Day 27- Kitchen revelations

So this is how I grew up. The kitchen was MUCH more beautifully decorated, but it was a good old fashioned eat-in kitchen with sit-down meals every morning, evening, and all through the weekends. I did a little bit of cooking, but mostly it was my incredible mother. Later on, my dad began to do all the bread baking and an increasing number of signature dishes that most of Cincinnati had not started eating yet. Tacos, guacamole, shrimp fettucini, brioche....and my mother cooked every nationality that caught her fancy. I ate quiche before it was a cliche. 

                                      I started my wifely cooking duties on a stove like this one

It was meant to heat the crappy home we had built, and I had to balance pans on whatever flat surface I could find. It was here that I methodically went through the Joy of Cooking, making substitutions for things we couldn't afford or wouldn't eat...at the moment. Brown rice and vegetables became replaced with game when winter hit and bullets were cheaper than food at the IGA. I even figured out a way to make Boston brown bread on one of these things! I canned over an open fire in the middle of August, which was BIG fun, let me tell you! And baked bread in a hole in the ground lined with coals and more coals on top of the lid of my Dutch oven. (found the recipe in a cowboy cookbook in the library)

                                                                       Then we upgraded!!

Ours didn't look so great, or clean, but the principle is the same. More wood chopping and more heating up the whole place just to make pancakes no matter how hot it got in the summertime. But I had a oven! And a wonderful neighbor taught me which wood to use to make a hot, medium and slow oven. AND how many verses of Amazing Grace to sing to guage the temperature. If you hold your hand in the oven and make it all the way through a verse AND a chorus, you have a nice slow oven for fruitcake. But if you can only make it through one line, then you're good to go to start your roast...knowing that you better change from myrtle to oak soon to cool it off a bit.

Ah, those were the days. Which I'm glad are gone! When I start griping about my apartment  in any way at all, I have to remember those days.

This is the kind of great kitchen I got when I was a travel nurse staying in corporate apartments.

And this is what I had in my first apartment here. It was made for dudes to keep their beer cold and microwave their Hungry Man meals and I griped continually about it.

NOW I have this one

And I thought YAY!!!! Lots of ROOM!!!

Well, yes. Lots of floor space. Counter space? Not so much. Storage space for pots and pans? Nope. All the cupboards have shelves that are too closely spaced for the kind of thing I use, so I used my noggin...and a cart and some metal shower hooks. YAY ME! That cart is my coffee cart too, and has my latte machine and my Keurig on it. Far cry from making Pero on a Franklin stove, lemme tell you!

The counter space, though, causes this sort of thing to happen. I pull out drawers and put cutting boards on them, pull out other drawers to set bowls and ingredients, and use the floor to unload my grocery bags...eventually. The stove top is where I set the clean pots that don't fit on the hooks until I can put them inside the oven for storage.

 What is the point of all this kitchen history? The point is that I managed to make some kick ass Greek meatballs and Greek tomato sauce to have for dinner and probably pack for lunch. And after my nap, which is happening pronto, I'll unload all the rest of the bags of produce and make a kick ass fruit salad. The top of the stove is clear today, btw, but I was bitching and moaning about having to use over the counter cutting boards and pulled out drawers and I suddenly remembered what I used to have to cook on.

 I made all this stuff in the middle of a heat wave....WITH air conditioning running full blast.

So I'm gonna quit complaining.

About my kitchen, anyway. No promises about anything else.