A step backwards?

[jdbower]

I've always had a dishwasher. From the house I was born in (well, the house my parents lived in when I was born at the hospital at least, but I'm sure the hospital had one too) to my first apartment to my first house. But for three long years I lived in a dilapidated wreck of a house while I was waiting for building permits that took too long (it's still for sale if anyone's interested!). During that time "we" had to wash dishes. I say "we" because my wife was very cunning and married someone who had a lower tolerance for dishes in the sink than she did. When we gave up building and moved to MA following my wife's job we got a much nicer house and once again had access to a dishwasher - no more scrubbing pots and pans, no rinsing off dishes, no drying the flatware, just pop them all into a machine and like magic they come out clean!

But now not everything goes in. First it was the KitchenAid with the burnished attachments that would turn a sickly grey color if they aren't washed by hand; no problem, I'll just rinse them off right after I use them. I have a carbon steel wok that heats up in an instant and is fantastic to cook with but would rust away and lose that beautiful seasoning in the machine; it's too big anyway so a garden hose and a bamboo whisk followed by a light coating of oil cleans it up nicely. Yesterday I decided to get a cast iron skillet...and a stiff scrub brush to clean it after I christened it with some delicious Spicy BBQ bacon that I just had to try.

I'm just a fine china set away from being back to washing everything by hand again! Non-stick surfaces can't get too hot so we have to use oil again. Clothes are dry-clean only so the washing machine sits idle. The A/C is too expensive to run so we open the windows. The furnace is way too expensive in the winter so I spend the summer splitting firewood. We have all these gadgets and new ways of cooking but we still go back to lighting a fire and putting food on top of it like we have since the dawn of man. Seems like we spent the latter part of the last century creating time-saving devices and now we're spending the first part of this one taking them all away again! I guess we do still have the interwebs to keep us amused so it's still a step ahead of where we were.