by Sarah Walker Caron
Tonight, there will be fragrant gravy with fall apart meat, little onions and chunks of carrots. We’ll be able to smell it as soon as we arrive home, entering from the cold outside, and when we dig into our bowls, it will wrap us in warmth and comfort.
But for now, it’s just ingredients and kitchen tools — a collection of foods and objects, each with its own history.
The stainless steel one tablespoon measure with the neat rounded edged rectangular indent scraps against the clear plastic of the flour container that came as part of a set that I won on a business trip to Walt Disney World years ago. I remember carrying that heavy set across the park — it didn’t feel so magical then.
I measure one, two, three tablespoons of flour into the stainless steel mixing bowl with the rubber bottom that was surplus after a food competition my company organized and I judged. It’s my favorite bowl — except I have two of them, so does that make them my two favorite bowls? Perhaps.
When I put the white lid back on the flour container and press down the button, it closes with a satisfying snap. That’s also how I feel about some chapters of my life ending, like the end of my marriage.
I open the plastic covered package of stew beef from the local Hannaford Supermarket. I wish I could tell you the stew beef came from my favorite meat farmer — the man from Tangled Oak Farms who always remembers me and always has something kind to say when I see him at the Bangor Farmers’ Market. But it’s January in Maine, and I haven’t been to the farmers market since last year.
That’s not to say I couldn’t go. I just haven’t. The farmers market operates year-round, setting up twice a month in a parking lot in the winter. I missed the first market of the new year and the last one or two of the old year though, so I have to make do with what’s accessible until I go again.
In the kitchen, I measure three more tablespoons of flour onto the beef cubes. Then I give the bowl a shake and toss, repeating the motion again and again. The flour and beef cubes fly into the air and land back in the bowl — well, most the mixture does. A dusting of flour gets on my kitchen island, but I ignore it, continuing to toss until the beef is fully coated. Then I dump it all in the slow cooker, excess flour sprinkling down in a flurry like the snow that has blanketed our yard.
This is my everyday slow cooker, the one I reach for nearly once a week for dinner on busy nights. My other one is massive, sent to me years ago by a company I worked with developing recipes. It was fine for what they needed, but for my family I needed something more compact. It’s the duality of being someone who cooks for work and also cooks for their family. My boyfriend bought me this smaller one — smaller but not actually small — for our first Christmas when I remarked that the larger one was just too big for most things I made for our blended family to eat. I’d pictured one of those pretty black and white swirling patterned slow cookers when I said it, but this was really what I needed — just the right size with just the right features.
It’s time to add the vegetables to the ceramic pot. I pull out the stained cutting board I ordered with a subscription box last year and the knife that sat in a package for years, sent to me by some company that wanted me to write about them. When I finally opened the package last year after we moved, I discovered the best, sharpest knives I had used in a long time. Now, this one is my precious, my go-to. It’s the knife that I hand wash and keep carefully stored so it remains the sharpest in the drawer.
It’s true: I play favorites in my kitchen all the time. Favorite baking sheet. Favorite knife. Favorite slow cooker. Favorite eating companions.
With that cutting board and knife, I begin to slice the last of the carrots from Wise Acres Farm that I bought weeks before Thanksgiving, hoping it was enough for our celebration. All our plans changed at the very last minute so I never roasted them with herbs and garlic to serve with the turkey. Fortunately, carrots last forever in the fridge which is why it’s January and I am slicing them into the one-inch chunks I need for this. I love that this recipe only calls for big chunks. It makes it so easy.
I make a mental note to either buy carrots at the grocery store or get to the farmers market for some.
Onions are next, but I don’t have to chop these. I just open a package of frozen pearl onions and dump them in, listening to the pings as the little balls hit the ceramic sides. Sure, the recipe says to defrost them, but I never do and the beef burgundy comes out perfectly every time.
The recipe doesn’t specify a type of mushroom to use, but I’ve fallen in love with button mushrooms and keep using them in this recipe. Another favorite, I suppose. I grasp the stem of each mushroom and wiggle it until it gives away, removing it from the mushroom. I continue doing this again and again until all the stems are removed and thrown in the trash and I am left to decide how to clean the mushrooms.
