MelissaH

My husband's 5' 10" tall, half a foot more than I. Our kitchen will have a designated place for a stepstool, because even though we don't often need a gravy boat, we like to be able to get to it on those occasions we need it. I'm definitely interested. We have a monument shop here in town, but I like knowing all my options. MelissaH

Absolutely! I think the part of the demolition I'm most looking forward to is taking sledgehammer or sawzall to the soffits. Speaking of soffits: our friend Anne's got a doozy of a soffit. Her cabinet space actually extends up through the soffit. But of course there's no good way to access all that space since the soffits themselves don't have doors. MelissaH

Sounds to me like another reason to slide a tall pantry cabinet between fridge and wall. MelissaH

There's really only been one time I complained at a restaurant. This would have been in the dark ages of 1997, when we were at a conference in Las Vegas. Our last night out, we went to one of the bigger-name chain restaurants. And my pasta with veggies was cooked to mush. When our waiter came back to ask how everything was, I told him that I thought the sauce was tasty but the pasta underneath was overcooked. I wound up eating the properly crisp-tender veggies out of the sauce, as well as my salad and all the bread on the table, and we ordered dessert. I wasn't hungry afterward. When the bill came, my pasta had been comped. At the time, we were happy, but we haven't been back to another one of those restaurants. MelissaH

Oraklet, We're with you on not wanting a hard floor. But for us, a "hard" countertop isn't a problem. We both grew up in houses where it would have been unthinkable to cut on anything other than a cutting board, and as a result we now have a multitude of cutting boards. (Besides, we like our knives too much to use them on anything that would do them harm. ) Anything so fragile that it would be broken just from being put on a hard surface won't survive our normal usage anyway. And if something falls from wall cabinet height, then oh well: if the hard countertop doesn't do it in, the distance to the softer floor probably will. I've ruled out a traditional tile counter for another reason: grout. I don't want to have to keep it clean, and if I'm spending a small fortune on a countertop, I'd like to be able to roll my piecrust directly on it. I am curious, though, if there's a way to get a stone tile countertop flat and smooth enough that dough won't get crisscross lines. MelissaH

Here's Version 2.1 of the kitchen (I didn't post v2.0), very different from Versions 1.x described upthread, as planned by my husband in Ikea's software and then twiddled by me in Photoshop, and based on the revelation that the sink doesn't need to be under the window. We also wondered if there was perhaps another place to put the fridge. This is what he came up with: And since this really doesn't give a great view of things, here are a couple of 3D views the program generated. We gave the cabinets the inset-panel birch veneer finish, since that's the Ikea finish that we're both most strongly drawn to. The first view would be what you'd see if you stood just about in the sliding door opening, and the outside wall of the house were transparent: and the second would be if you were Superman and could fly up above and use your X-ray vision to see through the ceiling (and ignore whatever else is in the attic): The hugest pro of this arrangement, from what I can see, is that there's now a very long unbroken stretch of cabinets along that inside wall (8 feet worth). This goes along with what snowangel just added. If we wanted a separate oven or an additional oven, that could be put underneath the countertop here, at the expense of some storage space. My husband keeps saying that it's up to me whether I want a second oven, but I don't think that's exclusively the case! In this arrangement, there's also only one corner with cabinetry. And the stove is back on the outside wall of the house, which should help with ventilation for the hood overhead. Additionally, the main sink is now down closer to the table, so we don't need a secondary sink. And the dishwasher is now also closer to the table, which means that everything with the dishes (washing, using, and storing) will happen close to each other and we won't need to haul them around the room. But I wonder if we'd have congestion issues with too many people wanting to get into the same sink. (The original design had a secondary sink tucked into the short stretch of countertop next to the fridge. I got rid of that because I didn't think a sink there would be of tremendous use, and because I didn't want a sink bowl in my refrigerator landing space.) But: *There's definitely some weirdness going on with the upper cabinets, especially around the fridge. Some of this is due to shortcomings in the Ikea design software, but we'll definitely need to do something different than what's shown here. *The distance from sink to fridge may be too long. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a second sink to cut this down to a more reasonable length, but right now I don't know where a good place (not in the way of other things) would be. *I want to measure the overall counter space in this design and compare it to the overall counter space in Versions 1.x. If we want to be able to open the refrigerator, we'll need to leave the wall between it and the side doorway without cabinets except maybe some really high ones, and I want to know exactly what we'd be sacrificing. *I just realized: this kitchen has no tall pantry cabinet. Might be able to put one in between wall and fridge. *I was kind of getting into the idea of a baking corner, which can't exist in this design because there's only the one corner in the kitchen. (And I thought the swing-up/down surface would be really neat too.) The best we could do with this arrangement is designate a portion of counter somewhere else (probably somewhere on the long counter) as the baking area, and store the appropriate goods (food and hardware) in that area. But if we wind up with a range, that puts my baking area further from the oven than I'd like. *Is the dishwasher too close to the entrance from the deck? I wonder if we'd want to round or slant that corner of the countertop, as a potential gut-saver. The door opening ends just about where the floor transitions now. If the DW is right at the end there or if the countertop is otherwise taken right to that edge with a 90° corner, I worry that it will give too closed-in a feeling, and lead to people coming in the door, trying to turn the corner to soon, and OOOOF! especially if the DW door isn't completely closed. The idea of moving the sink away from the window has some merit, because once we get a dishwasher we'll be spending much less time standing in front of the sink (I hope). Must think more about possible permutations, and refrigerator placement. MelissaH

