Wrinkly Bits A Blog by Gail Cushman Spoons I am a little late with my blog this week, and I have a good excuse: spoons.

I moved from Boise, Idaho to Columbus, Montana, and Cowboy Bob and I are doing just fine. I had about fifty boxes to move, all very important stuff, you understand. We had sorted, garage sale-d, and tossed lots of things deciding on Folgers or Keurig, which of six alarm clocks we could see in the dark, and what to do with twenty-six screwdrivers of varying sizes and bits, but somehow in our discussions we had missed SPOONS.

You are probably scratching your head, thinking, “Spoons, how hard can that be? A spoon is a spoon is a spoon,” but here’s the dilemma. Every spoon has its own use and it’s important to use the right spoon. I mean, you don’t use a wooden spoon to stir your coffee and a measuring spoon will not work for eating soup. There are teaspoons, soup spoons, serving spoons, coffee spoons, measuring spoons, demitasse spoons, parfait spoons, ladles, salt spoons, spaghetti spoons, olive spoons, Asian soup spoons, slotted spoons, and a host of others. If you don’t believe me, check out the spoon drawer in your kitchen. They are made from bamboo, wood, gold, sterling, stainless steel, plastic, and copper with long and short handles, varying sizes of bowls and sometimes they match, other times they don’t. We counted thirty-six large wooden spoons and metal stirring spoons between the two of us, not to mention several sets of silverware that included four or five types of spoons. For cooking, I like shorter wooden spoons with a slightly scooped bowl, but the cowboy likes the long-handled metal spoons, which he used stirring beans on the open campfire, so we did what any logical person would do. We lined them up on the counter and did the “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” chant, but somehow, all the “moes” hit his metal, long-handled spoons, which won’t work for me. I demanded a recount, with no better resolution. It was do or die and we took a break. We each went to our separate corners and guzzled a coffee. I stirred mine with a small demitasse spoon, Cowboy Bob opted for the campfire spoon. Coffee tasted fine with either tool.

Spoons are simple tools, invented long ago by simple people, even monkeys, who use banana leaves as spoons to dish their roots and berries into their mouths. So, what’s the deal with today’s spoons? My mother, the field marshal, had only a couple spoons for making soup and her version of spaghetti sauce and the Cowboy’s mother had similar tools for making chili-mac for her four boys. What worked then, works now and it seems that figuring out the spoon situation is unimportant in realm-of-life decisions. I checked to see if there were such a thing as an electric spoon, because after all we have electric and electronic knives and forks to ease our weary hands. Why not an electric spoon? I couldn’t find one, which is rather surprising because think of all the time we waste stirring by hand. We finally came to an agreement: one ladle, one long spoon, one wooden spoon, two serving spoons, eight spoons in a dinner set (in case we have company), and a partridge in a pear tree.

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