Shopping!

I definitely should not be confessing this to the blogosphere, but as I'm taking pains to be unidentifiable... I'm planning to take a not-really-sick day tomorrow (today, technically) to run some errands and apply for a few jobs. One of the errands is to look for new dinnerware. And here we get, at last, to a connection to the underlying theme of this blog: observant Judaism.

It's an expensive proposition to set up a kitchen, and even more so when your mother insists that you buy high-quality everything (she worked at a high-end kitchen store when I set up my kitchen, got an employee discount, ...), and even more than that when you need to buy two (or three) of everything for kashrut purposes. So when I first needed dinnerware, I bought the least expensive stuff I could find--clear glass plates and bowls that came in a set of 12 each for, I kid you not, only $10. To be honest, I truly hoped that I would meet my husband, he would ask to be my husband, and we would end up with nicer plates that we chose together. That hasn't happened, and it's been nearly eight years. Somehow, I still have 12 dinner plates and 12 dessert plates. They are not all completely intact, however, and I have only eight bowls.

It seems that it is time to replace my dinnerware.

There are so many choices out there; how ever will I make up my mind? Before I moved last June, I spent hours browsing every website imaginable for dinnerware. But I've come up with the criterion that will make my decision easier: the plates must involve the color blue in some way. Because, you see, these are to be my dairy plates. In my effort to make the kitchen user-friendly and kashrut-protected, I am moving towards a completely color-coded system. No, the blender will not get replaced by one that is blue (and a good thing, as I doubt those exist). But it is a lot easier to tell a kiddo to use a blue bowl and a blue spoon for her cereal than it is to explain which bowls are for dairy, and what foods are dairy, and make her connect them.

Off to bed so that I can get a productive day in tomorrow!