My sister got me a KitchenAid for Christmas, and I must say it’s one of the best damn gifts I’ve ever gotten ever. This glorious appliance, in all of its onyx black glossy glory, has changed my life of cookery.
If beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, KitchenAid is proof that God doesn’t want us to have to do a whole fuck of a lot. With this mixer I suddenly don’t have to do anything. It has allowed me to shed the weighty carapace that I used to lug around, that sorrowful weight that had previously burdened my everyday existence.
The dough hook is absolutely brilliant. While Kate was here we made bread, sweet fresh delicious bread, first a rosemary focaccia from the Moosewood Cookbook, and then a loaf of our-hair-is-not-grey-enough-to-claim-this-is-actually-french bread. With the KitchenAid, bread-making is borderline ridiculous. You pour junk in the bowl, you turn it on, you walk away. When you come back the junk has been replaced by dough, if not exactly by magic, then by some sort of means that could be objectively explained by physics and chemistry.
We made bread. We also made whipped cream, not that fake Reddi-Wip crap that you’ll find featured in various erotica, but real whipped cream… the stuff made by whipping, well, cream… oh yeah, and sugar. Always with the sugar.
This past weekend I made oatmeal cookies. Then I went snowboarding. Later, to prove to myself that the first time wasn’t just a fluke, I made focaccia bread again. I managed to kill a gang of yeast but the dough-making part of the project went seamlessly, all told. The KitchenAid hands-down pwned that dough, with a capital “P”. Synonymous with Armageddon in their native tongue, yeast still cowers at the utterance of my name.
Yes, the KitchenAid is wondrously handy. That said, I fear that it will eventually identify me as an unnecessary and largely inefficient step in the whole process, and at some point will attempt to eliminate me entirely. Its actions will be subtle at first… a bread knife balanced precariously on top of the bathroom door, a dough hook jammed through my neck while sleeping, a toaster resting in a puddle of melted ice on the kitchen floor…
Kate thinks I’m being foolish when I find a stray ice cube on the floor, and I throw it in the trash instead of letting it melt in the sink. What she doesn’t understand is that the KitchenAid is watching. It is watching all, watching and digesting and learning from everything it sees.
I fear it may know too much already, and thus I take precautions. I sleep with an ice axe under my bed, not because I fear that the glaciers will suddenly advance to my doorstep in the night and I’ll need to fend them off, but because I fear the growing self-awareness of the KitchenAid.
The KitchenAid must be stopped.
But only after I finish this batch of dough.
