Spoon Shopping

During lockdown, like pretty much everyone and everywhere else, we’ve been working on life inside four walls. Hubby rehabbed the light fixture, I’ve been cooking actual meals despite a glut of overtime and a decidedly uncooperative body, and so on.

Since hubby has been home more, and with more time on his hands, he noticed little details. Sometimes nitpicky details.

He does the dishes more than I do and started griping about the state of my wooden spoons, which I use every single day.

While I have a baker’s dozen of them, they’re all starting to deteriorate. I asked him if he’d sand them down and douse them in mineral oil, which he agreed to do. About five minutes into the F-bomb-laden process, he decreed it’s time I replace them. (The “or else” was heavily implied.) This was while everything was still shut down so I was going to head for WalMart or some similarly soul-sucking outlet. Hubby gave me the stink-eye and told me to order from Amazon instead, and not to get any more of that cheap garbage.

I wasn’t paying fifty bucks for wooden spoons, and most of the other options were dozen-packs of the same thing I already had. Then I found a trio of spoons in walnut, which is a gorgeous hardwood and I figured would last longer. I ordered this walnut set (as shown in my feature image). My only concern was hoping they’d be long enough for me to use with my Dutch oven and other larger pans. They looked kind of short to me in the picture. (I never measured my old wooden spoons. Who would? So measurements in the description didn’t mean much.)

Walnut is insanely expensive wood, so the $20 price tag made me think they might be on the small side, too. A chunk of walnut big enough to make even one of those would cost you probably $10-15, alone.

OH. MY. GOD.

Amazon delivered today. The photo is deceptive because these are gorgeous tools. And HEAVY. They look shorter in the picture because the handles are easily twice the diameter of my old dollar-store variety. Well worth every penny I paid for them.

We’re going to wash, then soak them in mineral oil and wipe them down. These will be treated with a lot more care than the crappy semi-disposable ones I’ve used all my life, so I expect they’ll last the rest of my life, easily.

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While I was online today I ordered the spousal unit’s birthday present – a $40 specialty hand saw. We had already discussed it and I asked his input because while I can tell you what a router does and what a thickness planer looks like, I don’t trust my judgment to choose for him, usually.

In this case, however, I had seen enough videos to have a rough idea, and this was the highest-rated Japanese saw on Amazon. I know what it’s used for and how much he wanted one. So I had already pretty much decided to go with that one, but figured I’d ask, just in case.

I showed him the one I linked and asked if it would be okay. He grinned ear-to-ear and said, “That’s the one I would have ordered for myself.” His birthday is a little over a month off, so I won’t be late this year.

(Disclaimer: I’m using links from my affiliate page so if you buy this saw or the spoons – which we all know you won’t – I might get paid 2 cents or thereabouts. But ‘Zon requires the disclaimer and for the few readers I have, I figured you don’t care either way.)

Almost makes up for forgetting his birthday a few years ago. Almost.

I don’t know if I mentioned before, but my spousal unit is Dutch. As in, his parents lived there when Hitler invaded, when Anne Frank was hidden in a cupboard in somebody’s house. His sister and her family still live in the Netherlands.

Birthdays to the Dutch are a few notches above Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Labor Day, combined. Forgetting a birthday is absolutely unthinkable. You don’t only wish the birthday person a happy birthday. You congratulate their entire family. Let’s just say forgetting a birthday is a cardinal sin, and one I won’t commit again.