This is not a ukulele post

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.

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.

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.