Kitchen's Done. Let's Drink!

My kitchen is done!

The last step was to put in the backsplash. I chose 2 x 6 subway tiles from Mission Tile West’s Revival series in blue wash. They make tiles to order, so I had to wait forEVER! for them to arrive. Almost none of them were broken and the guys from Handyman Connection were very careful and efficient. So now I have six or seven square feet of field tile left. What should I do with it? Someone hit me with ideas.

Detail: Look what a good job they did! Also: oooh, bullnose.

To celebrate, let’s make something easy and fun. The new countertops are acid-proof and the backsplash means I can use the blender with impunity. Let’s make fruity drinks!

I got a pineapple on sale and the mint in my garden is green and glorious. Plus there is a brand new bottle of rum in the cupboard just begging to be opened.

Yeah, baby.

Pineapple Agua Fresca Mojito
This is fun because a) it can be made out of any fruit you want, really; b) it probably doesn’t need any added sugar; c) you can skip the booze and it is still delicious.

A pineapple
Water
Sugar to taste (probably none!)
Mint leaves
Rum

Peel the pineapple. Don’t worry about doing too good of a job; and you don’t need to bother coring it, either. Cut it into chunks.

Fill the blender with pineapple chunks. Pour in some water; the waterline should be maybe a quarter to a third of the way up the blender jar. Liquefy. Set a fine strainer over a bowl and dump in the puree. Repeat this until there is no more pineapple. You may be forced to eat a chunk or two, you poor thing.

When the puree is well drained, sweeten the fruity water to taste (you might not need any sugar at all). Pour it into a pitcher and chill well. The pulp is done for, unless someone knows of a use for it besides compost?

Now then. Tear up a mint leaf or two or three into a tall glass. Use a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon to smash up the leaves a bit. Drop in some ice cubes and a finger or three of rum. Fill up with agua fresca, stir, and enjoy!

I did it all by MYSELF!

After using it twice, I came to regret the garbage disposal. My 100-year-old plumbing does not care to play nicely with it. (That’s OK, because for most of the year, my kitchen scraps go to compost anyway.) I was annoyed that I went to the trouble and expense of having it installed, and I didn’t want to spend another nickel to get rid of it. So I took it out! All by myself!

Except for help from an instruction manual, a how-to book, two online tutorials, and three people at two different hardware stores.

 

My lovely drain



Other than that, though, I did it completely unassisted! I took it out and replaced it with a regular drain and plumbing. It doesn’t even leak! Yaaaaay!

The kitchen is almost done, except for a tiny bit of painting and the backsplash. I put all my dishes and pans and cans and bottles in the new cupboards. We are ready to roll.

Which is good, because this week is the first Harmony Valley CSA share of the year. I can’t wait!

¿Quién sea La Anita?

My kitchen has countertops now! And the stove is in its new home, I have plumbing, and I have a dishwasher. (Dishwashers are magical! Why didn’t anyone tell me?)

My stuff is still in boxes in the basement, but I rummaged around and found enough pots, pans, utensils, and spices to make an inaugural chicken dinner.

Which, um, I cooked on the grill.

Well, I painted all day, OK?! And besides, it is all clean and beautiful in there. It still feels like a museum or a shrine, too special to mess up with spatters and drips.

I wanted to do something interesting to the chicken; but I haven’t been grocery shopping in a while, so I don’t have the usual deep bench of ingredients in the fridge. I dug through my “Spice Cabinet” box until I found something interesting:

I am ashamed to tell you how long ago I bought this box of achiote powder. But I am not ashamed to tell you WHY I bought it. Look at her!

I like food packaging that has pictures of women. La Contadina from the tomato paste can; the wheat farmer on the De Cecco pasta box; the mother and daughter that used to be on Amy’s Kitchen packages. I like their expressions of abundance, generosity, and the friendly pride of a good cook issuing an invitation to a meal she knows her guest will enjoy.

But La Anita? She is a little off.

First of all, she floats alone on her orangey-pink background. The De Cecco lady strides through her wheat field, Amy feeds her daughter a taste right from the stove, but where is La Anita’s context? Why is she holding that enormous roast bird? Dios mio, it’s as big as she is. For what occasion did she cook it? Where is the hot kitchen in which she labored to prepare it? Where are the half-dozen other people who cooked with her? Where is the family who will help her eat it?

Second, what are we to make of that look on her face? The tightened lips, the narrowed eyes, the arched brows… is it a smile? A smirk? Is she about to sneer? Is she barely keeping it together under the strain of holding that ostrich en achiote?

Who is she?

¿Quién sea La Anita?

Well whoever she is, I wish I’d tried her achiote paste a lot sooner because it is easy and adds good flavor to barbecued chicken. Thanks, weird lady.

Pie Haven, Pizza Fail

My kitchen’s still not ready for cooking, but it’s getting close!

This weekend, dear sweet Katrina welcomed me into her well-appointed kitchen so I could work out some of my pie issues. Katrina and my sweetheart, Beth, who have been friends since their freshman year of college, sat at the kitchen table and talked.

I listened with only half an ear, enjoying the piano song of women’s voices in easy confidence with each other. My hands remembered the stiffness of butter cut into wheat flour, the elastic resistance of pastry as I rolled it out on Katrina’s vintage enamel baking cart with her wooden pin. I felt my shoulders release the fretfulness of paint chips, the uncertainty of countertops and light fixtures, the angst of constant shopping.

