mashed potato time

Mrs. Pincus and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our son's house this year. This has all the makings of an annual tradition, as this is the third consecutive year that we have had the holiday dinner there. As plans were beginning to be made, my son's girlfriend requested mashed potatoes as a side dish. My wife usually takes care of preparing and bringing dessert, but this time she happily volunteered to fulfill the mashed potatoes request, as well.

In past years, mashed potatoes were a cinch. Just pop open a box of instant mashed potatoes — readily available at any and all supermarkets in a variety of brands and flavors (well, all are basically "potato" flavor) —  add in some milk and, after just a few minutes of stirring — voila! — you got yourself some mashed potatoes! However, the request for mashed potatoes came with the stipulation that they be actual, real-live mashed potatoes. Like from actual whole potatoes. So, on our weekend shopping trip to stock up on required items for our Night Before Thanksgiving dessert party (now in its 40th year!), we grabbed a big bag of potatoes. Like actual, from the ground potatoes. And we were going to make us some good old fashioned mashed potatoes. Just like the pilgrims and the pioneers and our mothers made! Those cardboard boxes of  dehydrated flakes would be passed over in favor of the "Real McCoy" or the "Real McPotato," as the case may be.

Now, I will happily admit that I don't know the first thing about cooking. I can make toast — that requires a legitimate kitchen appliance, so, in my opinion, that may count as cooking. But anything that takes place on top of the stove and combines multiple ingredients in some type of pot or pan... well, that's out of my wheelhouse. My lack of cooking skills considered, Mrs. Pincus would be preparing the mashed potatoes for our Thanksgiving dinner. First, she peeled a generous amount of potatoes. Then she put the potatoes in a large pot on top of one of the lit burners on our stove top. (The pot was larger than the one I had previously used to make hard-boiled eggs. Hey! Wait a second! Maybe I do know how to cook.... a little!) To be honest, I got bored. I left the kitchen briefly and missed out on what actually took place with the potatoes and the pot and the flame from the stove. I returned to the kitchen to find my wife working the soft, now-boiled, potatoes in the pot. She asked me to "google" a recipe for mashed potatoes to see what other ingredients were to be added. I said, "Why do you need a recipe? Everything you need to know is right in the name! Mashed potatoes! It's right there!"  She gave me a look as she added a few pats of margarine and a splash or two of almond milk. (The potatoes had to remain vegan-friendly.) She continued chopping and mixing... and  mashing. It looked like fun and something I could probably do without risk of ruining them. 

Our kitchen has a lot of gadgets and implements and such, but, curiously, we do not own a proper "potato masher." Instead, Mrs. P was breaking down the boiled tubers with a metal spatula, using its long blade to cut the bulky potatoes into smaller pieces. And it seemed to be working. Very well, as a matter of fact! I wanted in! I gently took the spatula from my wife's hand and began to mimic the chopping motions I had observed. "Are you sure you want to do this?," Mrs. P asked. "Sure!," I replied with all the confidence of a contestant on Chopped who fancies himself the greatest chef in the world. I continued the task of breaking those big potatoes in to small potato pieces. 

After a long period of time — longer than I expected (a time frame based on nothing in particular) — these mashed potatoes looked like the mashed potatoes I had seen over the years. They looked like the ones my mom made often to please my demanding "meat and potatoes" father. They looked like the ones I never ate but was forced to order in restaurants when my dinner order came with my choice of two vegetables and "French fries" was not an option. Goddamn it! They looked like mashed potatoes!

We began to pack up everything we would need to take to my son's house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was decided that the mashed potatoes would make their debut in the very same pot they were prepared in. This way they could just be heated up on his stove. 

