MelissaH

Wish I could, but it's a wall oven, and not a normal-sized one at that and definitely not the same size I'd want to replace it with, ever! It's at the far end of this picture on the right side, visible in this pic behind the fridge. The top oven's the one that gets used for most normal baking tasks. The bottom one's a killer broiler that gets very very hot, much hotter than any other broiler I've ever had at my disposal, but not really useful for anything other than broiling. Its days are numbered, but I don't have an exact number to start counting down yet. If the cooktop starts to go fritzy between now and then, we'll probably either look into getting the stove for the new kitchen sooner rather than later, or we'll look for an interim model cheap. Last time we had to open the thing up to clean it out after inadvertently putting too much water in the "pasta pot" and having it splooge out when we added the potatoes, my husband got a bit of an electrical poke. It seems to do fine if you don't mess with the burners if you have any water in the area, fortunately (or unfortunately?). MelissaH

So, my husband got home from work this afternoon and I told him about my idea of appliance garages in the corners of the counter. His response: "Those are fairly common, and I've seen them before." I haven't, and came up with the idea all by myself based on Smithy's question! He says that we've both seen them in some of the kitchen setups in various stores, and I've always been so anti-garage that I wouldn't even remember seeing them. That said: if we're both thinking of them, does that mean they're a sure thing in our new kitchen? MelissaH edited after we talked more last night

We see them at a few of the vendors in our farmer's market, but the season's over here (upstate NY) for this year, as well. I usually start asking in late June, to see who's going to have them. When I lived in Ohio, one of the markets that carried a lot of local and/or organic produce would take orders. They'd bring in only enough to fill those orders, so if you didn't ask for them, you were out of luck. MelissaH

I tried again, with another single layer of butter cake this morning, in part to use up the half-egg from yesterday and also to come up with something presentable to bring for dessert tonight. This time I decided to leave off the crumble topping, to see if that made any difference. My result: somewhat better. This time I had 2% milk in the house, so I didn't need to do any monkeying. (I know, a great scientific experiment with multiple variables.) The edges are still somewhat muffin-top-ish, but this time the cake came out of the pan without protesting or ripping. The top is barely golden, except for right at the one edge that was pointed at the hot spot because I didn't open the oven midway through to turn the pan, and the sides and bottom are about the color I'd expect. The bottom also feels a little coarse, sort of like a slice of bread that's been slightly toasted. It slants, but I knew that was going to happen. Definitely presentable. Because I promised cherries, I'm going to thaw some of my frozen stash of sour cherries, maybe cut them a little smaller, toss them with sugar and thickener like I would for inside a pie, and cook them on the stovetop to make a sauce to spoon over. And on the way to our friends' house we'll pick up some ice cream, maybe some slivered almonds too. Yum! HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY HOW MUCH I HATE MY OVEN? MelissaH

