The Kitchen Television
My kitchen, sometime today
Some times, things just pile up.
- Mountain of dishes – Janine’s been installing a garbarator. A side-effect is many days of non-working dishwashers and sinks. Also last night I spent my excess energy video recording my cooking for a future post, instead of cleaning.
- Groceries to put away - I went to the St. Albert Farmer’s Market for the first time (holy fuck that place roxors!). Tammy also went to the market and did a lovely write up about it. I wonder if we walked past one another? Then Save-On-Foods, then Safeway.
- Repack raspberries – I mainly mention this to say if you’re freezing fresh raspberries, put ’em on a cookie sheet so they don’t freeze together in a big clump. Once frozen transfer to a ziploc.
- Cook Supper – Janine took Nathan to the lake last night & this morning giving me time to myself (apparently to record myself cooking and go to the farmers market. Food’s on the brain) . Anyway, I wanted to have a nice meal for their return
How to make this a bit more fun?
I turned on the television.
Well, my laptop. I’ve also used my iPhone, propped up with a StickyStrap. I love doing this. It turns drudgery into watching television, something I really enjoy. Cooking from scratch means a lot more dishes. So why not watch a show while I’m at it? I can’t always watch tv when I’m cooking but tonight’s recipe wasn’t mentally taxing (chop cauliflower, grate cheese, cook pasta). Dishes on the other hand? It’s the only thing that gets me through. I actually like doing dishes now. After Nathan went to bed Janine & I watched the first two episodes of Party Down while trying to put a dent in the mountain of pots and pans that had accumulated over the week.
- I find procedural shows, like Bones or Lie to Me, work quite well. I prefer my scripted dramas to have more depth and serialization but since I’m only half-watching the show something less mentally taxing works better.
- I watched Persons Unknown today and when it finished I immediately re-watched the same episode, too many twists and turns to really follow it (and it doesn’t end every week with catching a bad guy).
- I’ve found In Treatment works well too because it’s basically two people talking for 30 minutes. Really, it could be a radio show (although I am definitely missing some of the subtleties and I’ll miss whole important bits because a particularly troublesome pot needs heavy duty scrubbing).
- Something like Breaking Bad, with it’s highly visual story telling doesn’t work so well. I mean, I can always go and hit the rewind button but that gets old fast.
- There are other shows, like Stargate Universe that have straddled the line. Honestly I’d prefer to watch that one on my big fancy television screen and after a few episodes it hooked me enough that I thought I’d do exactly that. A month later I realized that wasn’t happening and I went back to watching it over dishes. I hit rewind a lot, which is better than not watching at all.
- Comedies can work pretty good too. I watched a couple of season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia while cleaning the hell out of a bunch of dishes. It kind of falls into the Stargate Universe realm for me… it’s not the best dishwashing show, but I wouldn’t’ve made time for it other wise.
I also like that I can only work so long before a show ends and I’ll think to myself “really? have I been working in the kitchen for two hours? maybe it’s time for a break.”
I don’t even know how I did dishes before thinking up this plan. Oh wait, I didn’t. They sat in the sink and things grew in them. I want to get an iPad or a touch-sensitive pc and wall mount it just so I can watch television shows more easily. Honestly, I’m a fucking genius. It’s like, if I was being interviewed by Jay Leno and he’s all like “where do you get your ideas?” I’d be all like “yo mama! beeeach!” See, like that. This shit just comes to me.
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