Pots and Pans

Oh, my. Would you look at that sweet young thing. I would not go so far as "virginal" (see comments on last post) but I certainly was sweet.

There I am holding up my very first set of pots and pans. I am sure I was thinking that I might even learn to cook with them some day. What a silly girl I was (sweet but silly).

As you can see below we still have this very same set of pans and we still use them every day. They have survived many moves and many meals.

Why I remember like it was yesterday the time I almost burned down our apartment using that giant pot (see I still don't even know the name for it--the big pot is what I usually call it).

We were living in Princeton (so I am guessing we had been married barely 2 years) and Lyle was away for overnight trip somewhere. I got it into my head that I should cook something for him. So I looked through my cookbook (something else I got as a wedding present I believe) and decided on lamb stew. Now, I had never eaten lamb before in my life so I have no idea what got into me. I trotted off to the grocery store and purchased everything I would need. Then came home excited to start cooking! I mean, come on, how hard could it be to read and follow a recipe (christmas cookies anyone?).

The first instruction was to heat up some oil in the bottom of the pot. Well, OK. I put in the required amount of oil and set it over a flame. I, of course, had no idea how what size flame to use or how to tell if the oil was heated to right temperature so I just waited. I waited so long that the whole thing just burst into flames. Thinking quickly (I am quick, I just can't cook) I put the lid on and turned off the burner. I brought the whole pot over to the open window in the living room (there was a radiator in front of it that I set it on) and lifted the lid. Whoosh more flames, this time almost taking off my eyebrows. I slammed the lid back down and left that pot right where it was for about 2 hours. When I was brave enough to return to it, there was a pot-sized hole in the paint on the radiator and I assumed the pot was ruined. I probably should have kept with that assumption. But instead I cleaned it and proceeded to make my lamb stew.

When Lyle came home I told him the whole story and we sat down to eat the lovely dinner I had prepared. It was awful. I had never had lamb before so I thought maybe that is just what lamb tasted like. Lyle put on a brave face and said it was fine. So we carefully packaged the rest of the stew and put it in the freezer to make nice quick lunches and dinners for the future. The future never came. I think when we went to move out of that apartment Lyle finally confessed that the stew was indeed awful and we threw the whole lot of it away. Somehow we used and cleaned that pot often enough to lose the burnt smell to everything we cooked and we are still using it today.

I am throwing in a few pictures of Jackson using the same set of pans just to show how well used they are. The gift was from Lyle's parents if I remember correctly and since Mom Z. has used these pans herself many times she knows how much we appreciated the gift.