We don't use the microwave much while we cook. We do use the microwave to heat leftovers, but if we're making something from scratch it just doesn't get used (and right now the microwave is in a corner right next to the cooktop, about as convenient as it gets). So we decided to put the microwave near the fridge and the table. There are two very specific tasks other than heating leftovers that I use the microwave for: melting stuff (chocolate and butter, separately or in combination) and thawing frozen spinach when I don't plan ahead far enough. The butter that we melt in the microwave is almost exclusively used for popcorn, and I could easily see using the popper on the surface under the microwave. And any spinach that gets thawed gets an intermediate stop at the sink before it heads down to be cooked, so I can put handfuls into my potato ricer to squeeze dry. So those aren't issues. Chocolate is sometimes melted for non-baking use (like for dipping chunks of fresh fruit when I feel a little decadent). None of those would cause location issues for the microwave. Chocolate that gets melted explicitly for the purpose of going into batter is about the only thing that would need to be transported down to the other end on a regular basis. If that turns into a major chore, I might find a different way to start melting my chocolate. Are you designing an airplane? Is it as much fun as designing a kitchen? Me too, because from the non-3D views that I tend to work from, when you put cabinets on top of the refrigerator, all you see is cabinets. If you have more than one set of upper cabinets, the refrigerator disappears: you know it's there, but you don't know where. As long as I'm bringing the drawings into Photoshop to clean them up anyway, it's just as easy to add the labels, which make things easier for everyone. Good point, and thanks for bringing that up. You're right that it's probably too deep to be easily reachable for work surface. However, I think that they might make good places to store things like a mixer, food processor, possibly even toaster oven (which we do tend to use in preparing dinner) and water boiler. One recurring discussion between my husband and me is where to store the utensils that can get used on the stovetop: tongs, pancake flippers, whisks, silicone spatulas, slotted spoons, and the like. We have two crocks stuffed between the microwave and the cooktop, and I keep putting the utensils in there. My husband, however, tends to leave exactly one or two of everything out, and stuffs the duplicates into a drawer. (Then again, as far as he's concerned, he'd prefer to have nothing at all stored on the counters. Not me!) While I agree that they stay cleaner in a drawer, especially since we don't really have a place out of spatter range in the current kitchen, I'd really prefer to have everything at my fingertips without needing to open a drawer. We've agreed that appliance garages may be an adequate compromise for the mixer and food processor. One way to handle this might be to make triangular garages in the corners of the counter such that we can cordon them off behind doors of the sort that are often found on entertainment centers (swing open on hinges and then slide back out of the way), or maybe a tambour-style door that rolls back from one side like a sliding patio door. Then we could get the small fuzzy appliances and utensils out of sight but easily accessible, and also make use of an area that might otherwise be hard to reach. The diagonal would also echo the look of the upper corner cabinets from Ikea. However, once again I'd want to measure everything very carefully, to be sure that I had enough room inside the garage to be useful, and also enough room left on the countertop. I'd think that we'd at least have the space for the crocks of utensils on the stove side corner, and maybe this is a place to put some pullout shelves to hold little pastry tools or some of the more-frequently-used spices in the other? We're probably going to need to find somewhere else for the toaster oven, though. MelissaH

My grandma said that two of the big reasons she likes the Smart Chickens are that she doesn't need to trim them up much if at all, and there's not a lot of fat left in the pan after they've been roasted. Losing the tail could account for some of that. MelissaH

I'll be in Washington DC in a couple of weeks. In the time I have away from my meetings, there's one thing on my "must-see" museum list: the kitchen in the Smithsonian. MelissaH

