Kitchen Stories: Short-Shorts on a Theme

With its one tall and narrow window facing North, this kitchen always has cold light. Through the ample maple crowns beyond the window, flickering patches of light create their shadow-play on the low countertops and on the mint-green cabinetry that only reaches halfway up the wall. White stone walls, white porcelain sink. One long crack in the wall that runs from the corner above the cabinets all the way to the adjacent wall above the door. The worn hardwood floor is covered by a threadbare oriental runner. On the wall next to the entrance hangs a heavy chestnut panel that once chimed calls to the housekeeper. Its oxidized metal bookplates hold paper slips entitled Living Room, Parlour, and Dining Room, all in faded Cormier typeface. An eternity has passed since its little bulbs last lit up, summoning servant to servee (that word seems archaic now; when spoken it draws the corners of your lips far back, too far for comfort). Time stands still here in the faint smell of wall plaster, dust, and floor wax. War-time tea tins repurposed for flour and sugar, plain or adorned with embossed figures of smiling women with red lips and white teeth, aligned neatly on open shelves. This is the kitchen in my father's childhood home.
    - Aino Waller


In the summer I live without a kitchen, just a counter with a hot plate and a small fridge underneath it. In the morning food is prepared and eaten with a view of the lake and sounds of morning; ducks, orioles, and lapping water. Hot cocoa and cold cereal are served up in metal camp cups and bowls. All dishes and silverware are washed outside in cold water, with hopes that the sun has taken off the biting edge. When you live and cook mostly outdoors tasks take on a different meaning. Food is limited, but it tastes sweeter, and the fresh open air takes the place of vitamins. Before breakfast a swim in cold water tingles every nerve and prepares me for my day. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
    - Barbara Anger


It is a kitchen in flux, without a remodel. Everything in continual motion — around the island, which holds the sink — perhaps, to accommodate its many guests, or to include the cook. Washing the dishes becomes a family event. 100-plus-year-old cook stove still put to work. Winter warmer. Leavener box. Cast iron becomes a fixture. How many times have I heard them say, "This year we'll be moving that old giant out — how many of us will it take?" Homemade pizzas. Late night snacks. Giggling girls. A kitchen of chaos. A kitchen of calm. A kitchen built on love. With rounded corners, like loaves of bread. Warmth. Warmth. Warmth. Pottery through glass panes. Screen door slamming. Hand-woven rug with resting pup, ears poised in hopes of falling casualties during meal prep — the only eager member on the cleanup crew. The clock on the wall runs fast, then behind — we lose all sense of time.
    - Heather Boob


The year Charlie died I had gone to France for the summer and left without a place to come back to. “Who knows maybe I won’t come back." But then Charlie was diagnosed and I came back. Someone found me a little apartment on East Hill with a sad little kitchen. It was long and narrow in an apartment squeezed out of a nothing house like an appendage. The kitchen was so narrow, probably the owner could have been sued for body bias if the wrong size person showed up to rent it. I was desperate and also the right size. Now I get a great deal of therapy in the kitchen. But I have no memory of cooking anything in that kitchen. It was not made for cooking, for inhabiting. The following summer, a year later, I left for France to bring Charlie’s ashes to Plum Village. My life was more messy than ever and bigger than any kitchen therapy could address. It really didn’t matter, the weirdness of the kitchen. Everything was weird, somehow. I couldn’t find the door out. So I got on a plane and ended up in France. I know my mess both followed me and was left behind, like the long tail of a bird in a dream, a tail as long as the journey. I heard of the mold and infestation of ants, alone, from the garbage can I failed to bring out to the curb before I left.
    - Jayne Demakos