The next day I felt inspired to attempt some dough at home. I set out to answer this question: Can a person make a creditable pizza in an electric fry pan?

I’m loathe to say I couldn’t. But the fact remains I didn’t.

Were I to try again, I’d…

• Roll the dough out super-thin. The crust crisped up only to the thickness of a cracker. The rest of my quarter-inch-thick crust was rather steamed.
• Make the pan as hot as possible. Even this will not be hot enough.
• Flip the crust over like a pancake, then put sauce and fixings on top.
• Don’t expect the cheese to be toasted.
• Order delivery instead.

All I can fix in THIS kitchen

I have walls! I have paint! But still no horizontal surfaces.

While I was painting this weekend, I snuck around behind my back and tore off the rest of the window trim. I sanded and primed the sashes, too, while I wasn’t looking. What a jerk.

Now, for your and my amusement both, a list of things that happen in my friend John Reimringer’s book Vestments that have happened in my kitchen since last week:
• Smashing out wallboard
• Fixing wallboard
• Sanding and repainting window sashes
• Painting walls
• An enormous glass of whiskey

It’s Jameson on the rocks. Recipe: One Jameson. One rocks. Put in a glass. The End.

Swiss Seitan

I’ve just come home from vacation, and my kitchen looks like this:

See what I got? A problem! See what I don’t got: no stove, no sink, no countertops, no nothing. I’m tired; I’m crabby; I have to go to work instead of gad about all day in the sun with my girl. And now I have nothing to eat and nowhere to cook it.

But look! The workmen had to move some stuff out of the storage room to get at the electrical panel. Look what they unearthed!

It is my mom’s electric fry pan. She got it for a wedding present in the late 1960s. I drew the yellow lines around it to show off its majesty.

Well if this thing is here, then I am halfway to a good dinner. How about if I get out Mom’s Better Homes New Cookbook? It’s appropriate to the era.

Yeah, it was new back in the day, but not anymore. This might also have been a wedding present. What are these doing in my house?! Who can remember, and right now, who cares. These things are my ticket to some not-microwaved meals. Look at this goofy book:

“Men’s favorite?” With all due respect, men, who cares? I don’t need your approval to decide whether it’s good. And, in men’s defense, why does the Better Homes and Garden’s New Cookbook presume to know the salad preferences of half the human race? As my feminist scholar sweetheart would say, “It’s problematic.”

Oh get a load of this one:

This picture both co-opts, and eviscerates the potency of, the 1960s ethic of drugged-out spiritual exoticism. Nothing could be squarer than Susie Homemaker here, but she is all Lord Shiva on your ass with her Jiffy Cooking. Her dance both creates a meal from canned and frozen foods in 20 minutes and destroys any chance you might have had of enjoying home-cooked flavors from fresh ingredients. As an added ironic bonus, many people (possibly including the editors) may have missed the significance of this visual reference.

Enough ripping on Mom’s book. It is, along with its friend Electric Fry Pan, going to feed my ungrateful face. I deem Swiss steak to be a properly kitschy thing to cook. Also it has few ingredients and I have no prep space. Here are the directions.

As you see, it’s not a recipe. It’s truly just directions.

I don’t want to be as meat-tastic as things were in the 1960s. So I’m substituting seitan for beef. I’m not pounding in any flour or seasonings because seitan is already made of flour and seasonings. I’m also not going to simmer it until it’s tender because it’s already tender. I’m just going to whip it up and then steam a few potatoes in the microwave. No problem!

Look at it! It’s cooking like gangbusters, and it is starting to smell decidedly midcentury here in my basement.

And in twenty minutes, it’s food. I am just like Jiffy Cooking Lord Shiva Apron Lady.

Is it any good? Mmmehhhhhh… it’s problematic.

Straitened Circumstances

For the next four weeks or so, this will be my kitchen:

My house is a foursquare built in 1908; the original kitchen was most likely a tiny, dark, and utilitarian 19th-century cubby. At some point, someone rearranged a few walls and added four feet to the back of the house to create a galley. If the style of cabinets is any indication, this might have been done sometime between 1967 and 1978. In 1999, a hasty do-it-yourselfer slapped on some quarter-round molding and vinyl flooring to prepare the house for sale to me.

I cook in an awkwardly designed kitchen with a four-foot-square work triangle. The unvented stove is in a corner. The fridge is directly opposite. They share the end of the narrow room with a defunct radiator. The sink is eighteen inches to the left of the stove. It’s impossible for more than one person to work comfortably.

Over the past few years I’ve been feeling increasingly grumbly about the kitchen. The final straw came one morning this past November when I made pancakes. My bedroom upstairs smelled like an IHOP for three days afterwards. OH! That was IT!

So I’ve been working for a couple of months on figuring out what I want and whom to hire. Demolition starts this coming week. I won’t get to cook anything meaningful in my own kitchen until April. But when it is finished, I will have new cabinets. I will have hardwood floors to match what’s in the rest of the house. I will have more light, a new sink, a dishwasher (for the first time!), a better workspace configuration, and more countertops. The materials, style and colors will be appropriate to the era in which my house was built.

Meanwhile, though, I will be eating like a college student out of the microwave that lives on a cart in the basement. I'll keep you posted.