Yeah, it does eat up a lot of space, which we might be able to better use elsewhere. But it gets a lot less fun when you start to bring up money! Seriously, though, once you start talking about sweating joints, we'd want a plumber to do the work. And this isn't an easy area to get at, since down below is a finished room. That was part of the appeal of (unposted) version 2.0, which had a sink down in the cul-de-sac of the kitchen: just on the other side of that wall is a bathtub, so getting water to there's going to be easy. Any of the places we've shown a stove won't be a real issue to bring in a gas line either: underneath the stairs is our utility room, where we can easily get at existing gas lines. And the utility room is the one room in the house that isn't finished. Thinking some more about this, I came up with: Cabinets over the fridge, microwave next to the fridge and cabinets overhead, still with a 15-inch pantry all the way up. I adjusted the fridge in the software to be 36 inches wide rather than 30 inches wide (ours is about 33 inches wide), which means that the cabinets between the fridge and dining room are now 24 and 21 inches wide. I'd want to futz with that in real life to get as much room as possible, given the real-life dimensions and existing fridge. Still a possibility of a baking corner opposite the range with swing-up/down marble; still the possibility to separate the cooktop and oven but keep them both down in the cul-de-sac. On the outside wall, I didn't do anything to the range, other than make the hood a hood so the software knows it's a hood and not a cabinet. Two 24-inch cabinets between sink and stove. Upper cabinets all the way around from window to doorway, except for the aforementioned hood. Nothing up above from window to dining room, still; any task lighting there will need to be accomplished either from the ceiling or from something mounted high on the wall and pointed down. I'm thinking trash can underneath somewhere near the sink, and maybe another one down in the cul-de-sac. Dishwasher between sink and dining room, but not right at the end: I Photoshopped a 12-inch-wide cabinet to have a slanted front. Not sure what exactly I'd do with this space, but the slant at least eases some of the hip-banging potential. Could be a decent place to store some of the cutting boards, since we have them in all sizes. Might be somewhere to put in shelves (maybe ones that can pull out?) and use them to store soft goods like kitchen towels, since we go through a good number of those. Or cleaning supplies and sponges. Maybe a place to get wild and crazy and make two separate storage areas: one triangular area of open shelves, and another cabinet with a door facing the dining room table? I'd hate to just box that area in and waste the space. One downside: this design has two corners with cabinetry, which we'll need to do something with. To me, this looks reasonable, but my husband may feel differently. He hasn't yet seen this iteration. I think the cooking area needs to stay down by the cul-de-sac. There's the utility issue which I touched on above, and also the traffic flow issue, which I haven't really talked or thought about. But I believe that the stove should be out of the areas that people are likely to walk through. I also think the sink (if there's only one) should be easy to get at from either the kitchen workspaces OR from the dining room table. As far as ovens: if I can pull off yesterday's dinner with only my one miserable oven, I'm thinking that one good and reasonably-sized oven will be plenty. I've been cooking with small ovens for so long now that it's second nature for me to plan my oven-based cooking around limited resources, and make sure that I only do one touchy dish at a time, and never plan more than what can fit on one shelf. And I've been thinking about how I would use a second oven if I had one. My friend Linda uses her second oven mainly when she's doing big cakes, like the 14-inch layers that made the bottom tier of her wedding cake. But she only has one 14-inch pan, and the second oven really just saved her time during the baking process, because she was able to do a couple of smaller layers in Oven #2 while the big layer baked in Oven #1. (Without the second oven, we probably would have needed to spend two long evenings helping her bake the layers, not just one.) I, however, do not own a 14-inch cake pan, do not plan to purchase one, and do not want to get into the wedding cake business. (That whole construction and transportation issue scares me!) And last Thanksgiving when it was too cold for the grill to light, we proved that we could take up the whole oven for several hours and cook a turkey inside without causing problems with cooking anything else for the meal. It would be something to brag about, but I don't know that we can afford it financially or spatially...and Anne's new house is exactly 1 km from ours if you stay on the roads, and as of this afternoon she has a working range! (But I lied about it somewhere up above: it's actually all-gas, not dual fuel, but it does have continuous grates on the burners.) Therefore, I'm going to be working from the assumption that we only need one oven in the kitchen, at least until I change my mind. MelissaH

We don't get down to Syracuse and the Korean place down there nearly often enough. When we lived in Ohio, we didn't get to either Cuyahoga Falls or Cleveland and the Korean places there often enough either. That's when we started acquiring the various goodies needed to make our own Korean-style food. The Persian cucumbers we get here were a revelation: they look sort of like a very small English cuke, and they're by far the best we've found for this kind of salad when they're available. I still haven't gotten into the combination of sweet and fish, although it does work better in context than just to munch on its own. MelissaH

