Kitchens: Do them Right. Do them Once.

There is an article in the current issue of Kitchen & Bath Design News (December 2007) that details the findings of a survey of more than 800 consumers who have remodeled their kitchens.

One paragraph caught my eye and I would like to discuss it further here:

"Researchers also found that more than three out of 10 remodelers said they would spend more money on a kitchen remodel if they had to do it over, while only 7% said they would spend less. Of those who would spend more, the key things they would do differently next time are upgrading the cabinets and increasing the size of the kitchen."

Now cabinets are a big chunk of your outlay when putting together all the things you have to buy when remodeling a kitchen. They can easily amount to a quarter or half of the total budget.

So why do you think these (now) experienced remodeling consumers would spend more on the biggest part of their kitchen budgets? I think I can answer that question:

1. The cabinets are not as sturdy as they assumed, and are not holding up.

2. The shelves are not thick enough and are bending under the weight of their dinnerware.

3. The drawers are very shallow and items catch in them all the time.

4. They keep chipping plates trying to get around center dividers in two door cabinets.

5. The shelves in their cabinets are fixed and not adjustable, or the adjustments are drilled too far apart to give real adjustability.

6. The shelves in their base cabinets are 2/3 depth instead of full depth.

7. Their drawers are made of skimpy materials, like particleboard, and are breaking.

8. Their cabinets are unfinished on the insides and require shelf paper and drawer liners.

9. Their cabinet hardware items (hinges, drawer slides, etc.) are flimsy and not holding up.

10. The finish on their cabinets is lacquer, and is not holding up.

The fact is, these people assumed that the beautiful cabinets they saw in the showroom were all the same because they could not SEE any difference between the set that cost $8,000 and the set that cost $24,000. And now they have LEARNED the difference by living with their choices.

Now, I am not saying that you have to spend three times what you would like to spend to get a quality cabinet. But what I am saying is that you have to look at what you are buying with a critical eye. And you MUST do the research to know what features you absolutely must have in cabinets.

Then, you must spend whatever is needed to get a quality cabinet...Otherwise you will regret spending less, as those consumers in the study did.

They also regretted not expanding their kitchens, either by opening up the walls, or adding on...

Most people get only one shot at a kitchen remodel in their lifetimes, so these mistakes go on and on.

Don't regret. Do it right.

Peggy

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking
Morning Edition -Dec. 20, 2007
Web Extra: Recipes, Internment Camp Remembrances


This historical Hidden Kitchen comes from the memories and kitchens of the Japanese Americans uprooted from the west coast and forcibly relocated inland after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In camps like Manzanar, Topaz, Tule Lake some 120,000 internees lived for four years in remote and desolate locations — their traditional food replaced by US government commodities and war surplus — hotdogs, ketchup,spam, potatoes — erasing the traditional Japanese diet and family table.

I (Davia) was getting my hair cut by Akemi Tamaribuchi. Imagine Audrey Hepburn if she had a Japanese-American father. That's Akemi. It was the first time we met, and we were in the midst of getting-to-know-you questions. She asked what I did, what I was working on. I told her about The Kitchen Sisters and the "Hidden Kitchens" series — secret, underground, below-the-radar cooking in America, contemporary and historic. She kept cutting, but didn't miss a beat. "Weenie Royale," she said. "Weenie Royale?" "We eat Weenie Royale because of the internment."

She began to tell me the story of her grandparents' four-year incarceration in the camp at Tule Lake during World War II. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, about 120,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast, their homes and land taken from them, and put into one of 10 remote and desolate locations until the war's end.

They lived in barrack-like conditions, standing in long lines for little food, eating off tin pie plates in big mess halls. They were fed government commodity foods and castoff meat from Army surplus — hot dogs, ketchup, kidneys, Spam and potatoes. The Japanese diet and family table were erased.

In the early years of the incarceration, grizzled old Army cooks, used to feeding armies of men, now fed women and children. It was wartime, with strict rationing for everyone. At the Topaz Internment Camp in central Utah, it was decided that no one except children under 12 would receive milk — 6 ounces a day. Pregnant women, because their children were unborn, were not allowed any milk. Tami Tomoye Takahashi, who gave birth to two babies at Topaz, found a Sears, Roebuck catalog and ordered calcium tablets to benefit her unborn babies.

In the chaos of the dining hall, families no longer ate together. Teenagers wanted to be with other teenagers. Old people, who had once sat at the extended family table, were isolated. Grandparents, parents and children broke apart in the face of mess hall dining. Mothers no longer could cook for their children. The family table, with its traditions and conversations, began to fade.

Akemi said that during this time her grandparents and parents — her father was a little boy then — began to acquire the taste for hot dogs. Weenies began to make their way into their postwar cooking. Weenies in eggs (the aforementioned "Weenie Royale"), hot dog sushi, Spam sushi. Ketchup crept into the cooking.

Akemi's story sparked this Hidden Kitchen story. It made us ask — What was the food in the camps? How did it impact the culture and cooking of Japanese Americans in the following years?

Millions of people live in refugee camps around the world now, being fed commodities and surplus. It made us think about the impact on so many cultures within so many nations when they are denied their own food and traditions, when they are forcibly displaced and their land and homes taken from them.

Jimi Yamaichi, director and curator of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, says the internment camps became a world unto themselves. Tule Lake, a camp in northern California, had chickens and a slaughterhouse where hogs were butchered for meat and rendered to make soap. About 3,800 acres were farmed by the internees. And the food grown there was sent to many of the other camps across California and the West.

