The Tao of Martha (29 page)

I just didn’t need to
say
it.

“Where is the slow cooker now?” he asked, rising from his spot.

“Butler’s pantry, right side, bottom shelf.”

Before Angie could describe what Walmart’s like in China, Fletch marched back in the room carrying the Crock-Pot.

The Smug arrived two seconds before him.

“What’s with the smirk? Was the cord inside the removable ceramic part?” Angie asked.

I had to roll my eyes. “Oh, like I didn’t check there ten million times?”

In one deft move, Fletch flipped the Crock-Pot on its side to display the bottom…where the cord was neatly wrapped around the prongs.

Damn it.

Angie barked with laughter while Fletch explained, “The more you
talked about the cord, the more the day I bought it came back to me. I remembered my thought process as I weighed my options. There were nicer units, but I said to myself, ‘Jen will likely lose a cord in the chaos that is our drawers. I should get the model with the attached cord to prevent this from being a problem. I’ll buy this one.’”

“Then why didn’t you tell me it was attached during the two years I looked for it?” I was delighted to have my slow cooker back, but aggravated at all the time I wasted. Am I not a paragon of efficiency, after all?

“She never asked?” Angie offered.

“She never asked,” he confirmed.

Point?

I’ve found a project to occupy my time and my mind: slow cooking for the win.

And I shall call this month CROCKTOBER.

“W
hat’s for Crocktober dinner tonight?” Fletch asks.

“Pulled pork with a side of red cabbage.”

He nods appreciatively and rubs his beard. “Mmm. How long till it’s ready?”

“We’ll eat at six thirty.”

“Great!” As he retreats from the kitchen, he turns back to say, “The house smells like McDonald’s right now, and I mean that in the best possible sense.”

I nod in agreement. He’s dead-on with that assessment. The air is fragrant and heavy with the scent of warmed meat, even though I’m braising pork and not frying beef. I bet the similar aroma stems from the ketchup in the recipe. There’s something inexorably linked about McDonald’s and the smell of ketchup.

I’m excited about serving this particular dinner. Pulled pork is one of those dishes I never had any idea how to make. I routinely buy it premade by the pound at various grocery stores, and I’m always disappointed because it tastes so much better when homemade. Had I any clue how simple pulled pork was to fix at home, I’d have started years ago! The only difficult bit was making sure I started dinner eight hours before we wanted to eat.

With the advent of Crock-Pot meals, my organizational skills have been put to the test. As I was a competent home cook before, it could be six p.m. and I’d have no idea what to serve, yet I could always whip something together before Bill O’Reilly came on at seven p.m. (Don’t judge; I find his bloviating highly entertaining.)

But now I plan not only the morning of the dinner, but often days before, so I can shop and stock all the needed ingredients. I feel so…domestic. In terms of the Martha Stewart Experience, Crocktober has been among my favorite parts. Our roles in this house are fairly nontraditional in that I’m the primary breadwinner, and Fletch is more likely to take care of the day-to-day business of our household. He runs the laundry and washes the dishes and scoops litter boxes. He’s the one who schedules vet appointments and picks up prescriptions and
drops off dry cleaning while I’m at work. (Generally working involves my sitting at my desk in yoga pants without benefit of a shower, but still.)

But in living my life like Martha, I’ve taken back the mantle of domestic responsibility. Through diligent time management and a growing sense of organization, I’ve been able to better balance both household and professional tasks. I’m always at my best when I’m busy, so instead of feeling overwhelmed, I feel accomplished.

With my stepping back into the picture, Fletch has had time to start a small telecom consulting business. He’s still in the early stages of establishing a client base, but he’s deriving a great deal of pleasure from building something on his own. Plus, his being in an excellent state of mind is absolutely improving my own.

Since we’re not quite so enmeshed in each other’s day, we actually have stuff to discuss at the dinner table now, other than Bill O’Reilly. Which is lovely.

As Crocktober has progressed, I’ve come to accept exactly what a state my kitchen has been in for the past two years. Again, everything appears neat and clean, but there’s neither rhyme nor reason to any of the cabinets. What it looks like is that we moved in and I immediately had a book due, so I threw the contents of every box into any open cabinet. (That’s because it’s exactly what happened.)

Before I started any projects in the kitchen, I sat down and brainstormed on kitchen priorities, which were basic, yet painfully lacking. I wanted:

• like items, such as flatware, china, and glasses, grouped in a way that makes sense. I want day-to-day items in one spot, and entertaining items in another. Sounds so simple, and yet…
  
• a spice rack where I can easily grab what I need without pawing through every herb I ever bought
  
• a dedicated baking cupboard
  
• an orderly freezer where chuck roasts don’t come flying out to hobble me
  

So, every day, once I set up my Crock-Pot meal, I’ve been working on organization. I started off in the spice cabinet, as Fletch had previously claimed that looking for garlic salt was “like an Easter-egg hunt, without the fun.”

