Skip to main content

Potato Peeler

Many winters ago I received a holiday gift of an OXO vegetable peeler shaped like a Y from a vendor we worked with at the time. While I never owned a lot of kitchen doodads, this peeler was love at first sight and a love that has never dimmed. It changed the whole nature of potato peeling for me. 

Focus moved from the act of peeling to what might follow from there. What would be created and what level of perfection may the potato achieve. These were never the concerns at potato peeling in the past. It was necessary to focus on safety, reducing discomfort and successful completion of the job. 

About a year ago I accidentally left the peeler on a hot stove top and a part of the handle melted. The peeler became a less perfect to hold, the ding made it rough to touch. It was harder now to focus on the perfection after instead of the mundane act of peeling the potato. 

The arc of the OXO peeler’s life in my kitchen drawer is not that different from that of my own. I have brought joy to some in the past but after being dinged over the years the joy I might bring is subsumed by dealing with my imperfections. For some the peeler would have fallen to disuse by now or replaced even but I still hold it very dear; some in my life continue to cherish me dings and all. 

Interesting what thoughts might come to mind reading about the OXO peeler.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more