MelissaH

We got home from the market at about 6:30, and we were both very hungry. So for dinner, we went for quick and dirty. My husband divided the 0.8 pounds of ground chuck in the fridge in half and flattened it into burgers. While he took them down to the grill, I made salad, and set aside lettuce and tomato to go with the burgers. Out of all the stuff we got at the market, we only used one tomato tonight! Here's what the burgers looked like, straight off the grill. Mine is the one sheathed in the white cheese (provolone). The other is applewood-smoked cheddar, which we imported from our vacation in Michigan. We don't see that cheese in town locally, but we can get it in Syracuse sometimes. And finally, here's what my dinner looked like once I put it together: I dressed my burger with lettuce and tomato, nothing more. In my book, tomato and ketchup are mutually exclusive on a burger. My husband also used lettuce and tomato, but also some onion slices, and on the bun he put butteroid, Miracle Whip (yuk! As far as I'm concerned, if you're using anything along those lines use real Hellmann's mayo!), ketchup, and yellow mustard. The salad wasn't anything too impressive: iceberg lettuce (crunches nicely on a hot night), a little carrot, a little of the green pepper on sale at the grocery store this week, and the rest of the tomato. I drank ice water; he drank a Saranac Hefeweizen. As I said this morning, I have quite a sweet tooth. I haven't given in to it yet today, but there's a jar of Nutella in a kitchen cabinet starting to call my name. While there are many things I could do with it, tonight might just be a night to eat it off a spoon. While I do that, I think I'll contemplate tomorrow's dinner. I should use stuff I got from the farmer's market. I'm thinking maybe pasta with yellow squash and/or eggplant, and pesto made with that big beautiful bunch of basil. However, I don't know exactly how all these will come together, and I've never made pesto in my life (although I know I have some pine nuts down in the freezer). Any ideas or pesto recipes? Something else I should do tomorrow is make something with sour cherries. We saw lots of sweet cherries at the market, but only one stand had sour cherries this week. Next week, we'll probably see more. One problem: I still have some of last year's sour cherries in my freezer, and I'd like to use them up before buying more. What do you like to do with sour cherries? Pie? As I posted earlier, the rear wheel of our tandem bicycle is currently mangled: We have a new rim on order from the Geneva Bicycle Center in Geneva, NY. That's a small town in the Finger Lakes, about an hour and a half drive from here. We plan to visit there on Saturday to drop off the wheel, so they can rebuild it. (Last year we took the bike to Europe, and mangled the same wheel. I rebuilt it last year on a new rim myself, but I don't have the time this year.) And then as long as we're going to be down that way, we plan to spend more time in the Finger Lakes. Geneva is at the northern tip of Seneca Lake, and Ithaca is at the southern end of Cayuga Lake (one lake east). There are a number of beautiful state parks in the area, and my husband's a photographer. In addition, Ithaca's farmer's market is on Saturday mornings, so we'll be able to do more marketing! The bigger draw for me, however, is that the Cornell University dairy store will also be open on Saturday morning. So we'll have a nice little adventure this weekend. MelissaH