Well, after all that they never asked for our opinion this time. I guess it's because the meeting's in DC and the society's headquartered there so all the staff live there and they know where to eat. The group dinner's going to be at the Capital City Brewing Company. And I'm guessing we'll have a choice of three main courses: something meat, something fish or fowl, and something vegetarian. But thanks for all your ideas, because there will be other meals to eat! Any other eGullet chemists out there who plan to attend the ACS meeting? MelissaH

I have two points of view on this, one more recent than the other. My husband is a rabid college football fan. I like it too, but I don't feel quite so obligated to watch unless a team I care about is playing. (I'd rather watch pro football where the athletes legally get paid for their services.) When we lived in Ohio, we only got the channels the aerial on the roof was able to pull in. Needless to say, we weren't able to get particularly important games such as the annual Colorado-Colorado State matchup. On these nights (and they were inevitably night games, with a kickoff time approaching insanity in the eastern time zone) we'd go to Ray's, a restaurant in the town we lived in, sit in our favorite waiter's section, and very nicely ask for one of the TVs to be tuned to Fox Sports Rocky Mountain. Before the kitchen closed we'd get a late dinner or some munchies and a couple of drinks, and we'd stay usually at least till halftime. But in these cases, we were going specifically for the TV, not for the food. The night Mario Lemieux un-retired, we went to this same restaurant so we could watch the hockey game. Had bars been smoke-free in Ohio, we probably would have gone to one of those instead in both these cases. Fast-forward to last Monday evening. We went to a place here, with a burgers-and-sandwiches type menu. (It was either that or Italian, and nobody was in the mood for Italian that night.) They'd always had televisions here and there, but they were muted and only about half of them were new enough to have closed-captioning. We'd found them pretty easy to ignore in the past. On this particular night, we were seated at a booth. And much to our surprise, our table and every other booth was now equipped with a personal flat-panel TV with its own remote. Just for the heck of it, I turned it on, and it was equipped with this area's selection of analog cable channels, and a set of speakers. I turned it off immediately, because if we'd wanted to watch TV together we would have done that at someone's house. But we'd gone to the restaurant specifically to enjoy each other's company as well as to get a bite of dinner. And just imagine the din of six or eight televisions, each broadcasting their own channel and each turned up loud enough to be heard over the typical restaurant clatter...ouch. I fear it's an abomination that won't go away. And that restaurant is now off our list. MelissaH

