Notes from Stella's Kitchen
I regret to say that Stella’s “present limited kitchen precludes her writing a new column for a while. Her monthly recipes will still be presented but not remarks from her kitchen. Hopefully this will change next year.”
I have written this exactly as I was told to write it by Stella. Now I’ve done it, so there.
However, between you and me, I don’t know exactly why she has stopped writing. She certainly has not stopped cooking. And she seems to be enjoying herself. And I am enjoying it as well. The truth is that in our new house Stella’s kitchen is the largest room in the house. She has taken all that was good in her old kitchen and expanded all the little things that gave her problems before.
I’ve watched her do this and was amazed at the results. Let me give you a few examples:
Cabinets. Stella’s lower cabinets do not have doors. they have drawers. This eliminates the pesky problem of opening below cabinet doors and bending down to sort in the dark for what is piled helter-skelter in there. Where there was a two-door space, Stella now pulls out one of three stacked roomy, very deep drawers to find her pots and pans.
There’s more. The inside of the drawers are white! Everything is visible and whatever the material is its smooth and easy to clean. In addition, when Stella wants to close the drawer, she merely pushes it in, and it closes itself. She has two doors under her sink, but she has made the plumber install the two sinks so that there is a long flat drawer below the plumbing. She keeps her trays in there.
Of course there are kick plates below and a central island that combines drawer and shallow cabinets below.
The upper cabinets have doors, but these are made in the European Style, i.e., flush with the inside; there is no picture frame molding with the doors attached. Again the insides are made of an easily cleaned white material (the outside wood is cherry). As with the lower cabinets, she merely pushes the doors shut and they softly close themselves.
There is neon lighting under the cabinets to give added lighting to the overhead neon lights (so as to both give good lighting and not heat the kitchen).
The floor is tile, big windows over the sinks, food warmer, convection oven, microwave large refrigerator with freezer underneath, dish washer, compactor etc. Oh yes, a tremendous outgoing fan over the island stove.
Stella’s kitchen may be the biggest room in the house, but I have made a point of appropriating a corner of it for a recliner so we could be in that large room together. I placed the recliner on a raised platform in a corner of the room with two 5’ by 4’ windows so I could look through the windows out over the pond and the small field behind the house.
I have even placed a small spotter scope in the corner with me. On the eight-inch corner window’s shelves, I have a small group of field guides on birds, trees, plants and even one on mushrooms. (The broad shelves are really put there for our black tomcat, Holly, to sit on, which he has not done to date). The little corner is a little crowded, but when I sit there and watch Stella cook or look out the window at the woods or the pond, I feel I am in high cotton.
