TracyFood

Monkey Monday: goodbye, red cutting board. 5 May 2008 11:53 pm

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism, food safety, monkeys, pictures, meta, kitchen gear, cooking , trackback

So this post is late because every time I started writing anything all weekend Monday it turned into paragraphs of whining about how I’m not writing very well lately, and I had this stupid head cold, and blah blah blah blah blah. Turns out I can still write picture captions, though, though, so I’m going to make a lot of image-heavy posts while I hope that words and I come back to an understanding in the not too distant future (like so I can write a bunch of emails before my trip out to New York starting Friday — eep!) Anyway.

The week of pictures begins on a weirdly sad note: last week we discovered big freaky cracks in the red cutting board featured so prominently in many a Flickr picture tagged “tracyfood”:

As you can see, the board was also all kinds of scarred and discolored from lots of use and occasional thorough cleaning with bleach, but I would’ve happily kept ignoring those if it weren’t for those cracks, which are no fun at all as they sort of defeat one of the board’s main purposes, namely that of keeping crud off the counters. So. Here’s one last picture of the red cutting board before it went into the trash:

Goodbye, red cutting board from IKEA whose made-up Swedish-sounding name I forgot to write down. I will miss you.

As a replacement, I bought a four-pack of thinner boards, equally flexible and plastic, hence okay to wash ruthlessly, if necessary with bleach (I try to be gentler with our wooden cutting boards, though I don’t always succeed):

If you’re really absolutely starved for text after all those pictures, I recommend checking out Helen Rennie’s old Culinate column on cutting boards, which explains in greater detail why my newest cutting boards maybe weren’t the best possible choice (they’ve got these silly little silicone grippy thingies on one side, supposedly to make them non-slip, but really just to make them stick at inconvenient times and especially to make them trickier to wash). Alas, I had a gift certificate to burn at a store where my choices were these four for $12 or one sturdier but nubbly-textured (i.e. hard-to-clean) board decorated with a big ugly art print texture, which would make it harder to clean even if it wasn’t a total eyesore. So I went with the four-pack of flimsies; a heavier-duty board is in my future, but only when I’ve got a dishwasher to sanitize it in. And maybe those annoying silicone nonstick pads will scrub off, eh? Only time will tell.