I usually don't have much of an issue baking through the summer. Even now, I don't mind firing up the oven, as long as it isn't one of those days when you wake up and it's already sticky and 85 out. (None of my friends here have AC; we just don't need it for enough of the year to get it, and many of the houses have baseboard heat without ducts.) Summer's when school's out, and when I have the time to play and experiment more. But baking during the school year has its advantages too: it stays cooler in the house so I don't have to be up at the crack of dawn, and there are more people around to help eat what I make and preserve my waistline. I haven't done as much baking as I'd like since moving here two years ago, in large part because I hate this oven so much. I hate this one even more than I hated the smaller oven we left behind in Ohio, because this one's so much more uneven. I'm very much looking forward to when our friend Anne gets her kitchen settled, because she's got a beautiful new dual-fuel range (no continuous grates, alas) waiting for the plumber to come tomorrow morning and run the new gas line into the kitchen. I've already told her that I'm coming to cook at her house because her stove's nicer than mine. My workspace is better even now, though. On the bright side, I've figured out how to make this oven cook an acceptable spinach souffle, and it does have a window so you can look in and see just how unevenly things are cooking. I can usually do an adequate pie in it as long as I use a glass pan so I know when to move it down to the quarry tiles that live on the bottom shelf. I turn out decent (but not excellent) bread. But forget cakes. Even cakes that work elsewhere don't work in this oven. I can even go for a little while without remembering just how miserable the oven is, if I don't go visiting. <rant> I looked through the latest Consumer Reports buying guide, and found their qualitative ratings to be useless. Call me a geek (I do!) but if you're talking about something quantitative like heat output, I want to see numbers! Don't just tell me that a given cooktop did a "very good" job at bringing water to a boil, but tell me how much water, in what size pot, at what temperature, and how long it took, fer cryin' out loud! Don't just tell me that Model ABC of oven was only "good" on evenness of baking a pan of cooking, show me a picture! If you're going to test a burner's low heat capacity by using it to melt chocolate without scorching, tell me more about what you did: was the chocolate chunked up first, or did you just toss in a big Hershey's Special Dark bar? Did you stir the melting chocolate? How much chocolate in what size and weight pan, and did you wait to pull it off the heat until the whole thing was liquid, or did you take it off sooner and let a little carryover finish the job? (This is one job I tend to use the microwave for, actually. It's one of the few microwave tasks for us that isn't just reheating leftovers.) And if you're telling me what the reliability of these ranges is, don't just give me a qualitative ranking from excellent to poor, tell me how many repair calls were made per given number of units, on average. If a student handed me a lab report that read like the Consumer Reports article, discussing quantitative information without quantitative evidence, I wouldn't accept it! </rant> I like heat. If we both get home starving at 7:30 after a long day, I want to be able to very quickly bring a pot of pasta water to a boil. On the rare occasions that I can get a hold of a steak worthy of such treatment, I like to get a cast-iron pan ripping hot and toss that hunk of cow in. I like being able to get some good Maillard action on stew meat before it turns into stew-in-progress. I also like being able to do a good stir-fry indoors. When we stir-fry on a stove, we actually use a flat-bottomed pan because it works better for us. But when we want to do some serious wokking, we actually head for the garage. My husband is a homebrewer, which means that he regularly heats large quantities of water, the quicker the better. For this, he has a 180,000 BTU propane burner. And this burner does marvelous things for a wok, especially one with a reasonably long handle. No home stove, even a pro-style wok burner, is going to touch this. (On TV not long ago, we saw someone going into ecstasy over her stove and it's 15,000 BTU burner for her wok. Not only did this seem like a laughable amount of heat for a wok to us, the burner held the wok so far above the flame that there's no way she was getting much of the heat it did put out.) But by the same token, I like to have the control to simmer that stew meat long and slow after it's been browned. On a relaxed day, I like to be able to cook a big batch of tomato sauce to freeze without having to clean a scorched pot afterwards. I sometimes make risotto for dinner. And I even sometimes make creme anglaise and lemon curd when the mood strikes. My point: super-high heat isn't everything for me, although there are times when I want it. I remember when I first moved into a house equipped with a gas stove (as cheap as they get, with pilot lights for the burners and the oven with the broiler pan underneath), after cooking on electric coils all my life. After a stage when I burned everything that wasn't cooked in a ton of water, I finally learned that gas gets hot faster than electric, especially older electric. I also occasionally had an issue with not getting things cooked the way I wanted, because I'd turn the gas down to soon and wait for the non-existent carryover from the hot electric coil. I was a graduate student then, and for about a week I was miffed at myself for wrecking my dinner (and consequently the next day's lunch). Once I got over that, I didn't burn much for the more than three years I lived in that house. But then we moved to Ohio and the cooktop was a flat-top electric model. Once again, I burned everything at the beginning: I'd turn a burner on, get impatient with it for not heating as fast as I thought it should, turn up the heat, and eventually it would get hotter than I wanted it. After I regained my patience at the stove, I did mostly fine. I foresee a trip to Sears the next time we're in Syracuse, since that's generally a decent place to look at a lot of brands of appliances like stoves, and a lot of models in each brand. And also a trip to Anne's kitchen with thermometer and stopwatch once her stove is connected, to see how well one modern home dual-fuel range works. That's where looking at a lot of their display kitchens helps, you see how they do it--most of the time it seems they pad widthwise with cover panels, or cut strips from cover panels--and you can decide if that is worth it to you. I've disliked most of the attempts at this that their installers have done, just fyi. I tend not to like the complete built-in look anyway so I don't bother or have designed around it. I've seen their crown molding used to give a more framed, more built-in look, above the cabinets as well--but me, the most I'll do is an edge of thin cover panel above and below, even with the door and side panel. I also don't make any attempt to hide the under-cabinet lights but that can be done as well with squared off strips of molding. Ah, that's what I don't remember explicitly looking at during our last trip to New Haven. At the time, I guess I didn't realize it might be an issue. But now that you mention it, I can see how it would work. I'm guessing you could get a lot of filler out of one cabinet door. One of these days, I'll see if our new ceiling fixture is set such that your shadow falls onto your work area. It's still summery enough that when I'm working in the kitchen, there's plenty of natural light. The way our designs keep coming out, we continue to have work areas without wall cabinets overhead, and therefore work areas that couldn't have undercabinet task lighting. MelissaH edited to fix where my brain got ahead of my fingers

Please? Pretty please with sugar on top (or Parmigiano Reggiano, if you'd prefer that)? MelissaH