The table was set at my son's house and he was busy in the kitchen making last minute preparations. He brought every component of the meal to the table, except the pot of Pincus-style mashed potatoes, which he left on the store. Everyone would have to scoop them from the pot themselves, as his dining room table was now fully loaded with other items. There was just no room for a giant pot of potatoes. Everyone's plate accommodated a big slice of "turkey," (Three of the four people at dinner were vegetarians, so Tofurky was served as the main course. None of your fucking comments, please.) some homemade cranberry sauce (a Mrs. Pincus specialty), a chunk of pumpkin cornbread (provided by my son's girlfriend) and not one.... not two.... but three kinds of potatoes! That's right! Our first attempt at mashed potatoes faced competition from canned sweet potatoes (not yams! do not call them "yams!") and little roasted fingerlings that I thought, at first glimpse, were mushroom caps.

Everything was great! I even had seconds — an entire duplicate of my first plate. And the mashed potatoes? Well, they were eaten. With little to no fanfare. No one said: "Hey! These are the best mashed potatoes I ever had! And they are mashed so well, too!" They mostly just said: "Please pass the potatoes" because there were so many to pass.

A few years ago, I had a job interview for a position of writing a blog for a pharmaceutical company. I am not now, nor have I even been, a professional writer. But I told them, if given enough information, I think I could write a blog about anything. I told them that I had maintained two personal blogs for over ten years and had written about many topics. At the time of the interview, I had just written a lengthy post about hard-boiled eggs. And now I just wrote nine paragraphs about mashed potatoes. Needless to say, I didn't get that job. 

But I can boil eggs and, now, I can make mashed potatoes.

www.joshpincusiscrying.com

washing dishes with my sweetie

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I certainly had my share of household chores. I would sometimes receive an allowance for completing my assigned tasks, but mostly my dad would forget. In his (and my mom's) defense, I was rarely denied a little extra spending money if I asked. I knew when I could ask and I knew when I  shouldn't... and that was a little game I played with my parents expendable income.

In the summer, at least once a week (when I wasn't gently reminded), I would fill this relic up with gasoline and push it all over our front and back lawns. This was a job that I inherited from my older brother once he graduated from household chores to employment in the "real" world. I didn't mind this too much. It was outside. It didn't take that long to complete. And sometimes, if the nearby Nabisco factory was in production, the air was filled with the delicious smell of baking cookies. It took my mind off that fact that I was cutting the grass, instead I mentally wandered through a magical world of 24-hour cookie ovens and stacks and stacks of Oreos and Chips Ahoy! (When I visited Walt Disney World for the first time, I was immediately taken back to this childhood scene as I passed the Main Street Bakery. It was only later that I learned that the wonderful "freshly baked cookies" scent was fake and Disney pumps it into the air to entice passers-by. Bastards!)

Every Wednesday evening, after dinner, I would wend my way around our house and empty the trash cans and wastepaper baskets in each room. (We called the trash receptacle in the bathrooms "wastepaper cans," but all the other rooms had "trash cans." I don't know why that was... but that's how The Pincuses lived.) Once that portion of the task was finished, I'd drag the big metal trash cans that rested at the side of our house down to the curb for collection the following morning. When I got home from school on Thursday, I would drag the empty cans back up the driveway to the side yard where they would remain until next Wednesday. (One day, there was an "incident" involving trash collection that you can read about here.)

While I was making my rounds on trash duty, my mom was doing what 1960s moms did. She was cleaning the kitchen. This was what society had deemed as "woman's work." My mom did "woman's work." Not happily. Not unhappily. She just did it. She did the grocery shopping. She did the cooking. She did the serving. And she did the cleaning up after dinner. Looking back, I remember that my mom always ate dinner last, sometimes just sitting down as my father was using a buttered slice of bread to wipe up the last drops of gravy from his plate before lighting an after-dinner cigarette (as opposed to the several "during dinner" cigarettes he enjoyed). My dad, my brother and I would exit the dinner table, leaving my mom to finish her meal alone and eventually clear the table and load the dishwasher alone, as well. (Boy, the Pincus men certainly were little shits!)

