey with a delicious flavor with a delicate distinctive taste.  Honey produced from only the White Tupelo is the only honey that will not granulate.  Due to it’s high laevulose (44.3%), low dextrose (29.98%) ratio (average), doctors have been able to recommend some diabetic patients to consume Tupelo Honey.

Interestingly, when I was trying to see if Henry Parker still has his website up (doesn’t look like it), I stumbled across another blog with someone commenting about their honey-buying trip yesterday, complete with a picture of Henry Parker.  He’s the gentleman with the plaid coat and the white beard.

Renninger’s Flea Market was also a boon for Jeannette, who bought a used quilt for five dollars.  It was a super score.

We continued our spending spree at a Goodwill in Fern Park, where I bought a pair of jeans that fit for $2.99.  I’ve given up buying jeans at conventional retailers, as the price of jeans has gone up to levels that I’ve deemed obscene, and I seem to have good enough luck to find jeans at Goodwill anyway.  I own two pairs of jeans that are both a little long on me, but I’d rather roll up the ends of my Goodwill jeans I spent less than five bucks apiece for than spend $30 or $40 on a single pair.

I need that money for food.