Last night was notable because for once in my life, I managed to get everything on the table and ready to eat at the same time! I started by making a Korean-style cucumber salad. I started out with a recipe from Copeland Marks's book on Korean cuisine. I washed four of what my local megamart calls "Persian cucumbers" and chopped off the ends, and then used my plastic slicer with the 2 mm blade to make thin pieces. The thickness of the slices was the only thing I measured in the whole dinner. To the cucumber slices in a ceramic bowl, I added a spoonful of really really coarse sea salt, a touch of sugar, a splash of rice wine vinegar, a small glug of sesame oil, and a few pinches of coarse Korean dried chile. I tossed everything together and then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge until we were ready to eat. The red of the pepper makes it easy to see when it's distributed evenly. Next: a vegetable layered thing loosely based on the torta in the September issue of Cook's Illustrated, which arrived last week. I cut a large eggplant crossways in half, chopped off the spiky green cap and the very bottom, and then made the whole thing into planks about half an inch thick. These got sprinkled with more of my coarse sea salt and stacked in a colander for about half an hour. I then put them in a single layer on a folded-over cloth kitchen towel, topped with another folded-over towel, and pushed to get rid of even more liquid. The slices then went in a single layer onto a rack on a sheet pan. I also rubbed a whole red pepper with olive oil and stuck that on the pan, and wrapped three garlic cloves in a foil packet with another touch of oil and added that to the pan. The pan with eggplant, pepper, and garlic roasted at about 450 °F for about 45 minutes, until the eggplant was cooked through and even dryer. I turned the pan around halfway through to keep things cooking evenly, which made this take longer than the magazine said it should. While the vegetables roasted, I took a zucchini from the farmer's market, and sliced that 2 mm thick as well. These slices also got salted and colandered for about half an hour, and then dried on towels the same way as the eggplant. While the zucchini dripped, I sliced a couple of market tomatoes and salted them on yet another towel, and after half an hour pressed them dry too. While I waited for everything to be ready, I scrubbed a bunch of beets that were definitely grown in the ground, and then wrapped them in foil, in preparation for roasting. When the eggplant was ready to come out of the oven, I pulled the whole tray out and then turned the oven down to about 350. The pepper got immediately tossed into a bowl and sealed in with plastic wrap. The rest I let sit until they were cool enough to handle. While they cooled, I buttered a glass 9-by-9 dish with some of the heel of a stick of butter that had previously been rubbed on hot ears of corn on the cob. The rest of the butter, maybe 2 Tbsp. worth, got put in a saucepan, melted, and then made into roux with about the same amount of flour. By then the oven was cooled down enough for me to slide the packet of beets inside, and the garlic packet was cooled enough that I could open it and squeeze the insides from the 3 cloves into my roux. Then I added some milk to make a bechamel, and added a palmful of dry thyme. I brought that up to a boil and set it aside. No more salt, because I'd used plenty on the vegetables themselves. I had the end of a pre-made roll of polenta in the fridge, so I sliced that as thinly as I could, and used the slices to line the bottom of my buttered pan. I then added, in this order: eggplant, zuke, eggplant, tomato. By then the pepper had steamed and cooled enough that I could handle it, so I peeled it and pulled out the innards, cut it into strips, and tucked the strips into the gaps between the tomato rounds. I poured my slightly-cooled sauce over the whole thing, and slid the pan into the oven next to the beets. Less than an hour later, the beets were done and the vegetables were bubbling. I set the vegetables aside to cool and start solidifying a little. While that happened, I pulled on a pair of gloves to deal with the beets. I'd immediately opened the ends of the packet to let the steam out, and I carefully opened the packet the rest of the way to contain any red liquid within. I set a cutting board inside another sheet pan, again to contain any staining. Then I pulled the beets out, chopped off the tops and bottoms, skinned them, and sliced them about 1/4 inch thick. The beet slices went into another bowl and got a light dressing of O zinfandel vinegar. By the time I had the beets done, the vegetables had cooled enough to be handled, and the cukes were nicely marinated. The vegetables had given off just enough liquid that the polenta in the bottom had melded from distinct rounds into a more complete layer, and the cuke salad had just enough punch for all of us. The beets probably didn't go, but they tasted good and stained everything red. The leftovers, from three of us eating: three slices of eggplant that hadn't fit in the baking dish, and about half a beet, sliced and vinegared. I'll have to remember this one. MelissaH

