As evidence of my lack of kitchen investment, I present to you an example: The sink.
Ever since we moved, our sink has not worked reliably. Specifically, we have a sink with a sprayer nozzle, and the sprayer nozzle had cracked, so you’d get a weird pulsing effect in the water coming out of the sink: first water would come out of the faucet, then out of the crack in the sprayer nozzle, then out of the faucet, etc.
I did initially try to just fix it with tape, but tape and water don’t really go well together, so eventually I just gave up and accepted that we have a weird sink: If I want a consistent water stream, I need to use the sprayer nozzle. Mostly the sink was just used to fill a glass of water every now and again, so it didn’t matter much.
Over time, of course, this got worse. And in the past few months, it’s finally reached a tipping point: in addition to the sprayer nozzle having a crack in it, the top of the faucet has developed a small hole, meaning that any time water is coming out of the faucet, water is shooting out the top of the faucet. Also, because of this hole, when the faucet isn’t in use, it gets air in it, so in order to get water flowing again you have to smack it.
What does this mean in practice? Well, it means that it’s very difficult to get a steady stream of water out of the faucet. This makes it extremely difficult to – for example – wash your hands when prepping food or cleaning up; difficult to fill up anything quickly and reliably; and it also means that getting a stream of hot water from the faucet has become effectively impossible. In short: our sink is no longer usable as a sink; it’s a randomized water-spraying device.
For most people, if their sinks didn’t work, they’d have to do something about it long before “a few months” had gone by. But since cooking isn’t a daily part of our lives, mostly this doesn’t have a huge effect on me: Dishes get tossed in the dishwasher, and there’s never anything that needs handwashing because we mostly use just plates and normal silverware. But when I went to try to make Christmas dinner, I realized just how much of a problem not having reliable running water in the kitchen is. It meant I couldn’t wash my hands without going to another room; I couldn’t easily rinse the potatoes before peeling them; I couldn’t do any of the things that are just a run of the mill part of cooking.
So next week, we’ll be getting a new faucet. (I hope. The plumbers are coming to install a new faucet, anyway.) It’ll be the first step in my process towards integrating cooking into my daily life: having a sink with regular running water again.