Our house did not have a basement or a separate laundry room. We didn't even have a dining room, as sometime in the swingin' 60s, my parents converted the designated dining room to a den, with a sofa, a chair for my father and a TV. That left our tiny 10' x 10' kitchen jammed with a clothes washer and dryer along with our family table and four chairs. Our house did have a dishwasher, though. It was a portable dishwasher with a butcher-block top that my mother put to good use. The dishwasher was on wheels, so during meal preparations, she'd maneuver it near the sink and chop up.... well, whatever it is that moms chop up when they make dinner. After dinner, and once the top was cleaned, my mom would put all the dinner dishes, as well as any pots and utensils used in preparation, into the depths of the dishwasher. With liquid detergent added somewhere inside, she'd extract a large garden hose-looking tube from the back and connect it to the kitchen faucet. For the next hour or so, the kitchen faucet was off limits! You want a glass of water? Get it from a bathroom! You want to wash an apple (like I actually ate apples! Ha!) Too bad! Again, use a bathroom sink or tough it out. My mom loved that dishwasher and, as far as the rest of the family was concerned, it was her dishwasher. After all, no one else in the family knew how to use it. We didn't need to. That was "woman's work" and my mom was the only woman in Chez Pincus.

Somewhere around the time I entered high school, my mom got a job in a women's clothing store. My dad was, at first, not happy about this development. My mom, however, grew to do whatever she wanted to do, regardless of my father's opinion... and my father knew it. Once my mom started working on a regular basis, family dinners became a thing of the past. Our freezer became stocked with TV dinners and other assorted meals of convenience. Pizza was a common dinner. While my brother and I would enjoy the cheese-laden pie my mom brought home from the pizza place next to her store, my dad would frown, grumble and make himself a cold-cut sandwich, smoke a couple of cigarettes and complain about how much he hated pizza, although I never ever saw my father actually eat a slice of pizza. 

Along with "mom-prepared" family dinners, other "mom" services disappeared. No more laundry. You want clean clothes? My mom gave one lesson in how to operate the washing machine and dryer. My brother and I paid close attention and soon we were doing our own laundry. My dad, the "breadwinner" (And breadwinners don't do laundry. They.... they.... win bread!) had no intention of washing his own clothes. He fought in World War II, ferchrissakes! He didn't defeat Hitler for the honor of laundering his own socks! My dad would often persuade my brother or me to add his dirty clothes to our batch. And, of course, we'd oblige. With family dinners a thing of the past, my mom's portable dishwasher was used less and less. It was only when the sink became an overflowing mess of plates and forks and the occasional pan (my brother figured out the secret of making grilled cheese sandwiches), that my mom would run the dishwasher. Still, no one else in the house knew how to load and operate the dishwasher. It was still my mom's thing.

When I got married, I wanted to be as helpful as I could be around our house. I wasn't going to be like my father, sitting back and watching my wife do all the housework while I smoked cigarettes and watched TV. (Well, I don't smoke, but I still had plans of watching TV.) I vacuumed and took the trash out and, briefly mowed the lawn... until we hired a guy to mow the lawn. As a matter of fact, we have also hired someone to clean our house on a regular basis. But there was still laundry! I had remembered the basics of doing laundry from the quick lesson my mom gave when I was a teenager. I made the offer to my new bride and, reluctantly, she let me take a shot at it. Our washing machine was much different that the one at my parent's house and the dryer...? The dryer had more buttons and dials and settings than the control panel of a commercial airplane. So, after I put one of Mrs. Pincus' favorite sweaters into the dryer, shrinking it to a size suitable for a Barbie doll, I was barred from laundry duty 'til death do us part. I wasn't about to ask to use the dishwasher.