What a difference a month makes! We drove downtown and parked the car as close as we could. (We have sometimes ridden our tandem bicycle rather than driving, but on the way home from our vacation, the baggage gorillas at either Amtrak or the airport mangled our rear wheel , so the bike's not currently ridable. More on that later tonight....) On the way down, we drove by the lakeshore, to look at the Oswego Light: We got there at about 5:45 and the place was buzzing, both figuratively and literally (see Hives of Howard below). Here's what it looks like from the other side of Bridge Street: The city closes off a block and a half of West First Street, and all the merchants on that block make a point of staying open until 9 PM when the market ends for the night. I like that our market is after normal working hours, because it's easy for us to go after doing something else all day. Many of the vendors visit other cities' markets on other days; there's a large regional market year-round in Syracuse on Saturday mornings. Syracuse is our "big" city; we typically make the hour-long drive down that way once every 4 to 6 weeks to get the things we can't find at all or can't purchase economically here. We've been to the regional market a few times, usually to get the poblano chiles that don't come to our market. When we get those, we throw them all on the grill to roast, let the skins steam off, freeze them on cookie sheets, and bag them to use the rest of the year. [digression]My husband and I met in graduate school at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The market there was on Saturday mornings, in a parking lot conveniently located between downtown and my house. About this time of year, maybe a little later, the chile roasters would come to market. You could smell it for blocks! They had a truck with a giant wire basket that rotated, mounted over a burner, in the back. You'd tell them what kind of chiles you wanted (Anaheims, New Mexican, poblano, or what you will) and whether you wanted them raw or roasted. If you wanted them roasted, they might tell you to come back in X minutes, if they didn't have them ready at the moment. When you came back to pick them up, they'd have the roasted chiles packed into a plastic bag, which they'd knot closed and then slide into a plastic grocery bag. I'd take the warm bag of chiles and carefully nestle it into the bottom of my backpack, where it would feel warm against the small of my back as I rode my bike the mile and a half home. I think of everything at the Ft. Collins market, the chile roasters are what I miss the most.[/digression] We typically start our marketing by first making a sweep up one side and down the other, just to see who has what. Most of these pictures were taken during that initial sweep. We saw lots of sweet cherries and blueberries. This was the only vendor with black raspberries (in the baskets on the far left side). A couple of booths up, we saw for sure that summer has arrived: the zucchini are here! I only took pictures of the pretty little ones, but some of the booths had baseball bats too. I don't remember seeing the herb plants last year. This vendor also had lettuces, radishes, a few bunches of carrots, and some green onions. (Between the carrots and the squashes were more berries.) This booth had some vegetables that I didn't see anywhere else at the market: broccoli and large (non-pickling) cucumbers! Fruit Valley Orchards are regulars at the market. For now they have cherries and apricots as well as jams, but later they'll have apples. I'll sometimes go to their farmstand to buy fruit, since it's a nice little bike ride from home. Actually, a lot of the orchards are nice rides from home! "Aunt Mary," Mary Plummer, is probably the best known caterer in town. Her most famous offerings are her Italian cookies, which she sells at the market. The kettle corn makers are always there. Whoever makes the corn wears a face shield for protection. Once the corn starts popping, the shield comes down. It looks really cool while they're making it, but I confess that I'm not so fond of popcorn with sugar. I'd rather have salt, cheese, or caramel. The Hives of Howard is another market regular. Jim Howard was the college's wrestling coach until he retired, and this is one way he's filling his time now. He always has some of his bees with him, and pointed out the queen to me. She was camera-shy, though, and hid underneath a wooden support. We're still working on some honey we bought from him last year. This year, one of the storefronts in the market area is being used as an Artist's Market, supported by Arts and Culture for Oswego County. We stopped in to look, but I didn't take any pictures inside. We saw lots of watercolor paintings of flowers, as well as a couple of jewelry vendors. I also didn't take pictures of the candy sand people, the baked goods (mine are better and cheaper), the soap maker, the two wineries, or the kitschy craft sellers. Every week, there's also entertainment at the market: always music, sometimes dancing. The high school band does one of the June markets, before school lets out for the year. Some other local bands also get the opportunity to perform, and when there's no band there's a DJ. When St. Stephen's, the Polish Catholic church, sponsors the market, the music is provided by a DJ who plays polkas. When St. Mary's, the Italian Catholic church, sponsors the market, we hear Italian music from a DJ. When St. Patrick's, the Irish Catholic church, sponsors the market, we hear (you guessed it) Irish music, and I think they also bring in dancers. The city usually provides a bandshell trailer, but this week the entertainment was provided by one of the local dance schools, and I guess they needed more room. Lots of people were watching so it was hard to get in for a good picture. So after all that, what did we come home with? Five tomatoes (locally grown in a hothouse), 4 cukes, 4 yellow squashes, 2 eggplants, and an enormous bunch of basil. This post is getting really long; I'll put dinner in a new section. MelissaH (edited to fix an ugly picture/text relationship problem)

Nope, haven't tried that yet! MelissaH, off to the market!

We've actually gone a step further, and started keeping a freezer inventory. We have a small whiteboard with a listing of freezer contents and sometimes a date when it went in, and every time we put something in or use something from the freezer, we update the list. This way we don't need to open the freezer to know what we have. Sure it takes some organization on our part, but I like having a list to plan my meals. Now, if I were really organized, I'd have this list in a database on the computer, so I'd know the exact specifics of everything and I'd be able to port the list to my PDA or print it out before going shopping! (And yes, my husband has been known to call me anal at times. ) MelissaH