Artist Howard Ikemoto said his father had owned grocery stores before the war and lost them all when the family was interned in Tule Lake. After the war, his father (whose given name was Ito and who later took the name Ed) became a gardener in the Sacramento area as did many of the other men who returned from the camps. At lunchtime, the men would meet to eat together either in a park or on a lawn they had just mowed. They would eat rice with a plum in the middle, a slice of Spam and corned beef hash in a tin.

Hot Dogs for Days

Yamaichi, a retired contractor, recently returned to Tule Lake with a group of former prisoners. It was their first visit since their incarceration during the war.

"Here's where the slaughterhouse was where we rendered the hogs. Here's the chicken coops," Yamaichi said. "They would bring carloads of hot dogs in by the tons — we'd eat hot dogs for days."

Takahashi, 92, grew up in San Francisco and attended U.C. Berkeley in the depth of the Depression. As World War II broke out, she worked at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, helping translate Japanese radio messages for the U.S. Army. Takahashi, along with her husband and parents, spent six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor interned in San Francisco at the hastily converted "Tanforan Race Track Assembly Center," living in a stable that held a horse. Then they spent four years incarcerated at Topaz Internment Camp in the Utah desert, where temperatures averaged about 125 degrees. After the war, Takahashi and her husband, Henri, went on to form the Takahashi Co., which sold furniture, home design items, and arts and crafts to major department stores and fine art museums.

Shousei Hanayama, the priest at the Buddhist Temple in Watsonville, Calif., remembered that after the war, American soldiers in Okinawa brought hot dogs and introduced them into the island culture.

Hanayama noted that hot dogs are still a part of the Japanese culture, pointing to the story of Takeru Kobayashi, who can eat 63 hot dogs in under 12 minutes. The winner of six consecutive Nathan's Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contests, Kobayashi revolutionized and popularized competitive eating with a technique called "Japanesing," separating hot dog from bun as he crams to victory.

Rice, the Soul Food of Japanese Americans

Within this hidden world of internment camp cooking was another hidden-kitchen tradition: the clandestine making of sake from leftover rice from the mess halls. Tamaribuchi's great-grandmother would dig a hole in the dirt floor of the barracks where they lived and bury rice in a pot and let it ferment. Old, burnt rice was saved and brought to ferment in any number of contraptions — keeping the forbidden tradition of sake alive in places like Tule Lake, Yamaichi said.

In the early years of the internment, prisoners were fed potatoes instead of rice. People in the camps rebelled, and slowly rice was added to the mess hall menus, though it was often prepared badly, served nearly raw or burnt. Ikemoto said his parents ate rice every day of their lives. He calls rice the soul food of Japanese Americans. —Davia Nelson

The Archives

In putting together this story we drew on an astonishing collection of archives, oral histories and images of the internment. Some were gathered by historians, anthropologists and remarkable photographers, like the legendary Dorothea Lange. Others were collected by the internees themselves. We hope you will explore some of the links we've gathered below and learn more about this under-chronicled aspect of our nation's history. - The Kitchen Sisters

Ghosts of Kitchens Past & Present

Hello there!

I've been busy working and unable to get to blogging lately.

But I ran across an article on kitchens and kitchen design on Economist.com that I just HAD to share.
It's quite a read, but kitchen aficionados won't mind.

The article, Downstairs Upstairs, by ??? (whoever it is, they are English and did a lot of good research), is a lengthy history of kitchens from the days of Henry XIII to the present; as well as a look at kitchens around the world today.

Some excerpts:

"Royalty ran them on an industrial scale. Henry VIII extended the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace into 55 rooms, covering over 3,000 square feet (280 square metres). These included the great kitchen, privy kitchen, cellar, larder, pantry, buttery, ewery, saucery, chaundry, spicery, poultery and victualling house."

"No corner of the kitchen escaped Catharine Beecher's critical eye, nor the precision of her advice. She recommended the construction of cupboards, shelves and drawers adapted to each sort of utensil. She favoured a work-table with built-in drawers, in order “to save many steps”."

"Many contemporary ideas about kitchen design can be traced back to another American, Christine Frederick, who set about enhancing the efficiency of the housewife. Her 1919 work, “Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home”, and her articles for the Ladies Home Journal on radical notions such as “Suppose our servants didn't live with us?”, were based on detailed observation of a housewife's daily routine."


Enjoy!
And Happy Holidays to ALL!

Peggy

Chocolate Maida cake - A Sweet

My sister and her 4 yr old daughter Gauri came from Gurgaon to spend a week with us. Her Kerala visit is after 5 years. I was busy for the one week she stayed with us. My brother-in-law likes this sweet very much and wanted me to send them through her. So on the day of her return, I prepared this.

Maida - 1 cup

Coco powder - 1 tablespoon

Sugar - 2 cups

Oil / Ghee - 3/4 cup ( I used 1/2cup of oil and rest ghee)

Water - almost a cup

Preparation
Seive maida and coco powder together so that they get mixed well.

Take a kadai. Add sugar and water and make sugar syrup of one string consistency.

Add the maida,coco mixture with out forming lumps.

When maida gets mixed with the syrup, add ghee little by little. This step willl take about 10 minutes.

When the mixture starts to leave the sides, transfer to a greased plate.

Allow it to cool for 10 minutes. Then cut into desired shape

I used twice the quantities mentioned here