Not-So-Simple Mac and Cheese

Photo above: not-so-simple mac and cheese.

We have been cooking out of a temporary kitchen for the last six weeks, and expect to be in this unenviable state for another eight weeks. Living through a major remodeling project is generally lousy: the psychological impact of construction mess in our home; dust everywhere (even with diligent dust protection, it's inevitable); varying noise levels throughout the day; disruption of general routine and inconvenience all around. But the worst of it all, as far as I'm concerned, is the utter disorganization and severe prepping/cooking limitation that goes along with working out of a temporary kitchen.

Our setup is basically this: our kitchen (with oven, electric skillet, fridge, microwave, and freezer) is in the garage, which is on our main ground level. We also have a grill on the back deck, which is also on the main level. Our casual dining/family area is setup in the daylight walkout basement. For our cleanup, we are using the utility sink in the laundry room... which is on the upper bedroom level. So the progression of a meal is: prep on main floor; serve down in basement; hike two levels to cleanup on top floor. Here is "appliance alley" in our garage:


And here's the view of our ghetto-garage in all its glory from the outside. Not only is it our "kitchen", as well as storage area for newly delivered appliances, but also the garage contains random odd items as any self-respecting garage would:
The best is when I am using the oven to roast or something like that -- with no venthood, I really must open the garage door to let out the fumes. We get quite a few "looks" and questions from our inquisitive neighbors as they stroll past on their walks.

The situation is far from ideal, but I went through a few scenarios and there's really no good way to do this. So, each day requires traversing the three levels of our house many, many times. As an aside, I am 7.5 months pregnant. I am also sometimes carrying our almost-2yo toddler on my right hip, as I juggle items being transported from one living level to another in my left hand. So trust me, if I could find a better way than going up and down these stairs all day, I would.

Recently our exterior framing/siding was finished... which meant we could use our deck and grill again. This meant -- drumroll -- that I could now boil water! Our Daddy Grill has a side gas burner which I had never used before, but it was now an object of my lust. My daughter had asked for mac and cheese earlier in the day, and gosh darn it I was going to make it for her!

Challenge #1: find a pot to boil water in. Any stovetop work we do in the temp kitchen is primarily in the electric skillet, so we didn't keep too many pots and pans accessible... As in, we kept one pot out with the rest stored in boxes, closets, etc. That one pot was currently storing leftover soup. Five minutes of searching later, I finally found an adequate pot. It wasn't ideal (wide and shallow) but at ~3.5" deep, it would work to boil water.

Challenge #2: Fill water into pot in bathroom sink and carry water to deck without spilling. Mostly successful.

Challenge #3: I needed a landing zone for my cooking tools: Strainer, mitt, spatula, cheese packet. There was no work surface nearby and the patio table was too far of a reach. I balanced my items on various flat parts of the grill.

Challenge #4: Cook the pasta. It is supposed to boil for 8-10 minutes. With my wide shallow pot on my outdoor gas burner, I lost a lot of surface heat to crosswind. Had to boil for an unusually long 15 minutes.

Challenge #5: Extinguish the silicone spatula. Apparently my landing zone that I concocted for #3, left the spatula too close to my gas flame. My silicone safe-to-500-degrees spatula caught on fire. I had no water source nearby. My husband grabbed the utensil and headed down off the deck to the outdoor hose and soaked the utensil. After photo:


Challenge #6: By now, all pyro incidents have been solved and the pasta is cooked. I even had, by some miracle, a strainer at hand. But - where to strain my boiling water? I have no sink on the deck. My daughter and dog are both playing in the yard down below the deck. Solution: have husband keep them at bay while I strained off the boiling water in a far corner of the deck.

Challenge #7: find a measuring cup to make the cheese sauce. Who am I kidding? I'm not going back to the garage for a measuring cup. I eyeball it. I end up putting in too much milk so the sauce is entirely runny and way unappetizing, not to mention asking for uber-messy trouble with a toddler. I ask my husband for any ideas and he suggests that I try adding bread crumbs. Miraculously, I know where the bread crumbs are (they're in the garage, next to the measuring cups!). I throw some bread crumbs into the mac and cheese and the consistency was actually lovely. It simply looked homemade.

That's part of the problem with a temporary kitchen -- every new process, as simple as it is, seems like re-inventing the wheel. It's amazing how we take the convenience of a "real kitchen" for granted. We have been really fortunate in our remodel to not only go over to friends' houses for dinners, but also to be part of a couple frozen meal swaps that have kept us stocked in easy to prepare meals. I remember wondering if running a 220v line to have my oven hooked up in the garage was really necessary (electrician visits can be expensive!). It turns out to be a lifesaver as we have lots of frozen meals that taste like proper homemade dishes, that can only be baked in the oven.

Here is what I miss most about our normal kitchen:

• having a dishwasher - this easily tops the list as we hate dishwashing
  
• having ice to keep our drinks cold
• using real metal utensils (we could do this but... we hate washing dishes even more than we hate plastic utensils)
• having a clean dust-free environment for storing and prepping fresh produce. We're doing a lot of bagged salads and steamed frozen veggies. We certainly do these normally, but not ALL the TIME and it's getting a bit old. I can do SOME fresh produce, but it's so exhausting to figure it all out. Easier to just throw in the proverbial towel and just steam up some frozen vegs.
  

(ps Luckily, both my daughter and her friend totally loved the mac and cheese.)

The Plans

I figured it was about time that I posted an overview of our kitchen remodel plans!