This was lunch, grabbed after my swim from the supplies I keep in my office. (No, that wasn't Deer Park water in the bottle, but rather a refill from the handy-dandy water fountain just down the hall.) I'm following it up at home now with a diet vanilla Coke, the last from my fridge. (I decided over the winter that I didn't need the extra sugar of the Real Thing, but I detest the taste of most diet sodas. This one is at least tolerable.) There's also a bag of mini-carrots starting to call my name. I'm starting to mull over potential dinner ideas. I'm slightly handicapped at the moment because I have no idea what the market will bring. However, I do have about 0.8 lb of ground chuck in the fridge that should probably be used tonight. It was left over from last night's dinner. Last night we got together with our friend Anne. (She'll probably show up again later in this blog, as we frequently get together and collaborate on a meal.) I just acquired Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food book and decided that the Jamaican beef patties sounded interesting. I'd been thinking about trying them ever since I first read about them in Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook, and (honest!) I had no idea at all that they were featured in yesterday's New York Times also. In any case, I did a recipe vaguely based on both the one in Schwartz (crust made with Crisco and tinted with turmeric; filling pre-cooked, seasoned ground beef) but instead of making 24 little turnovers as he suggests, I made 12 larger ones like the paper did. One or more will undoubtedly be showing up for lunch one of these days. Anyway, the smallest package of ground chuck at the store was 1.80 lb, and we only needed a pound of it, so I have 0.8 lb of ground chuck left over. Do I sense burgers on the grill tonight, to go with whatever else we find? MelissaH

Hey, neighbor! Last year's market was wonderful, but the really good stuff (local corn, local tomatoes, local peppers, local eggplant, local zucchini) didn't seem to really arrive until August. As far as I can tell, nearly everything at the market is locally produced. I didn't see any strawberries before I left town last month, but then again over half the local crop was done in by a late freeze. I'm eager to see how many things have come in during the month or so I was out of town! MelissaH

Good morning, all! Summer is a beautiful time of year in Oswego, NY, and I'm thrilled to be able to share a week of it with you. Oswego is in central New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario. (In fact, my house is about a ten-minute walk from the lakeshore. Next time I head out that way, I'll be sure to bring the camera.) We're on a little bump of land very close to where the shoreline turns northward, so we get glorious water views both to the north and to the west. Oswego has about 18,000 residents, and SUNY-Oswego where both my husband and I teach has about 8600 students, mostly from all over New York. We have three supermarkets, an orchard store up the hill a few miles out of town, and a terrific independent bookstore called the river's end that helps me feed my cookbook addiction. Best of all, every Thursday night from June through mid-October, the city closes down a couple of blocks of West 1st Street for a farmer's market. It's actually been about a month since I last went marketing, since we just got back from a conference/vacation trip earlier this week. When we left, there wasn't much interesting at the market: lettuce, radishes, the last of the asparagus, and apples from last year. This evening we should get a much wider selection! This morning started for me with a July ritual: My usual breakfast is a bowl of cereal with milk. The cereal itself varies from day to day, depending on what was on sale that week, what else we have in the house, how much my sweet tooth is rearing its head, and the weather. This time of the year, it's always cold cereal. And this time of year, I always eat it downstairs in the family room, with the TV on to OLN's live feed of the Tour de France. Today's plan is to head onto campus to start getting things in order for the fall semester, since that starts a little more than a month from now. (Yikes! ) My husband's been there for a few hours already. I'll probably go for a swim at noon, and then go back to work for the rest of the afternoon. The market opens at 5:30 this afternoon, and we typically arrive downtown shortly after that. Later, MelissaH

Has anyone been to the New Haven store and checked out their kitchen department? We'll be visiting friends in the neighborhood ten days from now, and plan to stop in to see what's currently on offer, get a new kitchen catalog with the new price list, and possibly pick up a cart so we can take the Sawzall to the horrendous semi-circular semi-useless shelves in our kitchen. MelissaH

Wish I could celebrate. Our closest 7-11 is a two hour drive from here. Ditto for where I used to live in NE Ohio and Dairy Mart had the market cornered. We were, however, just on a vacation to Colorado. In grad school, I developed an incredible addiction to Slurpees, always Coke mixed with cherry. I looked forward so much to feeding my need. But horrors! Every single 7-11 we went to had not Coke, but Pepsi. That's just WRONG WRONG WRONG in my book. I'm now going on three years without a Slurpee. This is getting really bad. MelissaH

Cash only won't work for us. I forgot about that part. Thanks for all the terrific ideas. So many places to eat so many things I don't get a home, and so little time! MelissaH

