First of all, if you have any muscular weakness, place your mixing bowl in the kitchen sink and lean down into it. It is now below your elbow, and gravity will maximize your expenditure of energy.
Secondly, I do not even own (or miss having) an electrical mixer, hand or stand. For some purposes, I use a balloon whisk or even an old-fashioned egg beater, for others a steel potato masher. For most situations, I use a silicone spatula—the large spoon-spatula type. With just one implement, I can mix and scrape the bowl’s contents out into the pan.
Now, the best salad dressing is composed, as the Spanish proverb would have it, by four people: “a spendthrift for the oil, a judge for the salt, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman to mix them” (in the words used by Ruth Binney on page 131 of her Wise Words and Country Ways for Cooks [David & Charles Publishers (Newton Abbot, UK: 2009.)]) The way to do that mixing is in a large bowl, with two serving spoons or a salad spoon and a salad fork. I put the salt, freshly-ground black pepper and herbs on top of the lettuce leaves that I have already carefully rinsed, torn, and spun-dry. (As for the herbs, unless you have the sunlight to grow your own fresh, you can probably only afford jarred. Try a fair amount of tarragon or mixed Italian seasoning—which you can mix yourself from an online recipe, for economy—or just a pinch of garlic powder or of mustard powder. More than one seasoning is oppressive.) I then pour a little vinegar over (either wine or cider, although you may prefer rice if you don’t like tart tastes.) Finally, I swirl extra-virgin oil in a spiral over the lettuce. The ratio is about one part vinegar to three parts oil, but since you also need a tad of water, don’t spin-dry every drop of water off the leaves! I can’t be more specific because I don’t know how much lettuce you have used!
To move to the mixing of the salad dressing per se: First, I distribute the seasonings over the top of all the leaves. Then I start pulling the leaves up from the bottom of the bowl at the Noon point. I move to two o’clock and repeat, at four o’clock, six o’clock, and, you guessed it, also at eight o’clock and ten o’clock. All the leaves should be glistening with the oil by now, and (as once you have learned from experience in pouring the vinegar and oil), there will be very little dressing left at the bottom of the bowl.
Let’s turn to mixing batter, say for cookies. It’s practically the same procedure, only the first step is to mix clockwise around the sides of the bowl. Repeat counter-clockwise. Repeat until you’ve gotten all the flour away from the bowl’s sides. Now, you can do the Clock Dance. (However, if the recipe is actually for muffins, biscuits, or other baking-powder-leavened breadstuff, which have much flour in comparison to little or no sugar, be careful to mix only long enough to get all the flour moistened. Otherwise, you can easily end up with tough bread!) When you want to incorporate nuts or dried fruit to batter for a baked good, mix them with the dry ingredients to coat before adding the dry ingredients to the wet ones. In this way, the nuts or fruit won’t sink to the bottom of the bowl.
If you want to mix a meatloaf or a neat loaf (if vegan), you have two choices. The easier way is to use your hands. (If there’s meat in your loaf, be sure to wash scrupulously before and after mixing!) If you use your hands, just smoosh all the ingredients in each sector of the bowl together as if you were working clay or Play-Dough.– But, if you don’t like that idea, you can use a potato masher or a large spoon-spatula.
(C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.
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