Hi, Melissa... Well, that would be my main and biggest suggestion.... And, second, when you substituted part of the milk with sour cream, an acidic ingredient, you started to throw off the balance of the cake, even as you even suggested....Bake-from-scratch cake recipes are the hardest to bake (that's why foolproof cake mixes are so popular)...Substitutions, mismeasuring, oven tempratures being off, mixing methods not being followed properly will throw off a cake recipe......So, when you play recipe "chemist" and try new things, which is lots of fun to do, expect mishaps and cake mistakes! Actually, I am a chemist. It's way more fun to experiment with things you can eat, though! My topping baked up crunchy and delicious, if very flat and sweet. My MIL's apple crisp topping recipe ingredients are very similar to Lorna's: a cup of flour, a cup of oatmeal, a cup of brown sugar, and a stick of butter (melted), all mixed together. On top of apples, it just kind of oozes into the nooks and crannies, but the liquid from the apples keeps it from hardening too much. On my cake, it flattened out and sank into the batter, although I suspect the sinking is more due to my oven than due to my flour swap. I like the almost candylike coating I got on top, in contrast to the softness of the cake. With AP flour, a little gluten structure might have kept the topping together in crunchy chunks a little more, rather than having it spread out and sink down into the cake. Then again, smaller cherry pieces might have also helped keep the topping on top...as would an oven that bakes properly. In this oven, I tend to use Magicake strips even on cake mix cakes. They work about half the time. That's why we're in the process of planning a kitchen renovation. I haven't baked many cakes since moving here two years ago. I've even had issues here with cake mixes not working, and I know those have been extensively tested to be idiot-proof, even for idiots like me. I just don't know what to do with this oven, because even though thermometers tell me that it's calibrated properly, things don't bake right. There's the unevenness issue which necessitates rotating everything, which means the door gets opened, and I know this oven's not great about coming back up to temperature quickly. I baked this cake in the coolest part of my oven, the front right corner. Of course, since it was in the front, it was affected more by my need to open the door. But other than the muffin top, the cake was amazingly even. I've baked slanted cakes in this oven, because the racks sag in the middle, after 40 years. Fun aside, I think I may continue to experiment further with acidic dairy products, and accompanying adjustments in leavening, in your cake recipe (unless you've done that already?). The texture of the scraps I've eaten isn't too far from what I'd expect, once you get away from the muffin top and into the body of the cake. And especially with a very sweet topping like the crumble, or I suppose most frostings out there, I like to taste a little tang. However, given the oven issues, I'm thinking I will just go out to get some milk with fat, bake another single cake (but without the topping so I know more about what's going on with the recipe), and then say uncle until next year after the new kitchen (whatever it is) arrives. Unless any of you want to send me your oven? MelissaH

OK, here's an approximation with a smaller pantry, and sink and dishwasher next to the fridge. Assume there are also cabinets over the fridge. I haven't measured anything again yet. In doing this mock-up, I banged into a few limitations of the Ikea software. All Ikea doorways must have doors in them. Ours is just an opening. Why does this matter? Because doors swing, and you can't put a cabinet into a space where a door swings. I was having an impossible time getting things where I wanted them, until I made the doorway into a very tall window. (After everything, I took the picture into Photoshop and erased everything there so it looks like nothing more than an opening, which is in fact all it is. The dining room opening I'd put in as another sliding door, and that also seemed to be causing me problems. However, you can always move objects by using the arrow keys instead of the mouse, and that's what I wound up doing. The downside of keying rather than mousing is that things won't be aligned, and that's why it looks like the sink is not in line with the dishwasher, which is not in line with the fridge. I put a sink in a 24 inch cabinet at the end of that run, and added the dishwasher between the sink and the fridge. Picture a set of cabinets over the sink, and a microwave shelf and some cabinets over the DW. Cabinets over the fridge also, and a 15-inch pantry cabinet that goes all the way up. I left the range and other sink where they were, although there's no reason they couldn't slide along the wall to other places. The range could also go back down into the cul-de-sac of the kitchen, which would definitely keep it out of the flow of traffic. I'm not sure if the two sinks (as shown here) are far enough apart that they'd both get used in this case, especially if the sink on the outside wall of the house moves down, between the sliding door and the window. Must think some more. MelissaH