A lot of people, when remodeling, enter the project with a statement like "I want a Tuscan kitchen" or "I just want some new appliances to make life easier." They make statements about style, form, function, utility, etc. To me, that is secondary. The first todo is to take a very big step back and think about the overall goals, and desired feel, for the kitchen. For example, here are some overall goals that we had:

• nurture and foster a social family environment
• enable casual and comfortable entertaining for large crowds
  
• create a sense of connectedness to other areas of our home, as well as our entire site (i.e. our outdoor yards/deck)
• celebrate food and encourage a healthier diet and eating habits
  
• maximize efficiency and ergonomics* in daily usage patterns (* I have a bad back)
  
• bottom line: create a space that feels good

A lot of people in design often debate form versus function. In most cases, I think the elusive quality of "feel" trumps both of those. Kelly at Kitchen Sync wrote a great post about feel just as I was starting to noodle on the idea of how to describe it and write about it. For now I'll just let you take in her thoughts and sooner or later, I'll try to organize my own thoughts about "feel."

Here is the kitchen layout that we inherited with the house:

From Kitchen - Gorsegner

There were a lot of "feel" problems with this kitchen. Here are some of the top issues:

• When entering the front door of the house, you looked to the back and found yourself directly centered with a sliding glass door. As my husband said, the message was clearly: "welcome! come in! go out!"
  
• The kitchen was entirely open on one side to the living room, to form a great room, but it was very closed and imposing on all three other sides. As you entered the great room, there was no gradual transition into the space, especially since your first view, of the glass door, gave no hint as to anything else in the great room. In just one step, you abruptly switched from hallway to kitchen... an entirely unnecessary constraint in a floor plan of this size.
• The kitchen also had cabinetry 8' high that was 24" deep, on the three walls of the room. This might be ok for a larger kitchen but not a 12.5'x13.5' kitchen. It felt like a heaviness was bearing down on you from every direction. This imposing wall of storage - a pantry - towered over you as you entered the room:
  

  From Why Remodel The Kitchen?

  Note: I have a lot of kitchen "stuff" and I never used all the storage in the old kitchen!
  
• The island was 10' long by 3' wide -- effectively serving as a barrier to general traffic flow in the kitchen. The island actually extended 3' past the kitchen and into what should have been the casual dining area.
• The casual dining area was entirely cramped and uninviting -- primarily due to the intrusion of the island. Anyone sitting in the dining area obstructed access to the sliding glass door and thus the deck and back yard.
  

These are the new kitchen plans:

From Kitchen - Gorsegner

Of note ...

• There is now a designated casual dining area
• The food storage pantry has moved from the "social zone" to the butler's pantry
• This enables the stair wall to be opened up and allows for a smoother, gradual transition to the kitchen/great room area
• There is a speed cook oven recessed into the stair wall, under the halfway stair landing. Thus there is still function on this wall, without taking up floor space.
  
• Sliding glass door is now in the living room, and no longer chops up the great room into two smaller disjointed halves
• New island dimensions encourage a better social and functional traffic flow (through widened aisles)
• The corner windows, which "connected" us to the neighbor's backyard, have been removed, and a new single larger window is over the sink (this window gives us a view of our herb garden and living Christmas tree)
• We also switched out the butler's pantry door to a full height glass door, borrowing some light from the dining room into the pantry
• This layout also creates a focal point of a red painted dish hutch as you enter the room. The hutch, with glass doors, will store our every day dishes of Fiestaware china, as well as drinking glasses and possibly some heirloom Fiestaware pieces. We are well known for Fiestaware love among our friends and family, so having this prominent hutch of Fiestaware is a really defining (and expected) statement in our kitchen.
  

And finally, here is a 3d perspective of the new kitchen. It is missing the all-important stair wall, to give you a feel for the new transition into the space, as well as includes several mistakes such as window sizes. It does, however, a fairly decent job of communicating the overall feel of the new kitchen layout:

From Kitchen - Gorsegner

I should mention that the first two color illustrations are quick sketches done by me in Powerpoint. This last 3D drawing was provided to me by the custom cabinetry firm I have hired. It was done using Cabinet Vision, with the primary objective being to send instructions to the CNC machine to cut my cabinets. It's an engineering tool, not a design tool. I would like to draw up my new kitchen on my own, in either Sketchup or Chief Architect software, to give you a better "feel" for the new kitchen. I would like to do a lot of things for this blog, however, so this 3D line drawing will have to suffice for now!

I've created an online album, annotated with captions, to show various aspects of our kitchen plans. There's a total of seven drawings in this album (three of which are already included in this post.)

The plans are not perfect, but we are really very happy with the overall direction. In a future post, I'll detail some sacrifices, concerns, and tradeoffs in our plans and decisions.

Hotlanta

KBIS is taking place this weekend in Atlanta. KBIS is the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show and Conference -- the largest annual gathering of professionals in the industry. Oh, how I have KBIS-envy right now!!! I look forward to the year when I can attend. Drool drool drool. I have known attendees there the past couple years and they've brought back cool photos, literature, and news of technology and trends... but this year, amongst my new peers in Portland, I don't personally know anyone who is there. So sad. Luckily the community of kitchen design on the Internet has really blossomed in the last year or two, so there are a few twitter-ers (tweeters?) that I can follow, as well as KBIS themselves offer an RSS feed which I've subbed to. The KBIS site is more marketing-oriented than news, however (which I expected). For example, apparently Eli Manning lost a competition against his dear mother in a pancake cookoff on a Kenmore induction cooktop.

(ETA -- the RSS feed is not from KBIS, but from K+BB magazine online. http://nbm.typepad.com/kbis_live/)

The last occasion where I spent quality time in Atlanta was for the 1996 Olympic Games, where I both volunteered as a gymnastics statistician as well as had a job maintaining the official website for the USA Gymnastics team. I was in Atlanta for over two weeks -- it's a really fun city. I do hope it's a bit more temperate now in the first week of May, than it was in July 1996!