We remodeled our house seventeen years ago — all for a Thanksgiving dinner. For more than thirty years, Nancy and I hosted a large "Thanksgiving Weekend" for her family and mine, and for the many found-family members who had become central to our life over the years. To host 20 or 25 people and to prepare an elaborate meal, or meals — as, over time, Thursday dinner grew to be a Friday dinner, a Saturday dinner, and a Sunday brunch — required a larger dining room and something significantly more than our galley-style kitchen. And so, a complete remodel of our home, an eight-month construction project, was underway. Walls were moved, new I-beams and doorways added, plaster completely torn out and replaced, floors refinished, and tiles and bathrooms and new windows installed. The kitchen itself received the most attention. Design and layout took hours of configuration and reconfiguration on the pad of graph paper I used to plan the new space. Where was the sink to go? Was the refrigerator in the recommended place forming the fridge-cooktop-sink triangle? Where would the two ovens that were considered essential to the design fit? It was hours and hours of planning, talking with a professional designer and our builder, and making endless choices of cabinet finishes, tile textures, and countertop colors. Finally, after weeks and months of planning, all of the details came together and, in the end, we had nearly the kitchen we wanted. I say nearly because — while most of the details were right, the finishes gleaming, and the function well thought-through — this larger kitchen . . . was only two-feet longer and one-foot wider than the one it replaced.
    - Jim Mazza


I had just turned seven when we moved to Sasebo, Japan. Our private rental kitchen had one small window looking out into the vacant lot next door. Electricity, cycling off every other day, powered only a few light bulbs. In winter, we used smelly, dangerous kerosene lanterns and heaters, lit only as long as needed. My pregnant mother kept one heater in her bedroom to dress, then carried it to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. We rescheduled our American Thanksgiving dinner as we had electricity on Wednesdays and could use the stove Father bought. A wooden icebox stood in one corner of the kitchen. Blocks of ice delivered twice a week kept food cool. An old man carried a block from his handcart to our icebox using iron tongs. We rescued chunks of ice dropped on the floor immediately to suck on hot summer days. Food waiting to be cooked got stored in the ice box, no leftovers. Mother put all our leftover food in a box outside the front door. Homeless people came by to eat the food every night. They knew our routine as well as I did.
    - Joann Grisetti


I sauté the onions and garlic, glance out my wide windows occasionally, at walnut, maple, douglas fir trees, winter skies, and chickadees at the feeder. Then, in a heart-beat, I’m back in Mother’s kitchen of long ago with its stone sink, small window, narrow view of bleak hop-fields half-obscured by blooming winter jasmine. Here, today, I have counters to work on, a fridge, stainless sinks; she had a scrubbed table, cold “safe” or larder, a small stove, a flagstone floor that was hard to clean, and a stone “copper” for washing sheets. I work in the quiet of my house but in a distant background I hear Mother singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and am content.
    - Joanna M. Weston


One kitchen was not enough for my Italian-American grandparents. In their modest three-bedroom ranch house on 60th Street in Niagara Falls, they needed more than a single stove to cook a proper Sunday dinner. So, my grandfather set up a range across from the washing machine in the basement. On Sundays when I was a child, I would walk into the main entrance to their house around 4 p.m. to join my aunts and cousins for a dish of macaroni. I could hear my grandmother stirring the sauce in the upstairs kitchen, to my left, and my grandfather swearing in Italian as he tried to fit all of the gnocchi into a vat of boiling water in the basement. My grandfather, now 95, still lives in the same house. But after my aunt died of breast cancer in 2008, and then my grandmother died of Alzheimer’s in 2012, we stopped going to his house for Sunday dinners. The basement kitchen fell out of use. There is still a cooking range across from the washing machine, but the large vat that used to boil gnocchi no longer sits on it. It has moved to my parents’ house, who now use it in their own basement kitchen, where they boil pasta for my grandfather and whoever else wants to join them on Sunday afternoons.
    - Julie M. Lind


Probably our last kitchen. And so we let loose. No cabinets, no doors, all open shelves. Everything on display. A museum of broken things. My mother's ashes in two small beautiful etched silver urns on the top shelf. Only the odd and unusual essentials in plain view. The blown glass tiny vases from Florence. My computer on the counter, waking up. My mother's family portrait over the stove when she was five. My grandmother in Alexandria sipping tea a hundred years ago. It keeps getting better and better. First thing in the morning, almost twenty years after the renovation, I throw or give something unnecessary away, and add something new and precious to the mix. Souvenirs. A dessert tray of pink stones from Santa Fe. A finger-shaped stone from the Finger Lakes. The painted tile from Puerto Rico that reads "Do Not Disturb / Poet at Work."
    - Kath Abela Wilson


