Wednesday, December 14, 2005

My kitchen

As Banana Yoshimoto in her book Kitchen wrote: “The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, its fine with me.”. These are my sentiments exactly and whenever visiting someone’s house, I find myself drawn to this room. I love to nose around, looking at their food stuffs, gadgets, cookbooks and organisation. Several other blogs have talked about their kitchen, and I loved reading these posts. So here is my kitchen: small but with a great amount of character, which means tasteless units. net curtains and funky wallpaper. However strange the display of utensils and fruit on the walls may seem, I have grown very attached to it.

There is a good amount of storage space and we have a cooled cupboard just under the window as its built into the wall. This is full of baking utensils and preserves I made in the last few months and will hopefully keep us going far into the new year. Apart from that, there is a wonderful pasta maker, which moved in with the boyfriend, and lots of pottery I picked up along my travels. I really had to stop myself buying pottery, specially in Japan where they are big on presentation, have different dishes for seasons and more.

These mugs I treasure as well and are good for cups of tea to keep you warm…I never used to drink much tea until I moved to Scotland, where you just have tea all the time. Although I do diverge from the standard tea as we have a lovely speciality tea and coffee shop in Dundee where they roast their own beans, weigh out everything on old fashioned weighing scales.

Apart from the standard herbs and spices I have a variety of foodstuffs I brought back from Japan including konbu, iruko, katsuo-boshi, ochazuke and more. I guess the advantage of a tiny kitchen is that you have to be quite organised and can only cook one thing at a time. Normally I am quite bad at trying three projects at once, which then all coincide and generally turn out not quite as expected.

So now the next post will hopefully be about the concoctions and creations made in this limited space.

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