Here's my husband's latest modified plan, adjusted so the fridge is not opposite the dishwasher: There are a few other changes. The stove is at the end of the kitchen, about where the old stove is now. It's not quite centered, because if we centered it we'd have a really skinny cabinet on either side down below. By moving the stove off-center, we instead would have one wider cabinet, which seemed to make more sense to us. He's also removed all upper cabinets on the stove wall. There's still one upper corner cabinet, but on the corner closest to the stove he's just extended the wall cabinet all the way back. I don't think I like this, because the only way I'd be able to reach back there would be to basically sit on the stove top. I think we'd be better off just putting another corner cabinet in there, if there's room, and run cabinets along the wall. Another option would be to just block it off completely and build a soffit in to give us a place to put a set of speakers and car stereo, a la snowangel. I've started to think of the area between stove and door as my baking area, with swing-up marble surface on the end of the cabinet. There will be room on the counter for the mixer and food processor! The microwave is now over the counter between fridge and dining room. And we drew in a small sink at the end of that counter. We thought it would be useful to have a sink near the table and a separate work area; we also thought it would be good to have the microwave near the table since we use it mostly for heating leftovers. I'll probably do what my friend recommended: tape out where everything will go, and "make a cake" or "put together dinner" or even "do the dishes" by getting everything from where we think it will go, and walking through the task at hand. She said they found and corrected lots of little problems that way. She also commented that if we talk to a kitchen designer, make sure we find someone who likes to cook. This is getting to be lots of fun, especially while we still don't have price tags attached to anything yet! MelissaH

Hello everyone, I'm going to be attending the American Chemical Society's national meeting in DC at the end of August. Any day now, I'm expecting to get an e-mail from my committee's staff liaison asking for us to suggest places we might like to go for the committee dinner. We usually have on the order of two dozen people at dinner. Ethnic is generally OK, especially if it's not too weird. Vegetarian option a must. Our meeting will be at the convention center, so something within walking distance is a plus, although it's also fine if we can get there by public transit or taxi. The tricky part: we don't have a whole lot of money to spend. In the past, our guests paid on the order of $40 for their dinner, so I assume that's about the price we're looking at for our total meal cost including tip and everything else. We typically get some kind of appetizer (at an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia we had giant antipasto platters; in San Diego at the Rock Bottom Brewery we got wings and something else vegetarian, and this was the best part of the meal by far), soup or salad, main course (in San Diego, choice of salmon, some steak that once said moo, and brown ale chicken; nothing got great reviews), dessert (inadequate cheesecake in San Diego), and drinks (soft drinks, some draft beer, and house wine by the glass are generally included but if we want something more we can order and pay for it; the offerings at Rock Bottom went over very well). There will be mass rebellion if the beer choice is only Bud or Bud Lite, and the wines are Wimpy White and Rotgut Red. Any ideas for restaurants that I can suggest to my liaison? I'll also eventually be looking for places to eat with smaller groups. I'll be particularly looking for things that I can't normally get at home. I'm hoping to talk a colleague or four into making a foray for Ethiopian food, if there's something easy to get to. Do I have any chance at reaching a Trader Joe's on public transit? Thanks, MelissaH

It's very strange, but the more episodes I watch, the more I find myself enjoying the show...and wishing they gave us a bit more content. Then again, I watched the first episode in real time. Since then, I've been watching them on DVR and zipping through the commercials, recapped bits, and the like, and can easily get through a whole episode in about half an hour. And as my husband pointed out, we are most likely not Fox's middle-of-the-road audience. We spent quite a bit of time wondering whether they had access to any pantry items at all in the shop for and then cook five courses challenge, and then wondering who cleaned the kitchen each night. I also find myself wondering if any of these people are suited to having their own restaurant at the end of all this. Does anyone know if there are any stipulations placed on the restaurant, or if the winner will get to make any choices about the restaurant? MelissaH

As we start to plan our kitchen renovation project, to start in probably about a year, I find myself toying with induction. At this point I'm inclined to use induction to complement a standard professional-style gas cooktop. I know that some of the cooktops leave something to be desired as far as simmering capability, and in any case I wouldn't be comfortable leaving something on a gas burner to simmer if I'm not in the house. Heck, I even get a little nervous if I'm downstairs and my husband cranks up the volume on the TV so I can't hear anything from upstairs where the kitchen is! I do not, however, think I'd put in only induction cooking capability, without something more standard also. This is in part to avoid putting something in that's considered "weird." Even though we're planning this reno for us, and we are not looking to move, I can't help but think about resale value on down the line. Furthermore, I'd like to have something available that will work with any pot. (Everything I currently own that I'd consider simmering in is magnetic.) That said, I really like the idea of a portable induction burner for all the reasons Andie mentioned earlier! MelissaH

We thought about it, since we have this big lake just out our front door. But then we realized that cycling season and kayaking season overlap pretty closely, and as it is we don't have the time to do all the cycling we want. However, I could see how hot days like today would be better spent in a kayak than on a bike, at least until the thunderstorms roll in when you're far from shore. MelissaH

Ah, strawberries! Ours will be few and expensive this year, since we had a freeze as they were flowering, and lost a good chunk of the crop to that. But Jack, yours look beautiful! This entire blog has been a delight to "eat" with the eyes! MelissaH

