Ask TracyFood: about those mitts. 2 April 2009 2:56 pm
Posted by Tracy in : friends,kitchen gear,Morning Glory,pictures , trackbackAfter I posted the pictures of my sad oven mitts to Flickr,
my Sugar Momma posted a comment:
Poor sad mittuns. What have you been doing to them?
Good question, Christine!
* * * * *
First of all, I took the oven mitt pictures with an eye towards participating in Wicked Good Dinner’s Ugliest Oven Mitt Throwdown, announced on Is My Blog Burning? back in January. Entries were due at the end of February, which wasn’t my most consistent month for postings (although it was better than March, yeesh) so I missed the deadline, but I still had the mitts, the pictures, and their story to tell.
So. About my oven mitts.
These ratty-looking specimens were retired from the Morning Glory kitchen when owner Gail Brown brought us replacements back in 2007 or 2008 (I don’t rightly remember when). So I can’t claim all the credit for their torn-to-heck appearance — these mitts worked worked hard for lots of people, getting beaten and burned so cook hands didn’t have to. When I took them home, thinking there might still be some life left in them, they were way grungier than the mitts you see in these pictures, coated in a fine (and in other places not so fine) layer of Eugene’s finest hippie breakfast and lunch which had probably taken months to accumulate. Sure enough, they responded well to a good watching and just a little patching up:
Look closely inside of the thumb for a few stitches of black thread, which close a hole at the seam, which I of course discovered while handling something really hot. Ouch. BUT. Once that was fixed, these mitts were an even more welcome addition to my kitchen gear than before. I’d end this post with a shameless plug for them, but I honestly don’t know their brand, and doubt I ever did. What I can say is this: these mitts are pretty awesome for handling anything less than 500 degrees hot. They’re also huge, so they protect not just my hands but a good part of my forearms, which is really nice for handling big and especially heavy hot things, which are more easily wrangled using my whole hands instead of just fingertips. That’s my general unsolicited advice about oven mitts, by the way: go big or go home. Finally, full disclosure: because I was trying to show off their ugliness, these pictures only show the most worn out parts of the mitts. Here’s their flip sides:
Plenty of life left in those babies, I tell you what. And now I am oddly tempted to e-mail this post to The Post-Punk Kitchen blog, to reply to their subtitle/slogan. But instead, I will get back to my much-postponed readings for Research Methods. C’mon, concentration…