I should take a damp paper towel and wipe them clean. But I don’t feel like it so I run them under water, reasoning that these mushrooms are about to go into the slow cooker with so much liquid anyway. It’s the wrong way to do it — spongey mushrooms will soak up liquid — but I don’t care in a recipe like this. And it’s the way my grandmother did it, years ago in our maroon and gold kitchen in the house she and my grandfather built.
Now it’s time to mince the garlic. I open the cabinet to the left of the stove and pull the chipped white garlic keeper from its place on the shelf. The nickel top lifts off with a pock-sound, the seal giving way and I pull a head of garlic — grocery store variety, I’ve used up all our local garlic — from the inside. The recipe calls for two cloves but I decide to finely mince three today. A little extra garlic will make this even better than usual, I am sure. Replacing the lid on the container, I consider how nearly all the kitchen tools I’ve used so far are part of my life after marriage — bought or gifted since my husband packed a truck and moved in with his mother and I packed a truck and moved to Maine with our kids.
But this garlic keeper, it’s a vestige to the past — still useful despite the memories. My ex-husband gave this ceramic jar to me for a birthday he missed when we were still married, one of several presents he bought the year that his estranged biological father beckoned him to New Hampshire and he went without another thought or discussion. When he returned, days after I turned 31 or 32 or whatever age it was, he showered me with present after present from Williams-Sonoma, as if that could make up for his absence. A cookie press that I used only once, finding the process annoying, and the kitchen torch I insisted he return because I would never use it. And this garlic keeper. Was there more? I don’t remember. I only remember feeling like he was trying to buy my forgiveness. It failed. He’d chosen the man who rejected him again and again over me, his wife. It was an injury I kept inside, though years later I still know how it stung.
There’s only the broth to contend with now — the final piece of this recipe. It brings together odds and ends to create a fragrant liquid for this dish, much like our experiences together create who we are. I measure tomato paste — I found a leftover can in the fridge from the last time I made this dish — into a bowl and pour in beef stock. I use more red wine leftover from my parents’ recent visit then the recipe calls for because I want to finish the bottle. Next comes the kosher salt from the little turquoise salt pot I keep next to the stove along with dried rosemary and thyme and black pepper. I bought a set of them with my kids on a road trip to visit family in the times before the pandemic halted our travel. Next, I pull out a tiny whisk, the one I bought while on a business trip to Seattle with a dear friend years ago, and whisk the ingredients all together. They break and combine and become something lovely. I hope that’s what the ingredients of me have done too over time.
Perhaps it’s what I am still doing — breaking so that I can become something better, smoother, lovelier. Sometimes I worry though that my trauma has left me curdled, unable to become a smooth broth that can cover the flour covered beef and one-inch carrots and frozen pearl onions and perfectly minced garlic to make this magnificent dish. But I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
I press a button on the slow cooker and set it to cooking. This part is done now. It will do its job while I do mine.
Work, study, attend to my kids, feed the cat, run out again and again for different things.
Later, after my son runs in a track meet and after my daughter takes her dance classes and after I drive home from the college town up the highway, we’ll boil some egg noodles and ladle this Beef Burgundy over it. And it will be warm and comforting, a meal that tastes like I spent hours cooking it even though I really spent minutes assembling it courtesy of the kitchen gear that I’ve accumulated through my many experiences.And we’ll dig in, my children and I, letting that comfort wash over us. And we’ll be together. Just as it’s always been.
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photo credit: Annie Spratt, Unsplash
Sarah Walker Caron is an editor, food writer, feature writer and the author of eight books, including the recently released Disney Princess Tea Parties Cookbook and the popular Super Easy 5-Ingredient Cookbook. Her personal essays and feature writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Connecticut Magazine, The Today Show Website. and many other publications. She was named columnist of the year by the Maine Press Association in 2015. She is a part-time faculty member at the University of Maine where she teaches a variety of journalism courses including food writing. She also teaches professional blogging at Husson University. She graduated with a bachelor of the arts degree from Barnard College, where she studied political science, and received her Masters in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Maine.
Farmer-ish 