the opoponax's Profile

If you've "gone primal", how are you drinking limoncello? I don't think paleo humans had digestifs...

It's funny, when I was a kid we had a few of these "Cooking With Kids" cookbooks around the house, but they never really got used.

Instead, the adults in my life just let me help out in the kitchen. I mixed doughs and batters, squeezed lemons, shelled nuts, shaped patties, cut biscuits with an over-turned juice glass, and snapped beans. It didn't exactly teach me to cook, per se, but helped me feel involved and comfortable around the kitchen.

I'm not sure, by the way, that this sort of thing directly translates to healthy eating habits or being less picky or any of that. For me those instincts came from a whole separate place.

I'd guess that the reason it reads as "a non-cook's kitchen" is that it is very styled. Which, duh. This is a magazine spread.

My other guess is that it's a large room, in a home with plenty of storage space. Owned by people who have the sort of money where, if the antique mirror over the stove gets damaged, nobody's going to shed any tears over it. That's not my life, but it doesn't mean that the person this kitchen belongs to doesn't enjoy cooking.

Actually, the pouring flour into the cup over a bowl is a pretty nice tip. And it doesn't even require one to hire an interior designer, or even a trip to Williams Sonoma.

I also love the drawer pulls - it turns a cookie cutter apartment kitchen into a unique and modern space.

Yeah, so far there's a lot of hiding them. Or mashing them with lots of butter and milk. Not because I hate them so much, but just because I've never found a recipe that really features the flavor up front and center.

I often use food blogs and epicurious as an inspiration, but will go to certain tried and true sources for the recipe I'll ultimately use. If I see a French recipe that looks interesting, I'll try to find an equivalent in Julia Child, for instance. Probably because I've got two generations of Julia Child devotees above me in the family tree, so her approaches tend to make the most sense to me.

And, yeah, also the "forks" rating on epicurious, though I will usually skim at least a page of the reviews to see exactly what people thought. There are surprising number of bad ratings because something was either "bland" or "too spicy/garlicky/strong", which is a matter of taste and can be corrected easily.

1. chef's knife. I also use a few others, but it's the chef's knife I couldn't live without.

2. big wooden cutting board. It's gotta be wood.

3. set of 3 melamine mixing bowls with pour spouts and rubber bases.

4. my le creuset stock pot.

5. really high quality waiter-style wine bottle opener.

6. wooden spoons.

7. a good sautee pan

8. a smallish rubber/silicone spatula for scraping the sides of bowls.

You know what? Without descending to cutlery and tableware or food storage ware that can do double-duty, I think that could probably be a fairly well-stocked kitchen for me. There might be other things I'd want, but I could easily get by with those 8 items.

Once upon a time I lived in an art collective with a huge loft space, roof access, and lots of weird objects lying around. We had this houseguest from Europe come and stay, and he improvised something like this with a parachute and a box fan. We'd set it up on the roof and have crazy cloud parties inside. If this post didn't have SWEDEN written all over it, and if the house guest hadn't been French, I'd wonder if he hadn't patented the idea when he got home...

The misuse of the term "upcycled" bugs the crap out of me (probably because I spend too much time surfing Etsy).

These recipe boxes are not "upcycled". They are "decorated". They may be vintage or used recipe boxes which have had new decoration added to them, but they still are not "upcycled". An upcycled recipe box would be, for example, one built from salvaged wood. Or a tea tin repurposed as a recipe box. Something like that.

Oh, and to not be a negative nelly, I'll say that I'd really love a recipe box - my fridge is crusted with recipe printouts in ugly fonts or cluttered with website logos. It would be nice to have something a little more aesthetically pleasing and user friendly.

Wait, so now not only should we not bother to change anything in a rental, but we also shouldn't make any changes to a house we buy but don't plan to live in forever?

5 years is a substantial chunk of a person's life. Your life. Do you want to be in a holding pattern for 5 years, living in a home you can't enjoy, because What If the next person to buy the house would have liked it the way it was when you bought it? Why is some future hypothetical owner more important than you? If you want to paint the cabinets, paint the cabinets. And ditto for anything else you're not doing because What If the next owner doesn't like it.