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Kitchen diary, now with added question!
Jun. 22nd, 2013 05:30 pmLast night I made a beef tagine for dinner, topped with sweet potato (yams, they seem to call them over here - as we did thirty years ago, so that I had to go to serious effort to retrain myself, and I'm not doing that again). By definition, as I have been to such pains to learn and enunciate the difference, there is no way that this is the first time I have cooked sweet potato - and yet, and yet. I have no memory of doing it before. Whether I baked 'em in their skins or peeled and boiled 'em like potatoes or stewed 'em as I did last night, I simply do not know. But they were yummy in the tagine. And there were Chinese long beans disguised as Moroccan green beans on the side, and spiced carrots also, and om nom.
Today I am apparently not cooking; we're going out for dinner. Downtown Sunnyvale, destination undecided. And I had meant to make an apricot cake this afternoon, but I lack half the ingredients and I'm not shopping now. Not for groceries.
So instead, here's a whole other kind of shopping, and a glimpse of my paralysis, out of which you may ease me kindly:
Back in the UK I had an old nay ancient Kenwood Chef food mixer, the gift of an old friend (tho' I think the mixer was older, I think it came from her mother). I didn't use it often, but I loved it when I did. I really wish I'd shipped it over, but there's that thing about different electricities, and I didn't know you could get reliable adapters, so I left it for someone else. Which leaves me just a tad bereft, and wishing for a new one.
And now I have money in the bank, albeit briefly, and it's one of the treats I'm considering. In the UK, I'd buy an uprange Kenwood Chef without a second thought; but they're not apparently available over here. What dominates the market here is KitchenAid, tho' there are other makes available. I'm half-dithering between a KitchenAid 600 Professional and a Cuisinart - but the trouble is, I will keep reading the one-star reviews on Amazon. I have no idea whether they paint an accurate picture of companies in decline selling unreliable merchandise, or if those are just the few bitter voices, the utter outliers on the bell curve, but they are working very hard to persuade me that both machines are a single piece of junk and not the fine devices that they used to was.
So, O my sane and rational and experienced friends: does anybody have a recommendation? Or indeed a warning? About either, or about another machine altogether? Quick, before I dither myself into an utter standstill. My ear is open, like a greedy shark...
Today I am apparently not cooking; we're going out for dinner. Downtown Sunnyvale, destination undecided. And I had meant to make an apricot cake this afternoon, but I lack half the ingredients and I'm not shopping now. Not for groceries.
So instead, here's a whole other kind of shopping, and a glimpse of my paralysis, out of which you may ease me kindly:
Back in the UK I had an old nay ancient Kenwood Chef food mixer, the gift of an old friend (tho' I think the mixer was older, I think it came from her mother). I didn't use it often, but I loved it when I did. I really wish I'd shipped it over, but there's that thing about different electricities, and I didn't know you could get reliable adapters, so I left it for someone else. Which leaves me just a tad bereft, and wishing for a new one.
And now I have money in the bank, albeit briefly, and it's one of the treats I'm considering. In the UK, I'd buy an uprange Kenwood Chef without a second thought; but they're not apparently available over here. What dominates the market here is KitchenAid, tho' there are other makes available. I'm half-dithering between a KitchenAid 600 Professional and a Cuisinart - but the trouble is, I will keep reading the one-star reviews on Amazon. I have no idea whether they paint an accurate picture of companies in decline selling unreliable merchandise, or if those are just the few bitter voices, the utter outliers on the bell curve, but they are working very hard to persuade me that both machines are a single piece of junk and not the fine devices that they used to was.
So, O my sane and rational and experienced friends: does anybody have a recommendation? Or indeed a warning? About either, or about another machine altogether? Quick, before I dither myself into an utter standstill. My ear is open, like a greedy shark...
