Kitchen Remodel - Part 1

After 20 years in our house, we decided to remodel the kitchen. All of the built-in appliances were the original from when we bought the house new. The refrigerator we purchased in 1980 for our other house was brought over even though it was almond colored and the rest of the appliances were black. We didn't know until recently that it was quite revolutionary being a French door with bottom freezer and counter depth. Over the years, I have replaced the door seals and the internal fan and by today's standards, it was not very energy efficient. The day after we ordered our new refrigerator, the cooling fins in the freezer area of the old refrigerator froze solid with ice and the temperature in the main refrigerator went up to 50 degrees, and we lost quite a bit of food. We would have replaced the refrigerator sooner, but the opening in our cabinetry was too short for the new refrigerator, and I would have had to cut off the bottom of the cabinets to get it to fit in the space.

Our dishwasher sounded like a cement truck while it washed dishes and we would flee the room when it ran. The springs in the door had broken so many times that the internal door stops were bent. When we opened the door all the way, it was at such an angle that it made a ramp to the floor. When we pulled out the bottom dish rack, it would keep rolling and end up on the floor.

The garbage disposal was akin to a jet aircraft engine when it was in operation, though not as efficient.
We had an electric cook top with downdraft venting mounted in our island. As for the venting aspect, maybe 5% of the vapors would actually be sucked out by the poor design. I won't even go into the grease fiasco one time when we were cooking bacon.

We had noticed that the soffits above our cabinets (why didn't the cabinets go all the way to the ceiling!) must have been added on a late Friday afternoon before a three day holiday as none of the sides were square to anything. They were all five to ten degrees off square and were just plain ugly!

We decided about a year earlier to plan all the aspects of a remodel that included the kitchen, breakfast nook, and family room. We wanted to have an understanding about all the basics as well as options we could incorporate. We went to several remodeling shows, looking at all the available products and talking with the contractors, we made many trips to the appliance stores. We made check lists and priced out the requirements and optional items before we decided to move forward.

After I was laid off from my job, we decided to move ahead with the remodel.

My Inspiration

My inspiration has come from the Food Network. We really enjoy watching Alton Brown's Good Eats. The scientific approach he takes and explains appeals to my engineering side. I also enjoy Paula Deen's shows, I like the way she makes cooking fun and an enjoyable adventure.

I have two Alton Brown books: Good Eats and I'm Just Here for More Food - baking. The second book is more of a chemistry book on how food + mixing + heat = baking. I purchased the Good Eats book with some of my birthday money in October so I could plan on what to cook when our kitchen remodel was completed.
I also have several Paula Deen magazines specifically on cookies and desserts as well as her The Dean Family Cookbook that I received from my wife for Christmas. I have prepared meals from all these sources over the last few months.

My wife is just fine with me performing all the cooking. We have an arrangement, I cook, she cleans up the dishes.

These cookbooks as well as a few others in our library including the ubiquitous Betty Crocker Cookbook make up our cooking library. I augment this with specific recipes that I print from the internet typically found at www.foodnetwork.com

Dinner tonight is BBQ steak with potato and veggies.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell

Introduction

I have always had some interest in cooking. Every Christmas, I make hundreds of cookies with our family favorite being a ginger cookie. Our son loves these cookies! I also make caramel corn that we give to family and friends (both of the recipes I will provide in later posts).

So why how did I get involved in the cooking? For almost 30 years my wife has planned and prepared our dinner and done an excellent job and I prepare handle the BBQ portion of our menu. Summer, winter, rain it doesn't matter, I will cook BBQ a couple of times a month. After I was downsized at my last company, we had a choice to remodel our kitchen or go on a trip to Europe. We decided to move forward with our kitchen remodel that we had been planning for almost a year. It was, but the kitchen won. I will discuss the remodel process and results in a later post. While our kitchen was torn apart, I did the cooking on a two burner Colman camp stove either outside or in our garage. The little stove worked very well for that period and it has provided me new recipes for our camping trips.

Once the remodel was finished, I continued planning and cooking the meals on the new gas range. I love the features of our Electrolux duel fuel (electric oven and gas cook elements). It has been a lot of fun developing new skills and trying new recipes, some have been great, others, well... More on all these adventures coming soon.