I think I'll take a page out of fifi's book (excuse the expression!) and start keeping a log of what we cook and otherwise how we use the kitchen. (Yesterday dinner: loin lamb chops marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, herbes de Provence, and S&P for about 10 minutes before getting grilled for about 4 min/side, and a cool crunchy green salad.) Of course, as I say this, we're in our hottest weather of the year, and we haven't been cooking inside at all for the last two days, and aren't likely to do so again for a few more days. (I know that heat's all relative. We're so close to the lake that we don't get as hot as Syracuse or even the nearest NWS post ten miles south of here, but the humidity and dew points are way up so it's sticky. We don't know anyone living here with air conditioning, because we generally don't need it! SUNY-Oswego has a meteorology program, and you can check a real-time display of our weather.) What we cook: the short answer is a little bit of everything. We often joke that if you have half an hour, my husband is better at putting dinner on the table; if you have all week, I'll serve you a meal you'll never forget. In reality, most of the time, who cooks depends on who gets home first, or who had the later class, or the longer day. During the week, we tend to do quicker meals, or leftovers. Quicker meals are things like mac & cheese (either my way on the stovetop with a bechamel, his way which uses evaporated milk, butter, and cheese chunks and goes in the oven, or the Blue Box way, depending on who's cooking and how much time we have), a one-dish something, pasta with sauce, something Asian, Mexican, or Cajun-style to go with rice from the rice cooker, a quick saute of some kind, or whatever else we can throw together. We don't always eat meat; I'd estimate that about half the time, we instead choose beans, veggie crumbles AKA "burgeroid" in our house, or another alternate source of protein. Sometimes we'll also use just a little meat (usually ham, bacon, or sausage) as an accent in an otherwise vegetarian dinner. When it's soup or stew weather, we'll often make one in the crock-pot, often prepping it the night before and then cooking it while we're at work. Beans usually get done in the crock-pot no matter what the season. On weekends we're more inclined to spend more time in the kitchen, especially during the 51 weeks a year it's not too hot to even think about boiling water. Weekends are when a chicken or other large cut of beast might get roasted, and it's not uncommon for us to use the leftovers in weekday dishes for some of that week. We like to keep a pantry with enough staples to eat for a week if necessary, and we also freeze stuff for later use. It's common for us to buy chickens or parts thereof on sale, and then bone them ourselves and make stock when we have enough bones to make it worthwhile. The stock typically gets reduced way down, frozen in ice cube trays, and then bagged for later use. The hardest part about the freezer is remembering to bring meat up from the deep freeze at least a day before you want to eat it. This year's strawberry crop was partially destroyed by a freeze a couple of weeks ago (hard to believe it now) so I'm glad we still have plenty of last year's berries, which we picked ourselves, safely frozen. We also still have enough pitted sour cherries for two or three pies, and a few gallons of the blueberries we picked. I bake more than my husband does. He does a batch of cookies or bars or muffins or something every three months or so; it often gets brought in to share with his colleagues and students.) I do lots of different kinds of breads, as well as cookies and pies. (Actually, we share the pies: I make the crust, he makes the filling. Doesn't matter who puts it together.) I don't do as many cakes, because the current oven doesn't seem to do them well. For one thing, there's a tremendous hot spot in one back corner. Keeping the lower rack filled with quarry tiles seems to help even things out somewhat, but any time I bake anything, I must rotate halfway through or I'll char the corner. The oven is also small, so if I want to do anything in more than one round pan, I need to use my 8-inch pans because otherwise they don't fit. (Forget about using multiple oven racks in this oven, for anything.) Another pipe dream of mine is a wood-burning oven in the back yard. We have a Weber gas grill, which we use extensively when the weather's warm enough that the propane ignites. We cook just about everything on it, including our Thanksgiving turkey and the asparagus that came from the farmer's market last week, but have never had much luck grilling tofu. When we have the time and a reasonably full propane tank, we'll do a beer can chicken. The grill is an absolute savior during the one week a year it's hot...like now. When we entertain large groups during non-winter, one of our favorite ways of feeding everyone is to ask everyone to bring a dish to pass, and cook brats and veggie burgers on the grill. The brats always get boiled in beer first. Our first year here, we had a hard time finding brats in the supermarkets! My husband brews beer, so we have a 170,000 btu burner to boil gallons of water in a hurry. This burner also gets used for stir-frying in the summer. When we're done, the garage smells exactly like a cheap Chinese restaurant. It's also great when I load up the canner, if we've had a good year for tomatoes or something else. While high output burners are probably nice to have right there in the kitchen, this works well for us, and has the added benefit that most of the mess is outside! We also have an ancient three-burner propane stove, which came from my husband's family's farm. We use this when we make mole, so that smoke from toasting chiles and then frying chile paste is outside. I'll be keeping track of what we cook over the next few weeks, to see if what I think we do is accurate. I'll also try to remember to repeat the exercise in fall or winter, to see what difference the seasons make to me. In the meantime, I need to figure out what we're doing tonight, which will probably involve a shopping trip later today, so I'd better look at the new sale ads! A friend will be bringing her dinner over to grill alongside, so it will be a pleasant if sticky-hot evening. MelissaH