By using Martha’s advice from her “How to Stock: Home Essentials” checklist on the Web, I quickly culled half of my spices. I gave them the sniff test, and the ones that were no longer fragrant were tossed. (FYI, you do not want to snort cinnamon. Trust.)

I also evaluated my own purchasing habits and cursed myself for having three kinds of allspice. WTF, allspice? I can’t think of one dish that requires allspice, let alone enough to require three bottles! I did cut myself a break on the four bottles of chili pepper, because that had Fletch’s fingerprints all over it.

I cross-referenced the spices Martha recommends to keep on hand from
Martha Stewart’s Cooking School
and restocked accordingly. The only one I didn’t buy was Szechuan peppercorns, figuring I could muddle through with my black, white, red, and pink peppercorns, as well as my favorite Williams-Sonoma smoked pepper. (Which totally makes up for the macaroni sauce debacle.)

Then I put everything back in alphabetical order.

Oh, my God.

Rather, ERHMERGARD!

Do you have any concept of how much easier life is with alphabetized spices? Everything
I need is right there, in the exact same spot, every time I go to grab it. Assembling ingredients for a meal now takes seconds, not minutes.

Who knew?

Okay, maybe everyone else in the world already knew this, but I feel like Helen Keller the first time she figured out the word for water. Fletch says this makes him my Annie Sullivan. Oh, really, Annie Sullivan with your spices arranged by
country of origin
? No.

After I tackled the spice rack, I felt confident and emboldened and I rearranged all the dinnerware. I finally donated the plain diner-style dishes we received for our wedding, because the stupid lip on them made it impossible to balance a knife on the side. Instead, we’re now officially using the brightly patterned stuff I bought for a dinner party a while back, and Fletch no longer has to sneak off to enjoy their wide-lipped bounty.

My ultimate plan in here had been to convert the gun cabinet to a baking cabinet, but as Fletch works on it (he insisted), I realize that it’s too pretty to use to store flour. Also, Loki’s bed is right in front of it, and I don’t want to upset him every time I make a pie. (Which has been often—Crocktober has also turned into Sweettober, as I’ve been trying various pie recipes like crazy in order to have my Thanksgiving offerings down pat.)

So the gun cabinet will be a china cabinet, which means the butler’s pantry will be rededicated for baking.

But first I have to tackle the Cabinet of Shame.

The Cabinet of Shame is far worse than the Drawer of Shame, due to both size and necessity. With the drawer, everything’s stashed away to protect stupid cats and dogs from ingesting items that could hurt them. The cabinet? Well, that’s just laziness. This is prime kitchen real estate, located directly across from the stove. But is it filled with cookware or pantry supplies?

Not even a little bit.

Among numerous other items, I remove the following:

• my entire collection of
  Mad Men
  Barbie dolls, as well as my bonus Iggy Pop action figure
  
• six bottles of tanning lotion for electric tanning beds, none less than four years old
  
• a single mitten
  
• three kinds of pastel Easter grass, not bagged or contained, just pretty much sitting on a shelf with other bits of effluvia like quarters and screws nesting in it
  
• a garage door opener to an apartment we vacated in 2008
  
• three empty bottles of bug spray
  
• a copy of
  Life
  magazine with Richard Nixon on the cover (to be fair, we’d been antiquing recently)
  
• eight thousand loose AA batteries
  
• two chewed-up dog hairbrushes
  
• nine broken Christmas ornaments
  
• three packages of plastic caps to go on the cats’ claws to keep them from destroying the furniture/one another
  
• phone books, phone books, and more phone books. Because apparently the Internet no longer exists
  
• one set of 1970s mustard-yellow salt and pepper shakers shaped like mushrooms (In and of themselves, this is a reasonable item to house in a kitchen cabinet. Yet Joanna and I purchased them because they closely resembled the photo our friend received of one guy’s junk and we thought it would be funny to send them to her…except I fail at execution.) (Also? Naked Dude who thought he was being sexy by sending unsolicited shots of his gentleman business? For future reference? This photograph was passed around the table at Moto on the night of my birthday in 2010 at least a dozen times. Other tables even got in on the action. For Christ’s sake, we showed the same waiter who later appeared on
  Top Chef
  . Many,
  many
  laughs were had at your expense. Sending someone a picture of what’s in your pants is not a good way to flirt. However, it
  is
  an excellent way to have the story of your poor decision memorialized in the Library of Congress, so let this be a lesson to you.)
  

As I work, I have to wrestle almost every one of these items away from Hambone, as Libby has taught her the finer points of counter-surfing.

Oh, Hambone.

Once the cabinet’s emptied I’m able to wipe it down and restock with the overflow of pastas and rice from the other cabinets. That’s when I realize that all the times we’ve been to
the grocery store and I’ve said, “Do we need more bucatini?” we did not.