This is my bamboo floor. Isn't it gorgeous? And I even figured out how to send a picture -- after a couple of tries.
A dinner at OLD friends’ house kept us off of Bluemound Road on Saturday evening. These are such OLD friends, that Pat was my maid of honor and I was her’s, back when we could call ourselves "maids." Or pretended we could. She had read my blog about Boston Market, and when we arrived she was chuckling about what she was serving for dinner. It was meat loaf, made to The Man’s specifications using his (and my mother’s) favorite recipe from Betty Crocker’s cookbook. What a treat! With corn on the cob, oven browned potatoes and homemade rhubarb cake for dessert, it was the perfect home-cooked meal.
I was in a rush on Bluemound Road this noon, dashing between the kitchen faucet shop in Waukesha and my haircut appointment at Phases. So I stopped for lunch in the next restaurant on my list: Burger King. Oh, dear. It is a run down, old, not-too-clean fast food spot with a menu like McDonald’s of twenty years ago. Lots of people must like this fare. There were senior citizen couples eating there and a steady stream of young workmen like those who have been putting up drywall and installing flooring in my kitchen. The menu is almost all burgers and other fried sandwiches. As I don’t usually do burgers – unless they are buffalo burgers off of my grill – I ordered a salad, so I could compare it to McDonald’s. Burger King has two salads (each $4.99). They are basically the same, but one has grilled chicken on it, the other deep fried chicken. I ordered the grilled. It had a large portion of nice, fresh-looking romaine lettuce, a few tasty slices of tomatoes, several of those small carrots (not cut up -- how do you eat them with a plastic fork?), some grated soft cheeses, and a grilled chicken breast -- in a bag. Really. The chicken comes separately, hot, in its own paper pouch. I dumped it from its bag onto my salad, poured on some of the lite Italian dressing I’d ordered and stirred up the salad with my plastic fork. That was a mistake. The lettuce beneath the nice green, crisp stuff on the top was brown and gooky (professional restaurant reviewer terminology used to describe ancient greens). I ate the chicken, the cheese (of course) and a few bites of greenery and then dashed off to visit the plumbing. Another mistake. No overflowing waste containers, but the sink was totally disgusting. In the twenty years this joint has been open, no one has ever scoured the sink.
I washed my hands at my favorite beauty shop and swore to go to McDonald’s for my future fast food salads.
Not wishing to mess up my spiffy hair by working in the garden, I decided I'd give you a blow-by-blow description of which items are necessities to keep available when you decide to go kitchenless in your house. It’s amazing how few items you really need, if you just eat dinner out every night. Looking over my supply of sunroom stuff today, I realized that I had kept available way more items than I will ever use. What was I thinking I would cook in a casserole dish? Over what was I planning to grate cheese for which I’d need the grater? The food scale? Do I need to know how many ounces of raisin bran I’m pouring into my styrofoam bowl?
Here’s that list of the additional stuff that I should have packed off into my basement storage dump with the mixmaster and the cookbooks: the slow cooker, the blender, the indoor grill (these items would be impossible to clean in the bathroom sink), corn on the cob holders, ketsup, dip mixes, soda crackers for soup, and all spices. Dill weed, for goodness sake? Tumeric?
The items I actually use are: wine, 4 wine glasses (in case you drop in to enjoy the graciousness of our bomb shelter/ sunroom), a corkscrew, plastic flatware, paper plates, vitamins, nuts, cereal, olive oil, vinegar, tuna, splenda, coffee and coffee maker, 2 coffee cups, one paring knife, and fruit. And a few pieces of real silverware, because I can’t seem to manage to eat my salad for lunch with a plastic fork without slopping it on myself or to make a sandwich with a plastic knife for The Man Who Plays Sheepshead On His Lunch Hour. Honestly, that’s IT. You can exist on these items, plus a few things in the refrigerator, like lunch meat, mayo, salad ingredients, milk, orange juice and bottled water. And maybe a little ice cream in the freezer to keep you out of Kopp’s on a daily basis.
Not Floor-less, but still
Kitchenless in Brookfield
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