Finishing my thought: Some of my hesitation on putting shelves above the stove relates to not knowing how high-powered a stove we'll have, and what sort of heat it will put out, and what we'd store up there that would not be affected by this potential heat output. If we could get a mosaic backsplash flat enough to be easy to clean, and with dirt-colored grout, I'd consider it. I like color in my kitchen, and that could be really neat if the light hits it right. willing to share? The two things that I'm remembering right now are: *With a frame, you have a frame to work with. Since walls aren't usually flat, square, and even, you usually have to make the cabinet fit into the wall. If you have a framed cabinet, you can just scribe and trim the frame to fit in (similar to coping molding). With a frameless cabinet, you can't do that directly to the cabinet frame; you need to instead work with a filler strip, which can be a challenge to get square to everything else. *Depending on the frameless cabinet, they can be a bugger to keep square. And if a cabinet gets installed out of square, the doors won't close properly and the whole thing looks out of whack. Apparently, installers around here really hate frameless cabinets, and consequently the framed kind are easier to find. Of course, with Ikea cabinets you install them yourself, so there's nobody to blame but yourself! I'm ready to handle the challenge, especially if it does turn out to give us more money to spend elsewhere without causing major headaches. MelissaH Have I bored you all stiff yet, with my musings?

Yeah, I kind of do. The one bugaboo is, as you pointed out, our distance from any of the Ikea stores. We'd been using New Haven as our proposed pick-up point simply because we have good friends nearby, so we'd be able to see them and spend the night inexpensively. I hadn't considered having the cabinets shipped in to us, though: that's a good idea. However, none of this still solves the difficulty of getting replacement parts to us quickly. We'd wondered where an oven might best fit, if we wanted it higher than below-countertop level. As of now, we haven't come up with a good location, because we didn't want to interrupt runs of countertop. We told the designer that we'd be willing to consider anything, and we can hardly wait to see what options come back. I certainly agree that having functional storage near the cooking appliances is desirable; something that we haven't yet done is formally made a list of everything that we want to have kitchen storage for, and what we want them near, to be sure we'll have space for everything where we want it. In the last configuration pictured above, I'd mentally placed our dishes in drawers opposite the dishwasher, next to the fridge, and the glasses in cabinets up above that: near the dishwasher and the table. It would make sense to also put the rubbermaid containers that we use for leftovers in this vicinity. I'd figured that all the baking dishes would go in drawers under the baking side of the counter, and the pots and pans and stuff that goes in the oven but that I don't typically bake flour-based stuff in would rest in drawers on the other side. No clue where the baking sheets and cooling racks might live, if they don't go into the skinny cabinet that fills the space next to the range. Right now, I keep my flour (except the whole-grain flours in the freezer) and sugars with the rolling pin in the cabinets under my primary work area, and the little containers of baking soda, baking powder, cocoa, and other baking supplies in the cabinet over the cooktop, but I could see relocating both of these under the baking area as well. Given a choice I'd like to have the mixer and food processor on the counter, but my husband grew up in a house where all the appliances were hidden from view, and those that had to live on the counter got covered with a little embroidered tea-cozy sort of thing. I'd be willing to compromise with appliance garages, or swing-up shelves behind cabinet doors if we find ourselves with enough cabinet space, but I refuse to embroider a cozy for my mixer. I obviously need to think about storage (food, appliances, spices, dishes, everything else) some more. We're also well aware of the importance of a good hood. After the remodel, I'd like us to be able to make a batch of mole inside, including the first part that involves toasting a pound of dried chiles on a dry cast-iron skillet. We've never had a hood that actually vents to the outside, and after the first experience of me getting smoked out of my house for the rest of the day, we've always done that part outside. I'm curious about your oven usage, Steve. Do you like the way the freestanding oven bakes better, is it a matter of keeping what's going on in the oven out of the way of what's going on in the stove, or is the freestanding oven just in a more convenient place for you? Over the last seven years, we've become masters at cooking with inadequate ovens (both quantity and quality of the space). Exhibit A: what we've done nearly every Thanksgiving we've hosted. The turkey goes on the grill, so it doesn't need oven space. The stuffing (which never gets stuffed) goes in the crockpot, although we've sometimes put some of the stuffing under the broiler to get a crispy top. Always mashed potatoes, which get cooked on the stove. My husband prefers squash to sweet potatoes so we always have roasted winter squash, scooped out of its shell and mashed with butter and brown sugar, and we make that way ahead of time and freeze it, so on T-day we only need to defrost it in the microwave. Cranberry sauce is a stovetop thing, and gets done the night before. Gravy is also a stove item. Green vegetable on the stove, and/or uncooked salad. If my husband makes a pumpkin cheesecake for dessert, that gets baked the night before. The only day-of oven items are apple pie if we do that for dessert (goes into the oven just as we start eating), and rolls which I try to have coming out of the oven shortly before we sit down at the table. Last year was nearly a disaster because it was cold enough that we couldn't get the propane in the grill to ignite and stay lit, so the bird had to go in the oven. While it rested, I was able to bake the rolls, and the pie baked while we ate. A few other times we've had gatherings of 6 people before hockey games. Lasagna's worked well for that: while it rests, the garlic bread uses the oven, and we eat salad and brownies or cookies that other people bring. I did a Seder this year, and we had eight plus Elijah at the table. The same principles applied: anything that needed oven time got done early, and as much as possible got cooked elsewhere. The biggest issue had nothing to do with the amount of oven space and everything to do with our table only being big enough to hold 6, if everyone keeps their elbows tucked in. Next summer when my parents move and we get the table that's in their dining room, we'll have the capability to seat twice that many. We don't plan to do feed a dozen on a regular basis, but cooktop and oven space would certainly be more of an issue. As I said to Varmint in a PM, I've been asking all the kitchen people we've talked to whether the difference between heat output of consumer cooktop and pro-style