Different Mixers [Man and Bits of Paper]

Four years ago when I lived in Massachusetts for a summer, I moved into a spacious but unfurnished apartment. As a present, my mother bought me a set of something like seventy cooking items from Ikea. They came in a big box, densely packed, and heavy as all hell.

I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.

That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.

At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.

I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.

I think one of the measuring cups has survived.

I think.

I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.

My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.

The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.

I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.

Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.

In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.

The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.

The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.

And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.

As for everything else?

There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.