Two years ago on a Friday night, our contractor, Steve Butler, kept his promise: he and his crew cleaned up and left for good - 24 hours before 50 guests arrived for a wedding rehearsal dinner.
When Steve started the job three months earlier I had told him that I didn't care how much time he took, as long as the kitchen was ready for the party. It never occurred to me we'd be cutting it so close. After the crew left, my co-host joined me in a late-night shopathon and the next day she read the new appliance manuals to me as I cooked. My very first dinner from our new kitchen: Man, it was fun.
This is the third kitchen I have done from scratch and it's the best. I'm the first to admit I'm fussy. I trained for a year at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, taught cooking for a community college, was once the food editor at the Toronto Star and have been cooking for the homeless for 15 years at our Out of the Cold program at St. Andrew's Church in Toronto. For my money, restaurant and church kitchens are the most efficient; learning from them, mine has all the counter space, storage and access to equipment I need.
After that came the beauty. But to me it's all one and the same thing. An efficient kitchen is beautiful. Kitchen equipment is beautiful. My restaurant-weight copper pots are beautiful and I didn't want them to be hidden behind doors. Our everyday dinnerware is old French Quimper and I wanted it on open shelves.
I've got plenty of natural light, storage and counter space, a professional stove with water tap over it, two copper sinks, great appliances, a fireplace, a place to sit - and simplicity.
The old kitchen was a disaster, based as it was on that stupid holy grail of kitchen design, a work triangle, compounded by a U-shaped work space, an under-counter lazy susan storage cabinet, a corner sink, a peninsula and an island. I ground my teeth for 13 years. The cupboards were too high to reach and the few counters too short and narrow. I hated running around the island. There was almost no storage and only room for one person to work. Everyone was always colliding, especially at the sink. I was crabby all the time and finally almost stopped cooking.
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