It might have been a canyon, that dirt road running between our houses. Our kitchen window looked at yours across the divide. Daily, I saw you sweeping yellow dust off your porch. As from a little weather house, your tiny figure emerged mechanically sweeping, then re-entered, the door closing behind you. You came and went about your Baptist life, we about our Catholic. You to prayer meeting, your empty purse on your arm, for fashion’s sake; I to Mass, mother’s lace hanky bobby-pinned to my hair. It wasn’t said aloud, but the exquisite litmus of the young recorded it — you were the Other Grandmother. I have only a handful of memories of you, clinking together like the few coins given a child for the collection basket. Among them, one gleams most brightly: My bike had thrown me on that very dirt road between our houses. I presented myself, bleeding knees, chin, and palms, on your front porch. You opened wide the door, your arms, and took me inside your warm kitchen, that place of my father’s memories —ketchup sandwiches, spoonfuls of sweet condensed milk, endless grace at table. You lifted me to the drainboard by the sink and poured peroxide on my wounds, murmuring words of love. With bent yet gentle fingers you loosened embedded stones and grit. You smiled your sweet baptist smile and with your apron, wiped away my catholic tears.
    - Kathleen Kramer


Thirty years ago, my husband, toddler, and I had four days to find a house in Tallahassee, as Tom had just gotten his dream job there. We hired a rental agent to show us around. I knew for sure I wanted a big kitchen (“big enough to dance in”) with lots of light. Nothing we saw fit that description. One afternoon our realtor dropped us off at the motel, and my husband went for a run. He came back grinning. “There’s a for-sale-by-owner, right on the city park,” he declared. We took our little girl and raced over. It was a darling bungalow set high on a ridge, facing the park. Once inside, we saw huge windows in every room. When we walked into the kitchen it was love at first sight. The room was indeed large enough to dance in, with big windows, a bench with padded cushions where our table would fit perfectly, and a big double sink. All these many years I have made meals in this kitchen, had my morning coffee, written in my journal on the same table where my daughter always did her homework. This well-lived-in room has truly fulfilled its promise.
    - Katya Sabaroff Taylor


I have read that the kitchens of Ireland have couches so that people can hang out and keep the cook company. What a warmhearted custom this is. I also remember Joyce Carol Oates's novel Them where she writes about how people living in poverty were forever hashing things out at their kitchen tables. My great-aunt Florence's kitchen was like that; people rarely went into her living room, but sat around gossiping with her as she circulated endlessly around her kitchen and her mother's antique coal-burning cookstove. My own mother was more of a don't-cramp-my-style cook, and so were all my friends' mothers. In my ex-husband's mother's house, though, you could poke around in her cupboards and refrigerator, and that was among the few things you could do that she wouldn't yell at you for. Who has influenced me the most? Well, I welcome people coming in to listen to NPR with me, and am thrilled when I can get someone else to help me chop vegetables: I must be more of an Aunt Florence. Sometimes, too, a radio story is so good that I'd like to make the whole family come in and listen. So I am damn near Irish, as well.
    - Laurie Petersen


We often said that you could live for years on the food in my mother’s pantry. It was a big walk-in space, with shelves from floor to ceiling, stocked with supplies: cans of soups, all sorts of tomatoes (whole, plum, diced, crushed), hominy, hominy, hominy; boxes of broth, every shape of pasta, brownie, cake, muffin mix; bags of flour and sugar, bins of onions and potatoes; jars of jam, applesauce, condiments; bottles of vanilla (the good kind from Madagascar), olive oil, vinegars; multiples of plastic wrap, wax paper, parchment paper. Towering overhead on the top shelf was the 64-cup coffeemaker with spigot whose brew had driven people home from dinner parties in the 60s and 70s, a tureen or two, a dutch oven, and other random pieces of cookware too big for the kitchen cabinets. The last time I was with my mother in her kitchen, we took a tour of the pantry together. She shuffled to the door, pulled on the light, looked around, up and down. “Where did all this come from?” she asked. I tried to think of the last time she had made a meal, walked into the pantry to get ingredients. It was less than a year, but in her mind long ago. She wondered at the abundance, the forethought of whoever had gathered all that food, made all those meals. “What shall we make?” I asked. “I can’t even start,” she said. And we laughed together. 
    - Marian Rogers