This morning as we went for a ride on our tandem (best marriage counselor ever; it'll make or break you probably about as well as a kitchen remodel will) and talked a bit more about the swing-up/fold-down section. He assures me that supporting a swing-up will not be a problem. He's also thinking that this section would be perfect to make out of a different material, such as marble, and we could even put it at a slightly different height (a touch lower than a standard countertop, because I'm short enough that when I roll dough on my pastry board on top of our counter, my shoulders go up around my ears.) But this is the part I think is really neat. One of my concerns about a swing-up was that the working surface is on the outside, where it can get bumped, bashed, shin-whacked, or worse. His plan now: build a sort of cabinet around the swing-up, with a door that looks like all the other cabinet doors. Then, when you want to use the swing-up, you'd open the door---which would then block the doorway to prevent people from trying to come through and banging their hips on the swing-up. A multi-tasker! (Depending on how things are set up, the door may also help to support a fold-up backsplash.) MelissaH

I sometimes think it would be nice to have a straight shot from the stairwell to the kitchen. But I'm afraid that if we start messing with walls, we'd blow the budget. However, we'll see what we find when we start to really plan out the cabinets, to see if adjusting the doorway will give us a more advantageous layout of normal-sized (aka less-expensive, off-the-shelf sized) cabinets. MelissaH

These were in one of the grocery stores near us a few months ago. They smelled like fake grape flavor, and we didn't get any. But I did take a close look at them inside the clamshell, and thought I saw "needle tracks" where flavor might have been injected! MelissaH

To answer highchef's question about what's on the other side of the wall, I've put together a quick sketch of the entire floor of the house, sans windows: The kitchen and dining area are what I've previously sketched. The only transition between the two is the change in flooring. As I alluded to earlier, the deck is on the south side of the house; the door out there is a slider so we don't need to worry about leaving clearance. The wall between the dining/kitchen and living room really needs to stay put because it's a load-bearing wall. The living room has the same cruddy carpet that's in the dining room and all the way down the hallway. It was also on the stairs from the entryway up, but we took it off to reveal hardwood underneath. There's a wood-burning fireplace at the west end of the living room (on the right side as this picture is oriented) that we view as a prime candidate for a gas log at some point in the future. (There's another fireplace downstairs that's been outfitted with a wood-burning stove, and we use that quite a bit in the long winter season here.) You can probably see, based on the position of the stairs, why we hesitate to close the opening from the hallway to the kitchen. That set of stairs goes down half a story to the house's entryway, and the coat closet is at the level of the entry. The closet we use as a pantry sure looks like it was intended to be used as another coat closet, but we decided that we needed more storage space for kitchen stuff than for coats. The closet's close enough to the kitchen that it's not too big a deal, but it would be nice to have room in the kitchen. Another reason for not closing off the kitchen-hall link: that doorway breaks up what would otherwise be a very long wall. Having that doorway there keeps us from feeling like we have a bowling alley or tunnel running down the center of the house. My husband, who likes to build things and is very good at it, plans to make a sideboard to go against the wall in the living room. Then we'll have somewhere to store the set of china his mom's been saving for us since before we were married. The gray square below the pantry is the entryway, which is open to the ceiling level of the top floor. I'm not entirely sure what's in the space between the stairwell and the living room wall; I suspect that this is empty space that's closed in so the entire wall is flush, with the fireplace recessed to the depth where it meets the stairwell wall on the other side of the insulation. The linen closet's door is just opposite that of the spare bedroom. The other closet marked is the office closet, so the office counts as a true bedroom. And we don't plan to change anything major in the bedroom side of the house. My mom was just visiting here for a couple of days, and she (of course!) had a few suggestions as we talked things through. And she realized something that neither my husband nor I had considered: as things are currently set up in the kitchen drawing, you can't have both the dishwasher and the fridge open at the same time. So we started rejiggering things a bit (haven't redrawn them yet, sorry!) and realized that the only reason we'd both been stuck on putting the DW to the left of the sink is because there's a DW-width cabinet there now. So we're thinking that the way to go may be to put the DW to the right of the sink instead, and put the cooktop at the end of the kitchen, about where the current cooktop is. We'd still be able to vent to the outside, because this is the top floor of the house and we can go up through the roof. (Any thoughts on the merits of venting straight up vs. out the side?) Something else we discussed with my mom (who's absolutely terrific): how much room do you need in front of an oven? We're talking about a normal open-at-the-top pull-down oven door. This came up as we were discussing whether it would be realistic to even consider putting an oven anywhere other than at the end of the kitchen...which would mean that multiple ovens might be out of the question should the cooktop wind up there. We don't view this as a tremendous issue, since we aren't the kind of cooks who tend to bake at more than one temp at a time anyway. We also spent an inordinate amount of time talking about surfaces, both floor and counter. My mom's a big fan of ceramic tile floors, but I'm not. Then again, she loves ceramic anything, and I'm more fond of comfort while I cook. Fifi, if you can find the CVT link, I'm quite interested. As for the countertops, as my mom pointed out, we'll have a lot of them in the new kitchen. (I counted something on the order of 20 linear feet of counter space in all.) While this is wonderful to work in, fifi notes above that lots of counter can create a big problem for the budget. And fifi, you must have been talking with my mom because she also suggests a stone tile (laid tight together, no grout lines) as an alternative. Those of you who have done this, do you find that the junctions of the tiles create a problem for anything, either in using or cleaning? Am I correct in thinking that I'd want to put in a solid marble or other stone area for my baking area, so I have somewhere to roll dough without a tile grid imprinting itself? (I found this for soapstone tiles, at the very bottom of the page.) I suspect an undermounted sink would be out of the question if we're doing stone tiles instead of a solid surface, but one way to remove the obstacle of having a horrible sink lip to clean around might be to use one of the styles of sink with built-in drainboards. My mom also suggested concrete counters, but I just don't like the way they look! We're all definitely getting into the idea of a swing-up or fold-down piece of counter to bridge the doorway when necessary. No consensus on which would be the better way to go. But we all agree without a doubt that we'd want something to make it very obvious that the counter was folded down (flags? traffic cones? giant stop signs?), so nobody gets hurt trying to come through the doorway! Edited to clarify comments on edited drawing. MelissaH