Mrs. Pincus and I have been married for 38 years. In those 38 years, I have never loaded, closed, added detergent to, or operated the dishwasher in our kitchen. If someone came in, pointed a gun at me and ordered me to show them how to run our dishwasher, I would just shrug and tell them they might as well pull the trigger right now. I'd sooner be able to show them how to bake a cake... and I don't know how to do that either, but, I'm sure somewhere, there are printed directions. The dishwasher? Well, Mrs. P instinctively knows how to work it, just like she knows all the right questions to ask doctors and repairmen. She just knows. Good thing, too... 'cause I don't have those instincts. So, while I offer my (minimal) assistance in making salads for dinner, carrying packages from the car and carrying laundry (that I don't do) up from the basement, the dishwasher falls into the "appliance" category. As far as I'm concerned, when I was flagged from using the washing machine, I took that to mean all household appliances. 

Recently, an ongoing cacophony of uncharacteristic "clanky" noises coming from our 25-year old dishwasher let us know that we should probably start looking for a replacement before it is totally out of commission. Coincidentally, the ice maker in our equally-as-old refrigerator ceased working and, along with the various broken shelf brackets and cracked drawer guides, a new refrigerator would be a good idea, too. On Memorial Day weekend, Mrs. P and I wandered around the large appliance department at Best Buy and settled on a shiny new dishwasher and a shiny new refrigerator from the good folks at Samsung (makers of the TV in our bedroom and both of our cellphones.) Arrangements for delivery were made and in a few days, the Pincuses entered the 21st century of kitchen convenience. The refrigerator is a French door model with a through-the-door water and ice dispenser and a large drawer that houses a reach-in freezer. It is a far cry from the narrow, avocado green icebox in my parent's kitchen. The dishwasher, with its gleaming, stainless-steel front, has spacious racks and a cool flat shelf at the top for things like lids and spatulas that you don't want flying around during a cycle and smashing into your dishes.

On Day One with the new dishwasher, I don't know what possessed me, but I asked Mrs. Pincus to show me how to use it. I figured: "How difficult could it be? Technology has become simpler as time goes on, so the new dishwasher should be a snap! And sure enough, it was. My wife showed me what pieces she preferred go on the bottom rack and what should be placed in the protective top rack. She showed me where the detergent goes and how much to use. (First, she had to show me where the jug of dishwashing liquid is kept.) She explained the simple, silent, push-button operation. Then, just close the door and — BINGO! — magic occurs. A cool feature we discovered is when the cycle is finished, the door automatically pops open to help in the drying process.  

Mrs. P watched as I loaded the new dishwasher. She observed the way I squeezed the liquid into the little reservoir and snapped the lid of the compartment shut. I pushed two buttons — just two! — on the control panel, shut the door and the dishwasher whirred to life. Actually, it was pretty quiet. Next morning, after turning on the coffee maker, I emptied the dishwasher. I put our dinner dishes back in the proper cabinets, the glasses in their cabinets and the flatware in the correct drawers. There were a few items that, despite living in this house for nearly four decades, I had no idea where in our kitchen cabinets they are stored. I left them on the kitchen counter for Mrs. P to put away when she woke up. But — goddamn! — I acquired a new skill!

Now almost every evening, I fill and start the dishwasher and every morning I empty it and put our dishes and flatware away (except for the things I have no idea where they belong). Once again, I have chores.

Allowance, however, is still iffy.

www.joshpincusiscrying.com

i am the eggman

A little over a year ago, Mrs. Pincus and I decided that it was time to stop eating like ten-year-olds at a birthday party and start eating like adults. We eliminated all sweets and desserts and began a self-imposed diet regimen centering around a large salad for dinner. 

This is a stock photo.