rangetop is enough to be noticeable, in practical terms for everyday usage. And nobody's been able to give me an answer. For instance, if I have a pot of water that I want to boil, will that happen significantly faster on a rangetop's high-powered burner than on a standard cooktop burner? What about if I want to sear a steak in a cast-iron pan: would the pan get significantly hotter in a normal amount of time on a rangetop than on a cooktop? I can calculate the theoretical answer, but I'm more interested here in experimental results. And I can't get those without actually doing the experiment, which is near-impossible given the facilities I've found. The consumer vs. pro-style is probably the issue that conflicts me most, largely due to the big financial difference between the two and the fact that I don't really know what I'm in for either way. While I realize the countertop issue is also a potentially expensive-difference choice, I know what laminate countertops are since I've had them everywhere I've lived, and I know that they'll function reasonably well for nearly everything I'd ask of them. (Then again, as my dad likes to say, "There are two kinds of problems in this world: those that can be solved with money and those that can't. The former are invariably easier to fix." And the whole kitchen comes down to a problem that can be solved with money.) The customization edge is where I think we'd lose out the most on not having an Ikea store nearby. No matter how carefully you plan a project, there are always curveballs and things that need to be changed, and there's a big difference between running to the store to pick up the part, and a five-hour one-way trip. We do have a fair amount of patience, but the timeframe could get to be an issue since we won't be able to start work until June and we'd need to have the kitchen mostly done (or at least functional) before the fall semester starts. If the missing pieces are things that can be worked around, we can either order them, send our friends to get them and ship them to us, or make a list and take a weekend trip to pick them up ourselves. But if we run into too many items that would bring the whole project to a screeching halt, we'd start to have timeframe issues. Once school starts in the fall, we'd get a couple of long weekends, but no extended time to work until the end of the semester after grades are due. I don't mind cosmetic details (unpainted walls, moldings not up yet, even doors not on upper cabinets) staying unfinished a little longer, but I do mind things that affect function ("Sorry, you don't have anywhere to put your dishes because that cabinet's got a problem and had to be reordered" sorts of things). However, I'm delighted to hear that there are ways to scootch something over an inch or two if need be, because that's the sort of thing not obvious from either the Web site or the kitchen planning software. In the drawings I've posted, it's probably not obvious but I've had to do quite a bit of inch-here and inch-there tweaking to get the cabinets to fill the space of the kitchen. Knowing that I'll be able to tweak the real thing makes me more comfortable. Does Ikea make filler strips, to take up an extra inch or two if you need to? That's also not obvious from the Web site. Did you have logical places in your kitchen to make transitions between materials and heights, places where you were going to have to start a new piece of surface anyway? Or are there just good ways to fill seams between materials so you don't get bits and pieces of gunk falling into the junction? I hear you on places to hide or trap dirt. I'm not a big fan of wood surfaces that aren't removable, because I'm too paranoid about being able to get them clean if (heaven forbid) I should drip raw chicken juice or other germy material on them. I too have a wooden pizza peel, which right now lives next to my wooden pastry board between the pantry cabinet and the refrigerator. And I have the wooden pastry board, which may become redundant if I get a stone baking worksurface. Should that happen, the board will probably migrate to my mother-in-law. The chemist in me runs screaming from marble, because I don't want to see my countertops disappear in a bubble of carbon dioxide from an errant lemon squeeze or vinegar spill. As you say, countertops and their prices are greatly determined by location. For us, an Ikea countertop would have to be a good deal to make it worth shipping to us. A quick Yellow Pages search turns up a couple of countertop shopss in our town, as well as the listings for the hardware stores here. Once the design for the kitchen is a bit firmer and we know how much countertop we'll need, I'll be talking to them to see what's available and how much it costs. Yeah, we saw that one and liked it. But we went with the Cittra because it was easier to put up, and because we were really looking for something to just get us through the next year that cost less than replacing the two circular fluorescent tubes in one of the old fixtures. If we have a place for it after that, terrific. If not, they'll probably show up on eBay. We'll be revisiting the kitchen lighting issue, I'm sure. I hear you on upper corner cabs. The one we currently have, with its wobbly turntable, is so poorly built that it's a prime example of why they are deserving of hate. But what we're running into here is that if you run the wall cabinets all the way to the stove wall, you get a couple of cabinets (one on each side) waaaay back to the point where you'd pretty much have to stand on the burners, or somehow squeeze between the cabinet and the hood, to be able to reach inside. I think we'd be better off putting a soffit back in on the stove wall and building the hood into the soffit, should we do away with any corner cabinet. To be honest, these corners were one reason we talked to a designer, because we just didn't know what to do. Distance: the kitchen's 8 feet wide, wall to wall. Put normal-width countertops in on both sides, and you have 4 feet left, or 48 inches. Put in a 36 inch range or cooktop, and that leaves you with just 12 inches of unused space. Should we downsize to a 30 inch range, we'd have 18 inches. And those are numbers that don't take any kind of corner cabinet turntable into account. I'm not overly fond of turntables down below either, although some of the more modern ones I've seen lately are better than the one we currently have. I think I'd prefer some kind of sliding basket system like Varmint's Magic Corner, because that would then leave us with more space available next to the stove. I think symmetry will likely be a casualty, unless you think 6 or 9 inches on each side is wide enough to be useful? I like all your ideas for ways to use the skinny space next to the stove, but we'll need to pick and choose. I'm leaning towards vertical storage for flat things. Right now I keep all my little baking tools stuffed in a shoebox in one of my cabinets, but that's obviously not ideal. If we weren't about to redo the kitchen, I'd think it may be time to invest in a nicer box that can live outside the kitchen except when it's needed. For now, I'm in "wait and see" mode. MelissaH to be continued because I seem to have hit a limit on the number of quotes in a post