My mother was an excellent cook. When I was a kid growing up in western Kansas, I enjoyed watching her pull a dinner together -- especially if fried chicken was on the menu. She did everything with ease and expertise. But when she got into her '80s, she became a real sucker for kitchen gadgets. For example, she saw a TV commercial for "the amazing Salad Shooter," and was immediately hooked. The idea of being able to chop up a giant bowl of salad just by cranking a handle was really exciting to her. She called up and ordered one for herself. When the Salad Shooter arrived in the mail, she found the instructions very hard to follow and got terribly frustrated that making a big salad with this small white plastic machine wasn't quite as easy as the TV ad had promised. When she realized she needed to chop all the vegetables into smaller sizes so they could fit into the small round feeding hole, she threw up her hands and said "Well I might just as well finish all the chopping myself if I'm going to go to all that trouble first." So the Salad Shooter sat idle on her kitchen counter for many months, getting in the way and constantly taunting her with its grandiose promise of simplicity. Finally, she gave it away to Good Will and stopped expecting any magic from it at all. Every now and then, another gadget was advertised as being a miraculous time saver in the kitchen. Mom would cave in once in a while and put her order in. But, eventually, she always returned to the old fashioned ways and cooked up a storm of deliciousness all by herself from start to finish. Some things just can't be improved upon!
    - Marty Blue Waters


It was a small kitchen, the one from my childhood. It had a miniature, shuttered window used to pass food into the dining room for Easter and Christmas dinner. If I was sure that my father was not around, I would take a risk and climb up on the counter, slide through the small opening on my belly and slide head first down onto the china cabinet. Jumping down to the floor I would hold my breath so I could hear danger approaching. With barely enough time to conjure a story of being chased by pirates or avoiding the snapping jaws of imaginary crocodiles I would run back through the pantry and fly up onto the counter to close the small doors, hiding the evidence of my crime. The light blue enameled kitchen table was usually pushed up against the windowed wall to make room for the crowd of six that marched through each day. Meals were served there unless my father joined us and then my mother would pull the table, with solemn ceremony, into the middle of the room to create a place of honor. There was a low, round infant chair, not high at all, against the other wall. It was a space that had held each of us as we entered the family and before we could sit alone in a chair at the table. My sister Becky was the baby but soon there would be two more, the twins that my mother was carrying inside her. The tiny kitchen was where I could almost always find my mother. She would be on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor after a full day of teaching first graders, even though a perfectly good mop sat in the kitchen pantry. But usually I would find her with her back to the door, standing over the stove in deep concentration, attempting to create a meal for six, and most importantly to please my father (or to not displease him). I watched. I stood by silently but was never invited to participate. It was too important a task to share and my mother was too tired and too behind in her chores to see me there beside her. I understood as only the oldest can.
    - Mary Jane Richmond


Our kitchen occupies the northwest quadrant of our house, its two half-walls open to the rainforest and main entrance to the north, and overlooking the garden and nursery to the west. We begin and end each day here, attuning ourselves to the world around us. This kitchen is our natural refuge; a welcoming space at the heart of the house, with a bench and small table for guests and helpers along its eastern side. It is also a living organism, an alchemical kitchen where the fire with which we cook and the spring water we drink enter into experiments together with the fruits of the fields, the people present, and whatever creative inspiration comes to hand, to produce pleasurable and nourishing feasts. It's an environment where "inside" and "outside" co-exist peacefully: tiny bell-like fungi and slick algae cycle through their lives on the moist sides of our wooden sink; hummingbirds whizz past our heads; night lights attract spiraling clouds of moths; toads hunt insects and leave wet tongue-prints on the kitchen floor. It is a magical kitchen, filled with the transformative wonder of life in the tropics, and I love it with all my heart.
    - Mimi Foyle