Each evening, we stand side-by-side at our kitchen counter and prepare our leafy evening meals together. We each have our specific jobs in the preparation. I extract the various components from the different storage areas of our refrigerator and place them on our kitchen counter. Our fridge is regular stocked with fresh salad ingredients like lettuce, red cabbage and scallions (or green onions — the jury is out on which of those we actually use). I pile the items on the counter and Mrs. P chops them or slices them or slides them into a blade on a mini-mandoline slicer — whichever utensil or portioning method is appropriate for the particular element. While my wife adds things to her salad that I would never eat in a million years — like cucumbers and tomatoes — I begin my own customization process. I add jalapeno peppers, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers and bread & butter pickles (that's right, I like pickles on my salad! You wanna make something of it?). It is also my unofficial job to open a can of salmon for each of us. We have gotten used to including salmon on our salads and the salads seem incomplete without it. Sometimes, Mrs. P  makes fresh salmon and, believe me, it is much better than the canned stuff. Once topped with our personal choice of dressing (low-fat thousand island for Mrs. P and whatever is in the refrigerator for me), we accompany our salads with a baked potato and another fresh vegetable (usually broccoli or my new-found favorite cauliflower) and we're all set. We have been eating the nearly-identical dinner every night since February 2019 and we haven't tired of it yet. As a matter of fact, almost every night, one of us will remark how good the salad is and marvel at how it can be so delicious night after night.

Just for the sake of variety, we switch things up every so often. Instead of a baked potato, we will have a bowl of pasta made from shirataki, a Japanese vegetable. Or sometimes, we have a bowl of soup and Mrs. P will sauté a bunch of peppers, onions and mushrooms in garlic and oil for something she likes to call "Peppers, Mushrooms and Onions in Garlic." (Although it plays an integral part in the recipe, the oil is unjustly left out of the name of the dish.) We also look for other things to add to the salad. We have tried sun-dried tomatoes and French-fried onions. More recently, sliced hard-boiled eggs have become a regular part of our salads and I have become quite the hard-boiled egg aficionado. (Yes, it has been added to my resume just under my skills with PowerPoint.)

This is a stock photo.

Once a week, I dutifully fill an enamel pot (my wife showed me where we keep it) with water from the tap, just enough to cover a single level of eggs that will be placed at the bottom. I place the pot on the stove and turn on the flame, just like Mrs. P showed me. (I am not exactly Mr. Kitchen, so I appreciate the guidance.) Then I carefully add the eggs to the pot of water. I inspect each one for cracks before placing it in the water, sometimes turning them over several times and even holding them up to the light. Then, I wait until the water boils. When it does, I kill the heat, put a lid on the pot and I'm done.... until my favorite part.

Peeling off the shells.

This is also a stock photo.

I don't know exactly what it is, but I find peeling the shells from hard-boiled eggs very therapeutic. At first, it was sort of a challenge. I found myself pulling small chunks of the hardened albumen away with the tiny fragments of shell. I realized that there was a thin, almost invisible membrane that is between the shell and the egg white. I had to remove that membrane as well as the shell in order to keep the white in tact. After a while, I discovered different techniques with which to successfully remove the shell and be left with a perfectly smooth hard-boiled egg. I even watched a few YouTube videos showing several vastly different methods to attain the ultimate goal of the unblemished egg white. Some prescribed adding the eggs to already boiling water. This, as the video claimed, would prevent the membrane from creating a strong bond to the solidifying egg. Another suggested peeling the egg under running water or — better yet — submerged in water. I read an article on the internet about the subject (this is what my life has come to), including one that insisted on chipping away a quarter-sized opening in the shell on the wide end of the egg, then forcing a metal teaspoon into the opening and rotating it around the circumference of the egg. The promise being that  this action would force the membrane to separate and the hard-boiled innards would just pop out with no resistance. This has yet to be tried by me. There are other procedures that include adding vinegar or salt to the boiling water, but I think I will pass on those.

This is why I use stock photos.

I have found a technique that works well, using a little bit of several of the techniques I learned. I peel the eggs over the sink with a constant, fairly forceful stream of cold water running from the tap. I crack the egg fully on the edge of the sink and roll it around until the entire outer surface is covered with a spiderweb pattern of fractures. Then, it seems, that the shell is easily removed and the egg is left glistening, its exterior uncompromised.

So, what have we learned? Well, we learned that I have an awful lot of free time on my hands and that, given the opportunity, I can write four full paragraphs about hard-boiled eggs.

www.jopshpincusiscrying.com