kitchen nightmares

Lately, our kitchen was feeling like a bad slapstick comedy. With all of the bounty that summer brings, we'd been spending 90% of our free hours in the galley-style space - jostling and bumping like doddering fools. It didn't help that with all the steam from the jam jars processing on our stove, we'd been wanting to leave our back door open to let some air in. You see, in our old kitchen the back door sat between the largest counter and bread board (where we want to chop the food) and our stove (where we want to put the chopped food). This meant that cooking with the door open involved an elaborate dance. Often, I would sit behind the door stirring whatever was bubbling on the stove top, while P chopped behind the door. When he wanted to get into a drawer, or if I wanted to open the oven, he had to first move away from the door, we had to close the door, and then we could proceed. Needless to say, we're not always the most coordinated and this dance often resulted in one of two disasters: something would spill (requiring an even more elaborate dance to clean it up), or one us would get hurt.

Being the more hurried (and perhaps the more careless) of the two of us, I was often the one who got hurt. There was the time that I stepped back into the hot cast iron skillet P was carrying to the sink; the time I burned my hand on the oven door trying to open it enough to check something without closing the door and/or squishing P; or the time(s) that I opened a drawer into my shins, again because I was too impatient to ask P to move, close the door, etc.

My co-workers were beginning to notice and I was getting tired of watching their faces take on expressions of horror when I casually replied, "Oh, that's just where P hit me with the molten cast iron skillet the other night," to their inquiries about my scar. It was clear - something had to change.

Conveniently enough, our patience with our kitchen finally ran out at a time when I was obsessively searching craigslist to find a new place. My craigslist strategy follows: I open the PDX craigslist rental site in my browser and search under specific criteria (by neighborhood, price range, and a pet policy that accepts cats), then I leave this tab open and refresh it, oh, every five seconds or so. You haven't tried this? Maybe it seems a little neurotic to you? Well, my special strategy landed us with an absolutely, positively, fantastic new place. So there. I found it two and a half weeks ago and here we are, moved in. In addition to its many attributes (more space, more light, a basement where P can keep his letterpress so that we don't have to perform a different, but equally elaborate, dance whenever he wants to print something), I am convinced that the one, shining feature that sold us on the place was the kitchen.

It is, quite simply, amazing. Where the old space was cramped, this kitchen is open and liberating. Where our old kitchen was dank and tended to hold in moisture (we constantly battled mold, even on our appliances), the new kitchen is dry, airy and filled with light. P and I can stand in the new kitchen preparing food and talk to friends at the same time, without having to bring those poor souls into the already cramped space in order to hear them. Seriously: among its other benefits, this kitchen may improve my social life. It is a kitchen in which one might prepare half of a pig and not break a sweat (or break up a marriage). If only we had half a pig. Which brings me to the second best feature of our new apartment: a chest freezer will fit quite nicely in one of the upstairs storage rooms. Now perhaps I can have my pig and cook it too.