An idea hit me this morning. Go back to our very first thought: (If you're thinking that the explanations weren't there before on the picture, you're right. I realized that a little bit of what's what might be useful, so I added it in.) The first problem with this, and the reason we went back to the drawing boad, is that the refrigerator door opens right into the dishwasher. My husband's declared that he doesn't like having two corners to put cabinets in (although that doesn't bother me as much). And looking at this, I'm seeing another potential issue with the very limited space in the refrigerator landing area. In this first attempt, we were still stuck on the idea of keeping the sink in front of the window. But if we leave that idea behind, what if we just swap the positions of the sink and the dishwasher? Or what if you just slide the sink/DW arrangement (in whichever order) down somewhat (not all the way to the end of the run, but just down far enough to get it out of the way)? You'd then get a little more counter space next to the stove, which could be useful also. I'd definitely want to measure out things to the fraction of an inch, to be sure there's no overlap, but you might clear away some of the awkwardness that killed this layout initially. As for the limited space on the other side of the kitchen against the short wall: this original plan had a 36 inch wide cabinet, full height, between the fridge and the doorway. But there's not a good reason for keeping it so wide. What if it were instead a full-height 24-inch pantry pullout cabinet like this one? Or an even skinnier 15 inch wide cabinet? You'd then get another foot or 21 inches of counter space next to the fridge, which might even give you the room for a second sink at the end of the counter if you wanted. And heck, as long as you're putting the plumbing in for a second sink there, why not move the DW to that side of the room, next to the fridge? Especially if you put a garbage disposal unit in that sink, so you could also use the sink to wash vegetables and whatnot? Up above, you could put a microwave shelf and also some cabinets to hold our glasses. On the other side, even with nothing up above, we could have drawers for the dishes. Re snowangel's concerns about having unbroken workspaces: we wouldn't have a single giant linear stretch of countertop. But we'd have the whole cul-de-sac, from the stove edge around to the doorway on the other side, as well as more work area between the stove and the sliding door. (Can't say how big this will be, as it would depend on a number of factors, including stove size and placement, how far down we let the counters go, and where the sink is.) More to measure again, play with, and draw out. Should also go back and re-read everything here again, to be sure I'm not missing something obvious that others have said. MelissaH

Well...the cake didn't come out of the pan nicely. Around the edges, the batter started to come slightly over the top like a muffin top, where the rolled edge of the pan supported it. And the muffin top of the cake was no longer protected by the pan, and got much darker and crunchier than the rest of the cake top. (My cake pan is one of these Chicago Metallic commercial pans.) I ran a knife around the inside of the pan, but due to the muffin top effect, I goofed and didn't stay as tight around the inside of the pan rim as I should have. End result: at that spot, the cake tore free as it came plopping out of the pan onto the cooling rack surface, and it cracked across a chord of the circumference, right at that spot. My cake also took close to 65 minutes. I attribute my longer baking time to the fact that I had to open the oven to rotate the cake so it cooked evenly. The scraps taste good, even though it's not a beautiful cake to behold. And I have another day to try again. I think next time I'm going to use a Magicake strip on the pan, to try and keep the edges from cooking as quickly. Or maybe if I'm just more diligent about sprinkling the crumble topping out at the edges, they might help weight them down and avoid the dread muffin top effect. Any other suggestions, besides getting a new oven? MelissaH

Too late; the cake's been in the oven for about 50 minutes already, and should be ready to come out before too much longer. I used all almond flour, and whole cherries, and BUTTER. I would have used flour and almond pieces if I'd had any almonds in the house that aren't in flour form. Brown sugar and no cinnamon; vanilla and almond extracts in the batter. And because the only milk I had in the house was skim and the recipe specifies something other than that, I killed two birds with one stone by whisking the dregs of a container of sour cream into enough skim milk to reach the appropriate volume, and also by emptying the sour cream container so my husband could take it to the dump in this morning's trip (we can't recycle #5 plastics here). Next time if I had to do this last kludge, I'd probably try to measure the sour cream and replace a little of the baking powder with baking soda, to neutralize the extra acidity. In my oven, you don't usually need to worry about things burning on top, because it can be hard to get things to brown properly. I know the element on top gets hot enough to burn an errant potholder when the oven's on, but I don't think it actually generates heat itself on the "bake" setting. (It definitely turns on when the oven's set to "broil" so I know it's not broken.) Might have to try this one sooner rather than later. And if it's not good enough to share with company, we're in luck because we've postponed that get-together until tomorrow evening so I have time to try again...and between now and then I can get some milk with fat in it already, and maybe some almonds too. Hey, I already have half an egg waiting in the fridge! MelissaH Edited to add: The cake just came out of the oven. It smells divine, and is now on the cooling rack for its pre-turnout rest. The edge of the cake is maybe a touch darker than I would have liked, probably because I wasn't as diligent as I could have been about getting the crumble topping out there. The crumble and fruit both look nicely embedded in the cake, although I think chopping the fruit would probably be a good idea next time to cover more surface with the same amount of fruit. The cherries definitely didn't burn, either because my oven doesn't generate heat from above or because the cherries themselves were still pretty cold when they went in (although they were completely thawed, not hard and crunchy). In about fifteen minutes, we'll see if it comes out of the pan.

