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| Spoon butter cooling |
Since I retired I've
been participating in the Calgary Retired Teachers' Art Show. It's
not a way to make a ton of cash but it's nice spend a day
chatting with like-minded folks. There are always lots of great
paintings and sometimes there are ceramics and jewelry as well as my
offerings of wooden objects.
For a number of
years I've brought wooden boxes and they haven't sold terribly well.
The problem with an art show by retired teachers is that our friends
are pretty much the same age as we are and, while they come to
support us, many of them are trying to downsize rather than acquire
more stuff. I don't go with the idea of making money and there's no
fee for a table or easel. The Calgary Retired Teachers' Association
takes a reasonable cut of what we sell. If I don't sell anything, I
don't pay anything.
This year I decided
not to take any boxes. Instead, I branched out with some photographs
printed on metal and some photo cards. In terms of woodwork, I
offered only kitchen tools, spoons of different sizes and shapes and
kitchen multi-tools. To my great delight I sold three photographs,
eleven kitchen tools and a few photo cards.
One of the most
frequent questions I get when I sell kitchen tools is how to take
care of them. My usual answer is to hand wash them; don't soak them,
and give them a rub with mineral oil every once in a while. Even
though mineral oil can be found in just about any pharmacy and it's
relatively inexpensive, people seem reluctant to use it. I know many
prefer to use olive oil and have had no problem with it although I
understand it can go rancid. After answering the question a number of
times on the weekend and getting the now familiar hesitation, I
decided it was time to get off my butt and make my own wood
conditioner. It's not difficult and all the recipes on the net are
about the same. Mineral oil is easy to find and I turned to Amazon
for bees wax and two ounce jars. One recipe I read also suggested
adding a few drops of lemon oil to make it smell nice.
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| Richard filling the jars |
Tonight I undertook
the project. I found a jar with a wide mouth that I've been saving
for something, I don't know what but it was perfect for this
project. I poured bees wax and mineral oil into the jar and heated it
in a pot of water regulating the heat and stirring it with a
chopstick, wooden of course. I didn't keep track of how long it took
but it wasn't a huge job. When the ingredients were all nicely
melted together I took it off the heat. At that point Richard came
into the kitchen and offered to help so he filled the jars using a
soup ladle. It wasn't a particularly messy process and the ladle wiped
clean with a paper towel. We wiped as much as we could out of the big
jar with our fingers and put it on various cutting boards and
utensils. The big jar will be reserved for making spoon butter so we didn't need to clean all the butter out of it. We'll let the boards and saute tools sit over night and I'll buff them in the morning.
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| Cooled spoon butter and a couple of happy kitchen tools |
I'll do some
tweaking to the next batch. This first one doesn't have much scent.
The beeswax I bought seems to have no smell and I didn't add enough
lemon oil to give it that hint of citrus. Despite that, I think it
will work very well and I intend to keep a jar in the kitchen so that
whenever the tools start to look a little dull I can give them a
treatment. Because it's the consistency of Greek yogurt, it's easier
to apply than liquid mineral oil. As a bonus, my rough, scratchy
hands feel fairly smooth tonight.
The next time
someone asks me how to take care of a newly-purchased kitchen tool I
can tell them that I have the very thing for them at a nominal cost.
