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Thursday, August 30, 2007

THE LITTLE THINGS: THE BOWL BY BOARDMAN

During my two years at the barbecue joint I seldom got to see the friends I've know and loved forever — one of the chief reasons why I left — and during that time I began to unintentionally take many of them for granted. I'm doing my damnedest to rectify that now that I have normal work hours and weekends again, and this morning I stopped to think about how effortlessly awesome my friends can be. As a case in point, I refer you to one Susan Boardman.

Susan is the sweet and sunny partner of my buddy daniel, and the two are one of the few couples I know who make any kind of actual sense together; yes, I have plenty of friends who are paired off and/or married, but these two seem as natural together as Tarzan and Jane. Anyway, Suzan's one of the sweetest, kindest, most all-around excellent human beings I have the pleasure to know, and she a renaissance woman on top of it; she's a six-foot two-inch tall bespectacled brunette who plays a mean bass and has a twisted sense of humor that's doubly shocking thanks to her innocent Campbell's Soup Kids-cherubic face.

And she also dabbles in pottery.

During my period of unemployment a few years back, Susan took a pottery course not far from where I live in Brooklyn, and one day she gave me a tiny, turquoise-colored bowl that she'd made by hand.

For something so small it's extremely dense and sturdy and without it being intended for such a purpose, it's the most perfect bowl I could ever imagine for whipping up a pair of scrambled eggs. Since acquiring it I never, and I do mean NEVER, prepare that particular breakfast item at home without using the Bowl By Boardman thanks to its ideal shallow depth that causes the user to pay attention to their scrambling technique and eventually the subtleties required by the bowl become an ingrained habit. I find that when using my favorite three-tined fork I can lift the eggs and fold in a good deal of air, a technique that adds to the fluffiness of the finished breakfast treat and inadvertantly improved my skill at this seemingly minor task.

This innocuous little bowl has gone on to become one of my most prized possessions and is utterly irreplaceable in every way; a perfect kitchen aid made even more incredible thanks to being given on a whim by a good friend who made it just for me.

Thank you, Susan. I may never have told you how much I love that little bowl, but I'm sure as fuck telling you — and the vast internet — now.

2 comments:

suebeenyc said...

Thank you! So cool to see that little bowl hit the big time on the Innurnet. Good pictures (fyi for the potters out there, the glaze is seaworld over a black engobe). Thanks for the sentiments, right back atcha. I love you Bunche!! And your scrambled eggs.

Anonymous said...

Sir Steven Wordsworth Inverness Bunchington-Levy III,
I sir, must comment, That crumpets are pretty much the end all be all embodiement of perfection in the canon of savory (not sweet for all the mouth breathers out there) Breakfast pastisserie. I applaud your product placement, and encourage you to sometime make your famous bluebowl scrambled eggs,put a crumpet in the skillet and drizzle egg over the top and fill up the crupetholes with eggy goodness, and after it has puffed up with cooked egg, slap a slice of cheese and an already cooked patty of (preferably schwaggerty's or another high quality) breakfast sausage on the top for the best frigging eggs bennie variation on the planet (and screw the hollandaise, that stuff'll kill ya). almost better than scotch eggs, that. almost.
-big mike