Here's a question for those of you with multiple counter surfaces: how did you make the junction between them, or did you just plan your surface usage so as to not need to make connections? Varmint's picture above shows a marble slab set into a granite-tile counter. To me, this looks like the marble was just treated as an extra-large tile, and that the marble was either the same thickness as the tiles or whatever's underneath was prepped to account for a difference in thicknesses, so the entire surface looks flush. This looks like a great solution. But what about if you want a Corian counter with a zinc surface as a landing area next to your stove? Or laminate except for a marble slab in a baking area? Or if you wanted butcher block, but needed to use something more water-friendly around the sink? Are there good ways to make transitions between surfaces, or are you pretty much stuck with one surface until you get to a natural break point (like a range that breaks a countertop run, or a doorway, or an island)? MelissaH

Hey, this is something I might actually be able to do in my miserable little oven! And we're going to friends' house for dinner tomorrow; I said I'd bring dessert and I know they're quite fond of cherries. I was originally thinking pie, but we're helping a different friend move into her house tomorrow and the less hands-on work I need to do for the dessert, the better. I think I'll give a crumble variation a try instead, using some of the sour cherries (last of the season) we pitted and froze yesterday. I've generally had pretty good luck using the sour cherries I've frozen if I measure them while they're still solid, but let them thaw before use. Maybe I'll also try replacing the regular flour with almond flour, since I like how almond combines with cherry. I might also try replacing or omitting the cinnamon, since I don't want to overwhelm the fruit. (Then again, maybe I'll start by making the piecrust dough, so in case the cake doesn't work or looks ugly I'll have a backup. The cake can bake while the dough chills, and I have plenty of cherries.) MelissaH

This is what we'll have, too. One of the happy surprises during demo was that we actually have 10' ceilings, so instead of having cabinets that go to the ceiling, as planned, we're now going to have a foot and a half of extra space to store the same kind of things you do. ← Ooh, lucky you, kiliki! You get to have high cabinets, and also space above. We have plenty of display-worthy pieces, most courtesy of my mom the ceramic artist. We only have eight-foot ceilings, and if we wanted to leave room for a stockpot up above our cabinets, I think we'd lose too much storage space inside. That said, we may have another issue with leaving significant space on top of cabinets. Right now, we actually do have one cabinet with space on top, next to the refrigerator. That space arose when we got the new fridge last year. The new one was just enough taller than the old one that it wouldn't fit under the over-fridge cabinets. The way our cabinets are attached, the soffit had to come out before the cabinets could come down. So we pulled out the whole soffit on that side, but only removed the cabinets directly over the refrigerator. A little drywall work and a coat of paint, and you'd have to look hard to realize it was ever there. But almost right away, one of our cats realized that the top of the remaining cabinet is a nice high perch from which to survey the kitchen. The problem: His route up involves forbidden surfaces: both a table that takes the place of a counter and the top of the refrigerator. He's usually pretty good about getting up on top of the cabinet silently (in which case you walk up the stairs and into the kitchen and get that weird feeling of being watched, until you hear his tail thwacking against the wall or otherwise notice him) but occasionally he's a bit klutzy and knocks something down on his way up. Even now that it's no longer a new place that must be explored, we'll still sometimes find him up there. We pretty much keep both the table and the refrigerator top loaded with stuff, to block his route up. Presumably, though, if the route up weren't so obvious, he wouldn't head up there. I don't think we have the ceiling space to allow it in any case. I think that for us, glass-fronted cabinets might be a better display solution, if I could keep the cabinets neat enough. We'll just have to live with the stockpot taking up loads of cabinet space, or we'll do what we do now and keep it in the utility room unless it's about to be used, in use, or has just been used. MelissaH

