Kitchen Notes, A Beginning

Kitchen Notes, A Beginning October 1, 2016

I really love Simcha’s What’s for Supper posts. I have been going along wishing I was keeping better, or any track, of what we’re eating week by week. What was good. What utterly failed. Those kinds of important considerations are what I wish I had a grasp on. Because, you know, then eternity will have some kind of greater meaning.

Anyway, the most important thing to note, that I keep remarking upon to myself day after day, is What A Great Kitchen I seem to have acquired. One of the problems with modern life and houses, I think, is that the cook standing around in the kitchen thinks that he, or indeed she, should, through remodeling, be able to control all the elements of the culinary life. What do you want your kitchen to be like? You make a plan and the person comes and makes it happen, and then you are perfectly happy. That’s how it looks and what we therefore all expect.

When Really, reality, as it were, is a far cry from simply making a plan and paying someone to come in and do it. Really what happens is that kitchens happen to us. Even if you have taken the trouble to design a kitchen, once it exists in reality, you have to live with the happenstance of what your mind has conceived.

Of course I’m not making and sense and you don’t know what I’m talking about. What I’m trying to say is, I would Never Have designed the kitchen of my current habitation. You would never, in a million years, have been able to convince me that the arrangement of cabinets, appliances, and counters would make any sense or be useful in least. I would have looked at you and thought you were joking.

And yet. Here I am, and this kitchen is the most sensible and rational thing that has ever happened to me apart from marrying my husband. And indeed, it has happened to me. Because someone, many long decades distant, thought about the space and then built the incarnation of that thought. And I stand from my more modern vantage point, at the counter, dicing an onion and sweating it in the pan, marveling at such a gift.

And now I need to go clean it. So I will return to this important thought on some other Saturday. I’m thinking of dividing all my future blogging by days and rooms. But I probably won’t, because my mind is not that orderly. Have a lovely morning, what’s left of it.


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