by Robrt L. Pela

This is a watercolor of the blue bowl I mix cake batter in. The painting is by my spouse, Mr. Grossman, who’s good at everything he does because he’s a Jew.

The bowl was a wedding gift to my mother in 1946. It turns up in something like 700 different family candids, because Italian American housewives take pictures of their people eating stuff at every holiday. I used to play a game when I was a kid: Find a Holiday Mealtime Photo of My Family in Which the Blue Bowl Doesn’t Appear.

There were hardly any.

by Robrt L. Pela

Okay, it’s not really in my cupboard. It’s hanging on my wall. But, seriously, would you want me to use a 70-year-old bundt pan as anything other than an adornment?

This piece reminds me, every day, of how much I love the guy who invented Teflon. Because these old molded cake pans don’t really work. Everything you bake in them, no matter how much you grease the pan, sticks. So what’s the point?

And please don’t talk to me about Jell-o, which hadn't yet been invented when this pan was being used by poor, pre-mid-century housewives.

Pity them.

by Robrt L. Pela

Mr. Grossman couldn’t resist it. And who can blame him? A tin of Spotted Dick (a traditional English steamed dessert containing currants, typically served either with custard or butter and brown sugar) is an hilarious thing, at least if you’re an American. And so he bought it and stuck it in our pantry, where it causes us to titter each time we see it, months later.

Brits are unfazed by a sweet called Dick, spotted or otherwise. But everyone else who comes to our home for dinner gets offered some. I guess we’re easily amused. “Want some spotted dick?”

Still cracks me up.

by Robrt L. Pela

I keep getting up from where I’m sitting to go look at the tablecloth our friend Ruth Beautmont brought over last night. Ruth (a former Floradora girl) knows that Mr. Grossman has a thing for old linens, and when I phoned last night to say, “We’re barbecuing, come over!” she showed up with this amazing old tablecloth.

I know. I’m such a fag.

by Robrt L. Pela

This just in from the Snooty Boots Dept.: Mr. Grossman and I only consume olive oil imported from France.

I know, I know. I'm pretentious. But the trouble is we bought some of this stuff from a moulin in Callas, a Provencal village known for its olive oil. We brought it back to the states with us and, after that, regular olive oil from Safeway tasted like airplane glue.

Here are some foodstuff confessions that will hopefully counteract my snotty attitude about the olive oil situation: I like to eat generic sandwich cookies from Circle K. Also Nacho Cheese Doritos. And when I make guacamole for myself, I just mash up an avocado and dump mayonnaise on top of it.

Okay? Not so snooty.

(But, seriously, if you haven't eaten good olive oil, give it a whirl.)

by Robrt L. Pela

Mr. Grossman and I buy crap that we don’t need. It’s wasteful, but it pleases us to own stuff that just sits around looking nice.

Like this dried-out artichoke. It’s sitting in a bowl in the kitchen. It’s actually not something we bought just because it’s nice to look at, though. We were planning to eat it, but we waited too long and it started to fossilize. We liked how it looked, so we left it.

There’s a bowl full of kiwi in the breakfast room that’s been there since 2003.

by Robrt L. Pela

She rested on the kitchen windowsill of my childhood home all through the Sixties, dressed in a little ceramic dress, standing next to a giant ear of corn. In the parlance of the day, she was what was called “Colored.” And then one day, when I wasn’t looking, she disappeared.

It could be that she fell and broke, and Mom dumped her broken bits into the trash compactor. Or maybe Mom decided it was inappropriate, in that age of the Human Rights Movement, to own a depiction of an Afro American (as they then liked to be called) that might somehow be offensive to a Black person, and she put little Corn Girl into a garage sale.

I don’t know where she went to. All I know is one day she was gone. I searched for her for years and years in antique shops, but she never turned up. Then, about a decade ago, a new online auction called eBay got going, and within days Corn Girl was mine again.

This one’s eyes aren’t the same, though. They’re painted on really big, so that she looks startled, and they’re crooked, which makes her look a little sad.

I keep swizzle sticks in her ear of corn.

by Robrt L. Pela

Here's a friendly note to my friends and family: Stop buying me salt shakers. I'm done collecting them. I have 136 of them now, and that's enough. So, seriously, enough already.

Thanks.

by Robrt L. Pela

It was raining, and we were both on deadline. Neither Kate nor I wanted to go back to our apartments to write, so we went shopping for pepper grinders instead. I don’t remember if we knew we wanted pepper grinders, or if we both just found matching ones at that junky antique store where we were always buying crap back then, when we were both single, both living in that old high-rise over on Fourth Avenue.

But I do remember this, every time I look at my little copper pepper grinder: Sometimes it rains in Phoenix. And I am always on deadline.

by Robrt L. Pela

Do people use cookie cutters anymore? I have a big round box of them in my kitchen cupboard, but I never use the fucking things. I like to bake, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read a cookie recipe that included the direction, “Using a star-shaped cookie cutter…”

Every couple of months, I think about pitching the whole lot—the bell-shaped one; the giant heart-shaped one; the goofy Santa one that punches out pancreas-shaped cookies, or that would if I ever used it. But I never do. I know that a few days after pitching them, some cookie recipe I’m attempting will call for “a 3-inch flower-shaped cutter.”