We do, in fact, have an Aldi. It's way out east, between the Tops and the Lowe's. It's often a Sunday when we go out that way, and Aldi stores are closed on Sundays. But for this, I may need to make an exception. MelissaH

No clue what you've carved in your sculpture class. But I've used soapstone lab counters that have been abused by generations of students, and are none the worse for it. MelissaH

Are there any beet eaters out there? I was reminded again tonight of what beet juice does to my hands and my clothes. What does it do to your countertops, particularly those of you with light-colored solid surfaces? It didn't do anything to my ugly laminate, although I wiped my dribbles pretty soon after they occurred. MelissaH

Looks great to me! (I'm guessing that if something bad ever happened to your counter, you could replace only the tiles that needed to be replaced without having to redo the whole counter. I like that idea.) BTW, I see that you have a KitchenAid mixer with the crank-up bowl. I know those are taller than mine, which has a tilt-up head, in its resting position. How tall is yours? I'd like to be sure that I have enough room for one to fit underneath, should my mixer circumstances ever change. MelissaH

We've been tossing a bunch of ideas around this evening, but haven't actually put hand to mouse yet to try them out. There is a problem with putting the refrigerator directly opposite the range, though: our fridge is about 33 inches wide, and the aisle would only be about 48 inches wide. You wouldn't be left with much room in front of the stove if someone wanted to open the refrigerator. The kitchen is narrow enough that we've realized it would be best to avoid having major appliances directly across from each other. This is certainly a possibility. I still think we'd want to move everything inward a bit, though, to give us the ability to round or slant that countertop and the base cabinets underneath and open up space just inside the doorway. That would also exacerbate the issue of having the sink far away from everything else in the kitchen, so we'd want to explore the options for second sink placement. (In actuality, if we did this sort of thing, I believe the sink currently shown could wind up being the secondary sink, not the primary sink that we use most often, of the kitchen. But I'd want to think good and hard before committing to locations for the small single-bowl sink and the larger main sink.) Some parts of the software are maddening. I've had issues before with things being off by an inch here, or an inch there: I know the kitchen is 8 feet across the inside, and when I add up the lengths of the things I want to put across that dimension I get 8 feet...but then when I try to drag those cabinets into place, I come up short by a smidge. I'm not sure if they're building slop into the software to allow for sloppy installation, or if it really is impossible to fit 8 feet of cabinets into an 8-foot space. My tactic has been to go back to the room dimensions and tell it to make the kitchen slightly more than 8 feet wide, so everything will fit. We've sometimes had problems finding everything we want to use. The 2006 version, in particular, is limited on the available cabinets (so says my husband, who's played with the new version more than me) and appliances, so you may need to kludge some of what you want to see. The program's a bit persnickety about letting you place cabinets where you want them, especially if you're running tight spacially. And make sure you get everything on the floor exactly where you want them before you start working with things up above, because once you have upper cabinets in place you really can't move the down-below stuff. What I've been doing is pretty much any time I want to move things, I pull out the entire upper level of stuff so I can do the down-below, and then once I've moved the bottom level, I put the top back. That said, the price is right. You don't need any specialized knowledge: if you can get far enough to download and install the software, you can use it. You can make some decent drawings to work from, especially if you're somewhat well-versed in Acrobat, Illustrator, and/or Photoshop (or other graphics programs). The kitchen designer we talked to asked us whether we'd used special design software or Ikea's program, which indicates to me that it's indistinguishable from the consumer-level programs that aren't free. And I think that in the end, the list of what you'll need to buy would also be very nice to have, especially in a case like ours where the cabinets would need to be shipped in from far away. At least for us, it's been great for a first estimation, regardless of the cabinets you'd want to use. MelissaH

Varmint, what happens when you roll out piecrust or other dough? Do you see crisscrosses from the grout, or were you able to get everything flush enough that it isn't an issue for you? Tiles are much less expensive than solid hunks of rock. MelissaH

← Are these still around, under any name? I always preferred them to Oreos, but haven't seen them in quite a while. MelissaH