Board

I've mentioned on occasion that my wife has multiple sisters. Not me -- I'm an only child, technically (I had a fraternal twin; one of us died after about a week, though the jury's still not in on which of us it was). From what I gather, having sibs is a usually good thing, if only for the chance to blame stuff on someone else. When you're an only kid, I Dunno tends to wear out pretty quickly as a viable defense.

The downside, though, is Getting Stuff. I understand that in some families, balancing who gets what is an art form. In my wife's, they didn't have a lot of money, so it wasn't a problem to figure out who got what --nobody did. But as they grew older, they would occasionally get things from aunts or other relatives. To this day, you can make one of my sister-in-law's eyeballs bulge just a bit by mentioning that we got two afghans knitted by their grandmother (she didn't get any).

I was thinking about this as I was mixing the dough for the German Soft Pretzels, just a bit ago. (Having the laptop in the kitchen is helpful, as you don't have to print out the recipe, but getting dough or flour on the keyboard is a real pain). One of the steps says to knead the dough 'on a floured board'. For a long time, I'd simply use one of the counters. Then I realized that we had this huge board that my wife's grandfather had made for his wife, quite some time ago. And when I say huge, I mean it -- this jewel is about one and a half feet wide and about two and a half feet long. I started using it when I do things like this, and I really like it. For one thing, there's a nice tactile sensation when I knead the dough on it. For another, when I'm done, I can just step outside and tap the board on the deck railing to dump the flour (unless I've been dumb and gotten the wood wet, which tends to seriously clump it). Though you do have to watch not to let the excess flour drift down onto the plants that are sometimes out there. But the big thing is that this is something that my wife's family used. I don't want to get all metaphysical here, but I just like the idea of continuing to use something they used, for the purpose that they used it. It's just neat.

We only have one daughter, so when the time comes, I know who's getting it -- whether or not she wants it!