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It’s official. After seven years in my new apartment, I’m ready to cook. With the purchase of three bright orange pans, my kitchen is complete.
I could hold a dinner party now—well, except for the fact that I have no table and chairs (no place to put them if I had them, either). But boy I could cook up the food in style and serve it the same way.
When I moved from the old place, the old beloved place in which I’d raised the three beloved children, I had cooked and served—wait a sec, I’m doing the math—about a quarter of a million meals if you count all the people who ate with us at various occasions and non-occasions.
I’m not even counting the summer parties we had, when we’d set up a stage with a band, cook for days, play horseshoes and volleyball, dance around bonfires. We invited the whole world whether we knew them or not. To this day, I run into people who introduce themselves and say, “I was at your summer party in 1981” or ’82 or 3. Some of them had to have been 5 years old at the time.
But in all those 27 years, I never had a new pan or new silverware or new dishes—just a mishmash of unmatched castoffs. The first things I bought for my new apartment were the dishes, black-and-white square things, some black bowls and white bowls and black-and-white bowls.
For a few years I would buy one or two of every goblet I fell in love with. Goblets don’t need to match and are perfect for absolutely every unheated beverage there is. I bought the silverware last year, although I can only serve four people at a time—well, eight if you’re willing to use the wrong size spoon or fork.
I know I probably could have lived without the new pans—I had brought along two cast irons, one beat-up saucepan, and an even more beat-up soup pot when I moved to the new life. And honestly in these intervening years I haven’t cooked much.
When a new friend and I were talking about food recently, he said, “Oh, that’s right, you can’t cook.”
Wrong! I can cook—you tell me how many people raised a family grinding the whole wheat berries to make the flour to make the bread, how many made everything from scratch, how many made strawberry rhubarb pie, nut loaf, that heavenly pungent curry with the fresh scallions straight from the garden!
Can’t cook? No, I just don’t. I don’t feel the need to feed people anymore, to go through the hubbub of preparation and cleanup, washing tons of dishes (yup, that’s the kind of cook I am). And I’ve never adjusted to the “cooking for one” thing—how to buy fresh vegetables, fruits; how to cook a little bit of lentils and rice, one piece of salmon—or the space thing—my old kitchen had part of a bowling lane for a table.
Last year a farmer’s market set itself up within walking distance of my apartment. And for part of the year—a small part, to be sure—I found myself walking to the market to handle one luscious tomato, eye two fresh carrots, a beet, fondle an onion, and then pop them into my little bag, and walk the few blocks home.
This year they’ll be simmering in my beautiful orange pans.
Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced Jah-KIH-mih-deez) is a writer and artist living in Bangor. Her most recent publication is in the collection About Face.
I could hold a dinner party now—well, except for the fact that I have no table and chairs (no place to put them if I had them, either). But boy I could cook up the food in style and serve it the same way.
When I moved from the old place, the old beloved place in which I’d raised the three beloved children, I had cooked and served—wait a sec, I’m doing the math—about a quarter of a million meals if you count all the people who ate with us at various occasions and non-occasions.
I’m not even counting the summer parties we had, when we’d set up a stage with a band, cook for days, play horseshoes and volleyball, dance around bonfires. We invited the whole world whether we knew them or not. To this day, I run into people who introduce themselves and say, “I was at your summer party in 1981” or ’82 or 3. Some of them had to have been 5 years old at the time.
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But in all those 27 years, I never had a new pan or new silverware or new dishes—just a mishmash of unmatched castoffs. The first things I bought for my new apartment were the dishes, black-and-white square things, some black bowls and white bowls and black-and-white bowls.
For a few years I would buy one or two of every goblet I fell in love with. Goblets don’t need to match and are perfect for absolutely every unheated beverage there is. I bought the silverware last year, although I can only serve four people at a time—well, eight if you’re willing to use the wrong size spoon or fork.
I know I probably could have lived without the new pans—I had brought along two cast irons, one beat-up saucepan, and an even more beat-up soup pot when I moved to the new life. And honestly in these intervening years I haven’t cooked much.
When a new friend and I were talking about food recently, he said, “Oh, that’s right, you can’t cook.”
Wrong! I can cook—you tell me how many people raised a family grinding the whole wheat berries to make the flour to make the bread, how many made everything from scratch, how many made strawberry rhubarb pie, nut loaf, that heavenly pungent curry with the fresh scallions straight from the garden!
Can’t cook? No, I just don’t. I don’t feel the need to feed people anymore, to go through the hubbub of preparation and cleanup, washing tons of dishes (yup, that’s the kind of cook I am). And I’ve never adjusted to the “cooking for one” thing—how to buy fresh vegetables, fruits; how to cook a little bit of lentils and rice, one piece of salmon—or the space thing—my old kitchen had part of a bowling lane for a table.
Last year a farmer’s market set itself up within walking distance of my apartment. And for part of the year—a small part, to be sure—I found myself walking to the market to handle one luscious tomato, eye two fresh carrots, a beet, fondle an onion, and then pop them into my little bag, and walk the few blocks home.
This year they’ll be simmering in my beautiful orange pans.
Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced Jah-KIH-mih-deez) is a writer and artist living in Bangor. Her most recent publication is in the collection About Face.