My husband looked through this thread last night, and he had some good ideas. He thought the baking area would be better located opposite the cooktop. For one thing, it would then be much closer to the oven. And for another, if I'm baking when guests are over, we wouldn't have an up-close view of the entropy I tend to create anywhere I go. And we'd also have counterspace to act as a "landing area" for when we're setting out the food, or clearing the table afterward. This sounds reasonable to me. We'd then have a full complement of drawers, cabinets, etc. to store our dishes and other eating implements, and since this is all in the near vicinity of the dishwasher it would be convenient. But then I think about the ovens in the last two houses I've lived in, and their resounding lack of insulation. That's resounding, as in the yells of everyone who leans up against them when they're on. And I can't imagine trying to roll out pie crust on a counter preheated by the oven underneath. Those of you with ovens younger than 40 years old: have insulation techniques improved since then? The more interesting idea came from the discussion on closing off the side door. If the whole motivation for closing off the door stems from getting more uninterrupted counter space, there might be a way to do so without wrecking the traffic flow of the house. We're currently thinking that we'd have counter on one side of the doorway, and a tall pantry cabinet of some sort on the other. So here's the somewhat kooky idea: how about a swing-up or fold-down section of countertop? It would be attached to the pantry right next to the doorway. When you need the extra counter space, you'd simply swing up or fold down the section, which would be carefully aligned to the same height as the rest of the counter. It would block the doorway, but only when you needed the extra counter space. When it's not needed, it's out of the way. My initial thought was something that folded down, because then it would be easy to support on the other side of the doorway with a lip on the existing counter. My husband's initial thought (and he's far more construction-minded than I am) was for something that swings up, because he thinks it's easier to swing up than to fold down. And after thinking this through, I came up with another reason why swing-up might be better. In a fold-down, the working surface would be hidden from view in the "resting" position. For a swing-up, though, when it's not being used the working side would be out. And with the working side out, it would be easier to attach a second small piece of something with a piano hinge, to act as a backsplash so you don't push things off the back, through the doorway, and onto the hall floor. (We envision the backsplash attached to the working side, just far enough in from the edge that when you're using it and fold it up, the work surface itself holds the backsplash upright and you won't be able to push it forward.) However, I haven't been able to come up with a good way to support the swing-up section when you're using it as a counter. (We don't necessarily see this 30-inch section as a heavy-duty work area, but rather as a little extra counter space that could be useful to have.) Has anyone done anything like this? Any thoughts on fold-down vs. swing-up? Or can you not envision what I'm talking about at all? MelissaH

