Object #3: The KitchenAid Grinder Attachment I Found on the Street
The rent is high but the stuff is free
We never got around to carving the jack-o-lantern pumpkin I bought for Halloween, which is great, because an uncarved pumpkin basically lasts forever. It sat on our table through Thanksgiving and well into December until I saw a TikTok where a woman looked into the camera and said, basically, “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you still have your Halloween pumpkins, it’s time to throw them out.” This message prompted action, but I did not throw the pumpkin out, rather I took part in my yearly fugue of roasting the pumpkin and making purée. Even though I do this every year, I still read every article on the internet that warms against cooking jack-o-lantern pumpkins—too stringy, not enough flavor—and urges people to use sugar pumpkins or even butternut squashes instead. These helpful articles (from Bon Appetit and The Kitchn and everywhere else you’d expect) fail to recognize the direction of my desire. I don’t want pumpkin purée, per se, I simply do not want to waste this perfectly good vegetable that I already have in my home.
Food waste makes me twitchy. There is almost always something that I can do with the food bits that don’t have an obvious purpose. Frittata, pickles, weird salads. Soups absorb a lot (if, for instance, you need a baby food jar and don’t have or don’t know any babies, you can dump the 4 oz of carrot goop into a soup and you won’t even notice it’s there. Baby food is really just the thing it says on the label). The big kid often comes home from school with bits of the lunch they give her, and I once made a pie using only the baggies of pre-sliced “grab apples” that I found in her backpack over a couple weeks. Another mom I know makes pudding from the cartons of milk her kid brings home. After Patrick’s dad died, his coworkers sent an Edible Arrangement and I absolutely cooked with the decorative kale. (A Roberto soup, IYKYK.)
So yeah, for a few years now I’ve made purée from our pumpkins, freezing it in one-cup portions. It’s a pretty good applesauce replacement in a cake or muffin recipe, and there’s a pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting that I’ve made a few times. (I ruined a cheesecake with it once though, the homemade purée has more liquid than the canned stuff and the texture of the cheesecake was awful). This year, our pumpkin was very large so I roasted in 2 batches. The first, I puréed in blender, which was effective but somewhat difficult, requiring a lot of pausing and scraping the sides and adding water to get it to actually blend. The second batch I roasted, and left cooked in the fridge for a few days before I had a chance to turn it into mush.
And then, while on a walk with the baby, I found a KitchenAid grinder attachment on the street, in a pile of things meant to recirculate into the universe. I tossed it into my stroller and took it home. When I opened the box in my kitchen it was clearly unused, with its instructions factory folded and the parts pristine. We don’t eat meat, but the box said it was also intended for vegetables and bread and cheese: I attached it to my machine and immediately made some very nice bread crumbs from the pile of stale ends I save for such purposes (see paragraph 2).
If this was a really good story, I would be able to tell you that this found-on-the-street grinder did an amazing job on the rest of the pumpkin, and that I now have a freezer full of zero-waste purée made more holy through the miracle of found-on-the-street equipment. It’s only an adequate story though and the grinder did only an adequate job. Jack-o-lantern pumpkins are quite stringy (I know! I was warned), and though it came out of the grinder pretty smooth, it still had sort of a gritty texture. But then, when I put this output into the blender, it whipped up into an impressively smooth paste in 10 seconds flat. So even though I made two pieces of equipment dirty, I do think this combination was a good one. So far I’ve made a pumpkin loaf, a soup, and have fed a bunch to the baby mixed with yogurt.
I have found so much good stuff on the street and in our building’s lobby. A Le Creuset frying pan, the Yepp seat that holds my kids on the back of the bike, an electric blue Diane Von Furstenbuerg faux-fur coat I sold on Poshmark for not a small amount of money, multiple pairs of Madewell jeans I wear every day, a giant roll of brown kraft paper I use for tracing sewing patterns, light up sparkly rain boots in exactly M’s size. I’m not that good of a lobby-leaver though; I live in fear that the building staff will put my giveaways in the trash before they get collected by the right person. I prefer the Buy-Nothing facebook groups so I can put things directly in people’s hands, even though it can be so annoying to coordinate pick ups. Putting stuff on the street is an act of faith that an item will find its true owner before the rain or the sanitation trucks come, and I’m so glad that people do it. Brooklyn: where the rent is high but the stuff is free.
Object Permanence Rating for the KitchenAid Grinder Attachment: 6/10. I have a lot of things that chop food into bits: a Vitamix blender, a wand blender, a Cuisinart mini food processor (which, yes, I found in the lobby), and a KitchenAid food processor attachment. I don’t really need this grinder thing, but it’s pretty small and made great breadcrumbs, so it’s a tossup about whether I keep it.
Important Note: Object Permanence is a newsletter about things, and rating their permanence. If you’re getting this in your email, it’s because you’re my friend and I signed you up without asking. There are a few previous posts you can read: #1 is about cat diapers and #2 is about kids’ scooters. Go ahead and forward this to whoever. I promise there will be more, but not on any regular schedule. If you want to tell me about your favorite way to chop food into bits, go ahead and leave a comment.