My Kitchen has a turquoise stove…

and counter tops. I painted it yellow last May, and put up some shelves, but it hasn’t changed substantially since 1966 when my grandmother moved in. The cabinets are metal with fake wood grain laminate on the doors. All the shelves used to be lined with turquoise rubber that matched the counter tops, but after 35+ years, it started to harden and crumble off in little bits. I love to cook, and my little windowless galley kitchen is not my ideal, but I still love it. I love that it is MY kitchen. I can cook there, and create food that brings people together, fills their stomachs and leaves them satisfied and content. When I cook, I think and I pray. I tell the food how wonderful and nourishing it is. Combining food and flavors is a language I speak well and really enjoy.
Tonight I was cooking my sister’s speciality, “Quinoa, Bean-wa and Green-wa” is my favorite yellow (matches my walls) Dansk pot. It is from the 1970′s and is the perfect size and shape. Rachael Ray has one just like it on her show, which I get a kick out of. She even said once that it was her favorite (on the show where she cooked a veggie and garbanzo bean stew). I admit it, I love Rachael Ray. She was at Kitchen Kapers on 16th st. a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t get out of work to go see her. The only problem with her is she used an awful lot of pork products. It’s not that I don’t eat pork, but my mom is Jewish, and I have an instantaneous guilt onset when I eat it. Best to stay away!
Anyway, back to the yellow pot. The only problem with it is that the lid has a lip that catches food and liquid and has to be cleaned carefully. I have a brush which is designed for cleaning baby bottles (I don’t really know why I have it, I found it in the apartment when I moved in, I think it must be leftover from when my sister and I were really little and my mom would need to clean our bottles. My grandparents never got rid of a thing)! These days there aren’t any baby bottles around here (thank god!) that need to be cleaned, so I mostly use this long, skinny brush to make sure my pot lid gets clean to my slightly complusive standards. Everytime I do it, I check to make sure that my roommate isn’t around, because he already thinks I’m a little crazy when it comes to cleanliness, no need to further encourage that mostly accurate assumption.