To answer some of snowangel's questions and comments: Highchef also suggested closing off this doorway. However, I hesitate to do this because I'm afraid we'll wreck the traffic plan for the house. We actually use that side door more than the dining room entrance to the kitchen. What the kitchen drawing doesn't show is that if you walk out the "side" door of the kitchen, in front of you just to the left is the staircase leading to the entryway and down to the first level and garage. (It's a split-entry house.) All the groceries that we bring in come up those stairs and straight into the kitchen. If that doorway isn't there, we'd need to walk up and go around to the end through the dining room to bring them in. I'm concerned that this would be inefficient and make us grumble. Before I committed to doing this, I'd tape some cardboard to the wall and temporarily close it off, to see how we feel about losing the door before doing anything irreparable. My aunt and uncle have a faucet that looks like one you'd find in a restaurant, with a huge sprayer. I think it would be fun to have! What do you do when you're cooking pasta, snowangel, with a large pot containing an enormous amount of water? Is it difficult to lift out of the sink to get to your stove? That's my only concern about going to a very deep sink. If we put a pot filler in at the stove, we wouldn't have that problem, but I'm nervous about having a faucet with no drain underneath. (That lab background again.) We'll probably do some of it ourselves, but not all of it. We'll certainly let the plumber and electrician do a good chunk of the work, and we know good people to install the various appliances. (That's one great thing about life in a small town.) My husband is great at building things, but he's not going to be able to devote all of an entire summer to kitchen cabinets. So, we'll probably be looking for someone to do at least some of that. The short answer: however much we can manage but still keep the project to a reasonable time- and financial scale, we'll do. I like to cook to music, if it's just me in the kitchen. I particularly like to do dishes to loud obnoxious music, but once we remodel that won't be as big of a concern. We currently have a radio and CD player in the living room, and the sound goes quite nicely into the kitchen from there. We can always put a second set of speakers in the dining room, to project the sound more directly into the kitchen. Time for me to turn off the computer. We've got a bit of a thunderstorm coming through! Lightning over the lake is so cool to watch! MelissaH

We thought about it. Should we have another issue with needing to let air out of that baseboard, I'll be revving that Sawzall! However, our nearest Ikea is a 5+ hour drive away if you limit yourself to U.S. stores (Ottawa's closer than New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or anything in NJ) and we don't know of a good source for similar stuff any closer than that. If we can find a nice cart, we may not even wait until we have air in the baseboard. On another note, we're considering Ikea cabinets, although we aren't yet sure if they'll have the right sizes for what we want. MelissaH

My husband and I are both old-school science types. We like the idea of soapstone countertops, just like the indestructable ones we've used in every lab we've ever worked in. However, I have no idea (yet) whether it would blow the budget (whatever that winds up being). I'm also a little concerned that soapstone might be a little dark for the kitchen. Another possibility is one of the composite stone materials now on the market. I'm not as fond of corian and the like, and while I like butcher block for removable and replaceable cutting boards, I'm not so fond of it for countertops that I'd never feel comfortable were clean unless I'd just drenched them in bleach. My parents built a house in 1988, and at that time they put in laminate countertops. Their logic: it's relatively easy to change out countertops, so put the money into something that's less easy to change later, like good cabinets and a more-than-adequate septic system. A couple of years ago they did the upgrade, to granite kitchen countertops with an undermounted sink. They also changed the bathroom counter from laminate to stone, although there they opted not to undermount there due to the added cost of cutting openings for both sinks and their faucets. (And I admit that even without the undermounted sinks in the bathroom, it's still a huge improvement over what it was before. The kitchen, of course, is wonderful, and so easy to clean!) While I would very much like an undermounted sink, I'd be willing to view this as an upgrade for later should the budget run tight. My husband would like a farmhouse-style sink; I'm not sure if farmhouse, undermounted, and stainless are mutually exclusive because I haven't looked too hard yet. We did have a Lowe's store open in town a few months back, which may help initially in some of the looking. (It's about an hour's drive to Syracuse, the nearest big city, where we might be able to find other places to browse.) Something we've thought about doing is using multiple counter surfaces. I was sort of thinking of the counter next to the fridge as my baking space, where my mixer and food processor could stay out all the time and maybe my flour etc. could live underneath, and I'd want a stone surface there. But if I also want an undermounted sink then I think we're pretty much forced into using the stone all the way around. But I'm not stuck on that idea either. If we decide we need a second sink, it's pretty much got to go at the end of that counter section by the dining room. But I don't think this is a great place for a sink, and it would also be a pain to get water and drain to that location (underneath is our family room and the ceiling is finished with tiles of some kind), so that's probably not going to be an issue. Have any of you used multiple counter surfaces in a single run? How did you handle the transitions? MelissaH