My Kitchen

When I read on Kalyn's Kitchen that Ilva at Lucullian Delights was hosting a blogging event, I thought it was probably time to become a participating food blogger and enter my first group effort. I will use some photos from old posts, but I did take a couple of new ones today.

Here are the before and after shots of my kitchen. I won't go into all the details, but when we bought the house we were looking for something fully wheelchair accessible, and our house was built for a paraplegic. It has large rooms, but everything was outdated. The dining room was crazy big, so we made the kitchen bigger and reduced the size of the dining room. In this shot with the pumpkin muffins you can see the stovetop and the oven and our awesome red Korean rice cooker that talks and sings in Korean. At some point I would like to have double ovens. My husband put the brick backsplash up. He used individual sealed paving bricks. My original idea was to make an Italian kitchen. I wanted to put up a brick wall between the dining room and the kitchen with a wide arched doorway, and I wanted our stovetop enclosed in a brick archway and maybe even have a brick oven in addition to double ovens, and I wanted lots of hanging plants and ivy and maybe even stained glass here and there, and all stainless appliances, and I wanted... Oh. Sorry. Got away from myself there. Fundage was a problem, so it never came to fruition. Oh well. While looking for kitchen shots, I found this cute one of my two older boys taken a couple of years ago. I was so into Italian sodas back then that I kept several flavors of Italian syrup that you can see in the background.
Now I'll show you what is to the left and right of me as I cook. To the left of me while I am at the stove is my hodge podge, quite messy kitchen utensil drawer. Look at it. You could play I Spy with this picture. We also keep four kitchen utensils hanging on the wall behind the stovetop for convenience; a spatula, a slotted spoon, a ladle, and a pasta server. Then to the right of me is my spice drawer (and I also keep the bamboo maki sushi roller here). Don't try to read the spices. It's a terrible shot, but I was in a hurry, and I didn't want to use the flash because then the shot would have looked all washed out, and my guess is no one cares what brand of curry powder I use . Anyway, my point here is that it is convenient to have the spices there. We do keep pots and pans hanging over our island, but I also keep some pots and pans in the cabinet under the stove. The cabinets to the left of me below the cluttered utensils drawer are more cluttered kitchen accessories of varying use, and this is also where we keep our new Waring Pro Waffle maker. To the right of me under the spice drawer are my casserole dishes and some other cookware.One thing that I love about my kitchen is the view. This (picture below) is the view out the dining room windows from our kitchen. The picture, which is from this post, doesn't do the view justice, but you can see the horizon beyond the trees. There is a magnolia tree right outside the window above my sink which adds a nice green touch to my view. It's an east view, so I can watch the sunrise from my kitchen as I drink my morning coffee. For those of you who live in the mountains, this doesn't look like much, but I live in a very flat part of the country, so we're thrilled to have any view at all. You can read more about our view and the ridge we live on here and here.Now the shot with the spaetzle I can explain. When we bought our new refrigerator, there was one silly feature that was the deciding point. It's those blue lights which you can see if you click on this photo to enlarge it. At night when I get up to get a drink of water, I love those beckoning little blue lights. Silly. I know. But what Lola wants, Lola gets... except an expensive Italian kitchen.

Okay, this is a cute one minute video about someone's dream kitchen.