Kitchen diaries

::Orange juice tastes amazing when fresh squeezed into a vintage juice pitcher and sipped out of the coordinating glasses. I scored this set recently at a thrift store, and I finally got around to using them this week. There is something nostalgic about this set as it reminds me of my late grandmother, Ruthie. She stands in my memory as the quintessential 1950's woman. She kept a clean house, supported her husband tirelessly in achieving all his career dreams, and had a never-ending supply of ice cream treats in the upright freezer on the porch. I had my first taste of guacamole at her house when I was five, and this pitcher is just the sort of thing that I imagine sat in her avocado-colored fridge, filled with orange juice, fresh-squeezed that very morning for my grandfather's breakfast.

::I've always been a fan of tv chef Alton Brown's philosophy that kitchen tools should have more than one function. When starting a load of laundry yesterday, I did what any housewife has done at some point in her laundry washing career. In my haste to finish the task, I poured the detergent into the fabric softener compartment. Recalling what happened when I poured softener in the bleach compartment a few, short weeks ago (the machine temporarily broke), I panicked. Then...I pulled an Alton Brown. Out came the turkey baster from the kitchen drawer where it had been hibernating for two months, and, in no time at all, the detergent was sucked out and the load sent spinning on it's way.

If any of you reading this are my neighbor and happened to be looking out your window...Yes, that was me walking back into the house with a soapy turkey baster and a smug, MacGyver-ish smirk on my face.

And that's MacGyver, people. Not MacGruber.