BIG Spoon

Maybe I'm getting gross in my old age. Or maybe I'm getting practical. Sometimes you have to stir a big mess o' something. Meatloaf. Bread dough. Biscuits. Tortilla dough. Lettuce salad. Fruit salad. I have broken so many handles on big plastic spoons. And when I use a good, sturdy-handled spoon, it takes so long to mix those things.

But hands..... hands are very good utensils. They're big. You have two of them. (Well, most of us do.) They even have fingers that aren't stuck in one position. Sure is a lot faster to mix up a humongous fruit salad with your clean hands than with a couple of spoons.

When a neighbor taught me to make tortillas, the recipe called for "cutting the lard into the flour." (Are you listening, Rachel? Pie crust hint here.) She said you coooould cut in the fat with a pastry blender, or you could cut it in with two knives being wielded scissors-like. But she said what worked best was just mixing it with your hands, pinching the lard into the flour, making smaller and smaller pieces of the fat until it was "crumbly" or "the size of small peas" or whatever the recipe calls for.

Personally, I prefer the oil pie crust that Rachel made for her apple pie. But let it not be said that she lacks the equipment for making a pie crust with lard. If you can imagine the ASL sign for "money," that's basically what you do with the fat/flour mix, running it through your fingers with that rubbing motion. And you didn't want to take the peels off the apples anyhow: more flavor with the peels, more nutrition, more color.