Upstate New York, actually. MelissaH

I'd love to try Sarah's recipe and get in on the fun, BUT it calls for two 9-inch rounds. I have the pans, but unfortunately my oven is too small for me to fit both pans on the same shelf, and I've never had any luck in trying to put the two layers on different racks in this oven. Things either burn or don't get done, or I spend so much time rotating and transferring that my oven loses all its heat and things don't bake properly. Has anyone tried using Sarah's recipe in 8-inch rounds? Those will fit in my oven, if I let the pans touch each other. MelissaH

Chufi, Are these markets year-round? We won't be there till January. MelissaH

We haven't un-considered anything except ceramic tile and Pergo-style laminate, and possibly hardwood. Something that we haven't yet decided is whether we're going to convert the kitchen from baseboard heating to radiant underfloor heating, and that decision will undoubtedly have some impact on our floor choice. That's what we've discovered as well: laminate is less expensive than everything else, and everything else is fairly close in price. We've already decided that laminate countertops are one thing we can live with for a while, since we hope to have a fair amount of counterspace in the new kitchen. We're also looking into the possibility of putting in multiple surfaces, therefore saving the soapstone (and its price tag) for where it would be best used. We just aren't sure that we have good places to make the transitions between surfaces. Then again, we don't have a design set out either! What we were told is that oven cabinets are expensive. They're big (30 inches or larger) which jacks up the cost. And very often the cost of bringing the utilities to a second location also ups the price tag. Based on the looking I've done in the last couple of days, I'm inclined to agree with the designer. For other reasons, in thinking about it more, I'm thinking that we'll be going with a pro-style range. This is for reasons that have more to do with our cooking style than anything. We want the space of a 36 inch wide cooking surface, and we also want continuous grates. In addition, we want to be able to get high heat on whatever burner we choose, not whichever burner the manufacturer has deemed will be the high heat burner. Those requirements seem to be pushing us into the pro-style lines. Since I don't think we'll have the space to separate an oven from a rangetop, if we want a pro-style cooking surface we'll need to go with a range. I'm willing to put the money toward a range, since that's not something that can easily be replaced or upgraded. (Have you looked at what's out there for consumer-level 36-inch-wide ranges? Not much!) What I haven't said here is that we actually are likely to do a fair amount of the work ourselves. My husband's quite comfortable with and good at building things; the only reason he's not considering making our cabinets himself is time. Some things (plumbing, electric) we're going to have to let other people do for us, and there are other things we may let other people do (drywall, maybe floors depending on what the floors are) because they'll be able to do it much faster and/or better than we will. But there are plenty of other things we can do ourselves, and the more sweat equity we can put in, the more cash we'll have available for other parts of the kitchen. If we need more people-power than what we can provide ourselves, there are local contractors who are more than willing to help us out, ones who wouldn't need to drive an hour each way to get here. MelissaH

