TOTALLY BAMBOO

i am such a sucker for kitchen supply stores. i can spend hours (and way too much money when funding is available) in them, exploring every corner. there isn’t a product i don’t look at. and, i always find some funky new 'gizmo' that i just have to have. when i walked into the Kitchen Window store today my innocent intention was to browse the cookbook section and to buy a silicon bristle pastry brush. my old brush died on its last mission over my homemade breadsticks, leaving clumps of bristles everywhere. after browsing through the cookbooks, i couldn’t leave without checking out the rest of the store as well. at the end of my adventure, i left with a new pastry brush and a bamboo cutting board by Totally Bamboo in hand. the boards were all placed on a spacious shelf like works of art hanging in a gallery. what caught my eye were the simple geometric patterns and the natural golden tones of the boards. i had never seen them before but they looked gorgeous, so I had to have one...........from what i learned later, bamboo is a very durable and dense wood, and therefore not too porous - which is a good thing if you are like me and you are cutting everything from bread to squid on it! you know those plastic boards color-coded for fish, meat and veggies? they are not for me. i mix the colors up all of the time anyways and end up cutting fish on the veggie board. all of my cutting boards (until today) are olive wood and I choose the board based on size, not color. and, a simple scrub down with a piece of lemon always kills any odors left on the boards. one of my favorite perks from the purchase i made today is that bamboo is an easily renewable resource. it doesn’t have to be planted every season because it continuously pushes new stalks through the earth. that sounds like a small miracle to me! the human race is doing a pretty good job of plowing through the resources of planet earth so it’s nice to discover alternatives that encourage the conservation of our home.