Events in the Kitchen

When I was growing up, every house we lived in (and I was an Army brat, so there were many) had a great kitchen. Nice appliances, lots of counter space, plenty of cupboard room, the works. Even our modular housing unit on the military base in Fort Polk, LA had a damn good kitchen.

This might have been what instilled in me a love of cooking. My mother was definitely a good cook, but it wasn't her domestic love. (That would be cleaning. She would clean the house every day like it hadn't been cleaned in a year. As a youth I found this annoying, but ten years later I have grown to appreciate it. Sometimes I find myself wishing she was here right now to clean up after me and maybe vacuum my drapes.) When I was thirteen I began asking her to let me cook dinner, and it quickly became one of my chores. My specialty was my chicken stir-fry, which my mom would have me cook when we had visitors. I'm not the best cook you'll ever meet, and experimentation does tend to scare me a little, but I do love it as a hobby.

But my cooking has become less frequent in recent days. I love my historical, centrally located two-story townhouse apartment very much, but I hate its kitchen. It's waaay too small! Counter space is at such a premium that I often have to lay the cutting board on the washing machine (there's really not even room for a microwave). I hate seeing a cute set of canisters at Anthropologie and then having to say, "Sigh. No room." There are so few cupboards that I am relegated to storing my sundries on the top of the refrigerator and occasionally even in the utility room. I don't have a proper pantry. To tell the truth, it really pisses me off.

My kitchen also comes equipped with an antiquated gas stove. My uncle was an executive at Alagasco for many years, and if you were to even suggest to him that an electric stove was in any way superior to a gas one you could prepare for a lengthy one-sided argument and not expect to win. But recently one of the pilot lights blew out, rendering the two left-side burners inoperable. Turning them back on would involve unscrewing a large plate from the bottom of the oven. Be your own judge.

I probably should have noticed the kitchen would be insufficient when I was first shown the apartment (and I also should have assumed that the antique bathtub wouldn't be able to handle my keratinous Greek genes). But I'm a sucker for hardwood floors and crown molding.