It's been an interesting week. First of all, we took out the one ceiling light with circular fluorescent tubes and replaced it with one of the Ikea light fixtures. We learned that you only use the lamp holder to focus the light, not the bulb itself. Then we learned that the bulbs are available at our local home-improvement megamart, individually or as a box of 3 for about $10. The new light is nice, I think. It's definitely different from the old fluorescent. For one thing, the light's much warmer, both in color and in temperature. But I like that the light's on as soon as you flip the switch, and I really like that we were able to focus the lamps to the areas that need the light. We have one pointing at the table next to the fridge, another onto the dish-drying area, a third onto the new cart, and the last more or less down but towards the sink. You can actually do dishes and know that they're clean without having to turn on the over-the-sink light that always burns out! We oriented the fixture down the long axis of the kitchen. We'll probably replace the other light fixture in the very near future, and we're planning to install that one perpendicular to the first, across the short dimension of the kitchen, to get the lights aimed at the oven, cooktop, and the rest of the counter. We also picked up our rebuilt tandem wheel from the shop in Geneva, and instead of driving back home on the Thruway, we took back roads and paid a visit to an appliance store in Auburn, NY (home of Harriet Tubman's house). I'd wanted to go there because this store carries both GE Monogram and Viking appliances. When we got there, I learned that they also carry many other brands, including DCS, Dacor, and Thermador. We spent a little while just looking at everything, starting to figure out what we liked and didn't like. We also learned that if we go with a professional-style rangetop (as opposed to a consumer-style cooktop), we would probably not be able to put an oven underneath it. We also picked up a stack of "kitchen porn" to look through and drool over. It's shocking how expensive some of the electric convection wall ovens are! The third thing we did, kitchen-wise, was we spent a bit of time talking with a kitchen designer. I started by doing a search on the NKBA Web site for designers in our area. Their default search is apparently set for a 20 mile radius, but didn't turn up anything. I widened the search to 50 miles, and got some hits. I set my focus on Monday afternoon, because we were making a trip to Syracuse anyway to pick up a friend at the train station. I immediately crossed out the designers with Home Depot as the referral company, because we'd had bad experiences with them only trying to sell us the stuff that Home Depot sells, when we were thinking about redoing a previous kitchen. That pretty much narrowed down the list. One person on the list either didn't answer the phone or had a busy signal, so I also crossed that name off because I want to work with people who I can easily get a hold of, if the need arises. Then, I called someone who answered the phone, said they liked to cook, and was available that afternoon. So we headed down, and spent a worthwhile couple of hours there. One thing I found out right off the bat, just from some phone calls: nobody around here has any firsthand experience with Ikea cabinets. I attribute this to the lack of close Ikea stores. We'd started there for two reasons: first, it was easy to do especially with the kitchen planning software they make available; and second, we liked the combination of style, quality, and price. But the designer we talked to deals in some lines of cabinets, and that's obviously where this designer's profit comes from since our chat was free of charge. As we said, though, we aren't wedded to Ikea cabinets, and we're quite interested in seeing what else is available without us needing to drive five hours to New Haven and renting a truck for the trip home. In fact, one of the things that I'd wondered about was if the lack of customization options for the Ikea cabinets would make our kitchen trickier to plan or less user-friendly in the long run, especially since we're likely going to have at least two corners to deal with. Furthermore, as we learned, almost nobody around here wants to touch frameless cabinets; the contractors are much happier dealing with face frames. And my husband the handy guy pointed out to me the various ways in which face framed cabinets can be easier to deal with. In any case, we can price out the Ikea cabinets on our own, and we're both curious how this designer's cabinet options will compare. The designer has agreed to work on a per-hour basis if we choose in the end to go with the Ikea cabinets rather than his cabinets. The designer confirmed that separating the stovetop from the oven increases the price. This is good to know, because it means that we're likely going to be looking only at ranges, not at separates. But because we're probably not going to separate the two, we'll need to find something on which we like both stovetop and oven. I don't think this will be that big a deal, but it's good that we know this now before getting our hearts set on one brand cooktop and another brand oven. Unless we decide we'd be sorry if we only had one oven in the kitchen. Right now I can't think of many occasions we would have liked two ovens at different temperatures. (I certainly would like more oven space at times, but we've come up with ways to work around the spacial restrictions of a tiny oven.) But a second oven is probably something best considered in the original kitchen design rather than as a retrofit, which means we should make up our minds sooner rather than later! We also laid out the dimensions of the kitchen for the designer, explained some of what we're looking for and our likes and dislikes. We also brought along our latest proposal for a floor plan, and explained what we did and why. One thing I really liked was that this designer spent a lot of time listening to us, and seemed to understand that we don't know what our budget is yet but that price will likely be of some consideration so there may be places where we'd like to save money. (The one that comes to mind right away: countertops.) We should have some of the designer's plans within a month, and it will be interesting to see how those ideas differ from what we came up with on our own. Yesterday, after our visit and discussion, my husband came up with yet another iteration of our plan, based on the possibility of moving the sink away from the window...or possibly even adding a second window to the kitchen wall. He hasn't walked me through it (dinner with our friend last night, plus the Hell's Kitchen finale we'd Tivoed for her, kept us otherwise occupied), so I can't post it or say much about it yet. I'm all of a sudden really starting to question my own yearning for a pro-style range or rangetop. Yes, it's way cool. Yes, I think I'd probably get a lot of use out of it and having it would probably make me very very happy. (That in itself should be reason enough for doing it, I know.) But you do pay a rather hefty premium for getting a rangetop rather than simply a cooktop. I'm wondering if the happiness I'd derive is worth the extra $$$. And I'm also wondering how much I'd miss the extra BTUs you get from a rangetop that you don't get from a cooktop. But then again, it's not just my kitchen. Yesterday my husband cooked dinner. He had three burners going at once: one on which he cooked somen noodles, a second on which he steamed broccoli, and a third for searing tofu. Somewhere in there, one of the burners got used to toss everything together with a sauce he whipped up from oyster sauce and other stuff. Any time you're talking noodles and searing, that's two high-heat burners at once. And I'm not convinced that a cooktop will give us the heat we'd like for meals like this. I really like the idea of using whichever burner I want for whatever task I want, not necessarily being stuck with the noodle pot in the middle because that's where the highest heat is. And I think that last part dictates rangetop or pro-style range. Any thoughts on whether I'd be sorry for not going pro-style, when the dollar speaks and push comes to shove? MelissaH

