Anything but the Kitchen Sink

A very famous kitchen at the Smithsonian

Good advice!

If you have a kitchen sink, give it a kiss.  Here is mine, but not for long.

Chris and I are moving steadily along in the kitchen, can't cha tell??  We actually have a new one, but we'll get to that a little later on.  

Chris began tearing into the soffits the first weekend of the year.  This uncovered a few obstacles.  To begin with, there are hidden pipes in places we were hoping to expose.  And secondly, the demo left a terrible film of dust covering the entire first floor of the house.  We are new to this and didn't realize that we should have sealed off the room with plastic zip-up doors and covered the hard wood floor with paper before making such a mess.  And somehow I didn't realize just how unusable this kitchen was going to be during the project.  

To drive this home further, we received our first winter gas bill - $400.  N.C. (Not. Cool.)  I get a lot of, "so, you gonna replace the windows?"  And while we may down the road, I don't think our 92 year old windows are the culprit.  Sure they could be better, but the real trouble stems from our lack of insulation.  I am going to get some quotes on having insulation blown into the walls, but while we have the kitchen torn up, we may as well insulate the kitchen's two exterior walls.  And guess where the kitchen sink is.  Yep, on an exterior wall.  So say goodbye to that sink.

You don't get too far in a kitchen without a sink and I cannot fathom life without a kitchen for the next few months.  We bought a new gas range on Black Friday, but the current electric range is still in fine working order.  So why not have an extra oven in the basement?  Where there is a sink.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?   

.... and thus our new basement kitchen was born.

Now it doesn't have a fridge yet, but it has everything else and the fridge will be right up the stairs.  Not too bad, eh?

My diligent carpenter & electrician

Tonight we watched the movie Julie & Julia and it got me thinking about kitchens.  Neither of those women had sparkling, state of the art kitchens with miles of countertops to work on.  They had good tools and a love of food.  A kitchen does not a cook make, so I will be just fine cooking from this basement.  Similar to Julia Child, there are few things that bring me more joy than eating and consequently, there are few things that give me more purpose than cooking.

The movie also got me to thinking about culinary projects.  Julie Powell cooked her way through Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote a blog that led to a book that was made into a movie with Meryl freackin' Streep in it, how cool is that?  When I think about what I am really passionate about and how I wish I could spend my time, I always come back to food, not accounting.  I just don't know how to get myself from point A to point B, where point B is a place where I can still pay my mortgage.  So I am putting it out to the universe - I am in search of a new culinary adventure or project. Suggestions welcome.