EveAnna's_kitchen

My Fabulous New Kitchen 2005

This is my small kitchen on Esther St.

Yes finally after 15 years, the horrible oak and pressboard ready-made cabinets have been burned as firewood.

Elvis "Elements of Style" Simpson built a beautiful new kitchen for me. Elvis also plays bass in the band that rehearses in my studio.

The wood is Lyptus®, a new species, "the wood of the future." It is a hybrid of Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla in case you were wondering.

Lyptus is grown in Brazil on renewable and managed plantations. It matures quickly. The first harvests are just starting to hit now. It is a hard wood, harder than mahogany or cherry, although it looks kinda similar, if you have to try to compare it to something.

It is "eco-friendly" so that's nice.

Green. It goes with the stove.
I love it.

The ceiling is adventurously red.

And there is new recessed lighting.

Yes indeed. The focus of this kitchen is the fabulous fully restored 1948 O'Keefe & Merritt 40" beauty incorporates a few elements from 1948 and 1949 models.

Pictured left are the inaugural quiches cooked right after delivery (before the backsplashes arrived). I have since cooked many meals on this fabulous stove. I come home looking forward to cooking an interesting meal. Even though I don't have a copy of Joy of Cooking I still experience it with this stove.

I typed this the other day:

"For me, these old stoves makes me recognize the shift of our nation away from personalized care and quality products that mom'n'pop stores like my grandfather's used to provide, replaced by the cheap and impersonal nature of Wal-Mart and made-in china cheap shit offered there. Yeah, these stoves weigh something like 500 pounds, they are solid, they have required safety features built-in and they cook like a dream. Total quality, in design, function, aesthetics, and construction. They inspire me to cook."

There's another restored old stove, a very special 1955 O'Keefe & Merritt Model 535 High-Vue at the Rat House that just got delivered 6/20/2005. When Elvis gets the cabinets done over there I will also put up a new kitchen update page on the Rat House website.

Now if I had a nifty percolator to plug into the appliance outlet, my life would be complete.

Why they don't make microwaves these days that are as handsome as this I don't know. I mean really, is this killer industrial design or what? What happened to this Great Country?

P.S. "P.S." stands for "PEPPER" and "SALT"

And yes, the oven is fully programmable. I can set it up to have my meatloaf ready for me as soon as I get home from my weekly bridge game. They were doing this cool stuff in the NINETEEN FORTIES! (When people used to socialize by having weekly bridge games and cocktail hours instead of renting DVDs.)

My kitchen is small, but very functional. Plenty of counter space. And now they are super thick SileStone. Great stuff. Solid. Strong. Chip resistant. Beautiful. And you do not have to periodically seal it or have to do anything to 'em for maintenance. Perfect for a jet setter like me.

Same material is on the backsplashes as well as I could be prone to forgetting to put the lid on my classic Osterizer® blender and getting Blue Hawaiian all over the place. It happens.

And yes, that is a complete collection of Wacky Packages magnets on my fridge. I bought 'em on eBay.

My fave is "Kentucky Fried Fingers!"

That's a giant Kohler sink. Cast iron. Heavy. Porcelain. Wrench Re-Pipe does all my plumbing for me.

Since I don't have a nifty percolator, I bought an electric water solenoid that I am going to wire up to a switch and run a water line to feed cold filtered water from my icemaker line into my coffee maker so I can shove the coffee maker into the corner so it will not require higher vertical clearance in order to pour water into the top water hopper.

I thought I had invented this concept but apparently you can buy a coffee maker that will hook into your icemaker line. That's new to me.

	Ah yes, the microwave. This Frigidaire model was the most least offensive looking new microwave I could find. What is up with modern design people? Most new appliances are just plain ol' UGLY. This one isn't too bad as it doesn't have any extra lopsided curvy crap going on and stays pretty square and innocuous enough in design but I would like to replace the handle if only I could figure out how to get to it. :>( It is stainless steel skinned and also serves as a vent hood and additional light source. But I can't figure out how to make the POTATO button work. I guess I need to RTFM. So complicated. I just wanna stick a potato in there, push the potato button and have it ready in 8 minutes instead of getting some scrolling error message. WTF?
	Anyway, back to more pleasant things, you can see the glass window details in the upper cabinets. Things I don't need too often, like white wine and that giant margarita glass I stole from the parking lot of an Outback restaurant in Las Vegas live up there and I bought a nice flat folding step-stool to be able to get to them. The lights come on by touching a secret place. (Shhhhhh! Don't tell!) The touch dimmer puts the lights on in three levels of brightness. I ordered seeded ripple-ly glass for the upper cabinet doors from a stained glass supply house and cut the glass to size myself, since I used to be a picture framer in a previous life and know how to use a glass cutter.
	I am waiting on the lower cabinet handles to show up from Rejuvenation.com. That joint has a LOT of very cool stuff! I'll take one of those and twelve of those....

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Indian nite! Yummy.