Whoa! Are you saying that pea soup is supposed to be mushy? MelissaH

If I can ever find a copy of this book to look in, I'll see what he says. I sense an attempt at an interlibrary loan coming on.... MelissaH

Carswell, This sounds like plenty for me to go on. I'm intrigued with your findings about whole vs. split yellow peas, and why that has changed over the last 60 to 75 years or so. We have no problem finding split peas here, in green or yellow. (My husband contends that split pea soup must always be made according to his mother's recipe, with green peas. This is a recipe straight off a farm in Michigan, and I really hate the color of the finished soup, so I won't tell you what it reminds me of. ) I don't know that I've ever seen unsplit peas for sale, even in the market that sells Indian food. I think I'll probably try it with the split peas that are easy to find. Thanks a ton! MelissaH

Hello all, We were visiting with a friend last week. His parents were also there for a visit. One night we were all sitting around after dinner talking about the food that we remember our parents cooking. My friend's mom (she's about as old as my grandma, and of French-Canadian heritage) grew up in waaaay upstate NY, not far from the Quebec border. The thing she remembered most was French-Canadian yellow pea soup, made with whole (not split) yellow peas. Is this a classic soup that everyone in that part of North America grows up eating? What else goes into traditional yellow pea soup? Is there something else (bread? biscuits? crackers?) that always gets served alongside? Do the peas need to be unsplit, and am I likely to find unsplit yellow peas in not-as-far upstate NY? Educate me, please. If you're willing to share your recipe, I'm interested! Thanks, MelissaH

Good question, Fat Guy. (And apologies to shelora for hijacking the thread.) I suspect the answer will depend on who you ask. I always thought of a dumpling as having stuff inside some kind of a wrapper. I guess by that definition, even a stuffed grape leaf would count as a dumpling, although I never thought of a stuffed grape leaf (or stuffed cabbage) as a dumpling. But just now I asked my husband what he thinks of when I say "dumpling" and his immediate answer was "flour and water mixed together and dropped on top of a pot of beef stew." He then went to his recipe box and pulled out a card with the recipe written by his mother: He also added that these might not be dumplings in everyone's book, but may be better referred to as pot biscuits. My husband also reminded me of something available at every ice cream stand we visited in NE Ohio: apple dumplings, which consisted of an apple wrapped in pastry and baked till the pastry was done, then plopped into a bowl and served with a scoop of (usually) vanilla ice cream. I think the reason I never considered these as dumplings in my mind is the size: to me, a dumpling is small enough to eat in one or two bites. Therefore, stuffed grape leaves would still fit the definition. Did you have something specific in mind without a wrapper, Fat Guy? MelissaH

Pierogi, filled with potato and cheese, from St. Stephen's Church here in town. They make them for their annual St. Stephen's Festival (in only a couple of weeks!) and also for the Fridays during Lent. Is there any culture that doesn't do some form of dumpling? MelissaH

Well, if it's in really bad shape, you can sand or use steel wool to resurface, but then you have to reseason and begin a new life for the pan. ← I've also heard that if it's yucky dirty, you can jump-start the cleaning process by putting it in your oven for a self-clean cycle. However, my ovens have always been of the "self-clean? Clean it yourself!" variety, so I have no first-hand experience. MelissaH

Since moving into a house without a dishwasher, definitely the hands. With a dishwasher available, though, I prefer the food processor for the butter and dry ingredients. I'd still fold in the wet stuff by hand because I always overdo it by machine. It's much easier to wash hands than a food processor. Also, there's much less risk of cutting yourself on your own hands. MelissaH