My mother is washing my hair in the kitchen sink, why, I don’t know, but maybe just because it’s a treat. I am nine years old. This is our new house, much larger than our old house, with six doors leading to the outside deep in the woods, a long drive from anywhere. I am leaning over the counter, my head tipped over the porcelain lip. My mother uses the sink sprayer to rinse the suds from my hair and I squeeze my eyes shut. Water bubbles in my ears and I can taste the soap even though I am squeezing my mouth shut as tight as my eyes. Over the sink is a window looking out through a small porch where my mother has hung a bird feeder. She keeps it full of sunflower seeds tight in their little black and white jackets. The birds LOVE the seeds and my mother identifies them for me. Chickadees — black and white like the seeds. Blood-red cardinals and their olive-colored mates. Big blue jays looking very intelligent and knocking a lot of seeds on the ground. Nuthatches — also black and white — hanging upside down from the feeder. Snowbirds — more black and white birds! — who are only there in winter. She says if I stand very, very still, the chickadees will land in my open hand and take a seed. It’s true — and yes, they are light as a feather.
    - Patti Witten


I love kitchens because they remind me of my mother. If my mother were a dancer, the kitchen would have been her stage. Her body built and defined over countless years by the exercise of feeding her family. Her body gracefully moving to the rhythm of the dwindling daylight as she mixed dough and chopped greens. Her hands floating through flour like clouds along the sky, her fingers like a soft rain sprinkling salt and pepper and just the right amount of vinegar into heated pots that sat on the burners of our old, worn-down stove. We, her children, her exuberant audience, eagerly waiting for biscuits to emerge from the oven and the collards and black-eyed peas to simmer down. And while we waited, in the interval of her performance, she would wash her hands and pull the laundry in through the window, the large kitchen window all dressed in yellow curtains, the same window that allowed the setting sun to illuminate her culinary talents. Back then, my mother's cooking was more than utilitarian, it was a way of giving of herself, a way of giving us more than we had, because we had very little. My mother was a woman from another place and time — she was born in 1911, abjectly poor. She was born in a place and time where brilliance was measured by the degree that one knew how to provide for their family, and like a great magician,  she turned a scant amount of ingredients into something that nourished us completely. For her, her strength as a parent was shown by making sure her children did not go hungry, and had a roof over their heads.  She was from another time — an amazing woman who once told us that no matter how little you have, you always have something to give. Yes, a woman from a time wherein your resolve was shown by your ability to simply survive, not just out in the larger world, but within the walls of your home and the warmth of your kitchen.
    - Peaches Gillette


Lately I feel clumsier than I used to be. I came home and while searching for something in the fridge I bumped the door and a plastic jar of iced coffee fell and spilled on the floor. A slowly spreading cold, dark liquid seeped across the grout lines of the large beige tiles and expanded like a shallow layer of viscous mud, spreading under the refrigerator and soaking the edge of a light green scarf hanging over the back of a chair, turning it the color of old, dark wood.  I dashed to grab a handful of dish towels from the drawer and threw them into the pile of muddy liquid, even the stiff one from Hawaii with the fuchsia and orange flowers that my mother-in-law brought me that I never use; even the very soft white one that is only to be used on the gleaming stainless steel of the refrigerator and not meant for mopping the floor, as it may become entwined with tiny specks of grit that can later scratch the surface.
    - Phoebe Jenson


It is true that the kitchen in my home is about to be completely transformed. It’s been a long start-and-stop process of planning, considering, selecting, and learning. I’ve learned more than anyone really wants to, I’m sure, about the edges of countertops or differences in the ways cabinet doors can be built. It’s almost time to pack up our kitchen stuff to make way for the demo team. Time also to get rid of unwanted or unneeded items.  I also want to be mindful of energy to purge from this old kitchen. I didn’t get off on the best foot with it when we moved in 11 ½ years ago. I had loved my old house. Almost every direction I looked in, in that house, I found something to smile about. I have not felt this way much about our current house, especially not the kitchen. I will pack our belongings, and get rid of annoyance about the food being in the too-low cupboard with bad shelving. I will also toss out resentments over all things related to these four walls. I will let go of feeling crowded. Or burdened. And I will look for other things to let go of that I don’t realize are there yet. There will be abundant space, and light, and room for new possibility, and a sense of joy and welcome.
    - Stacey Murphy


I am in love. No, I am in lust! Kitchen lust! In House Beautiful, there are photographs of gorgeous kitchens. You know the ones: “Country Serenity,” with the requisite, exquisite collection of jadeite, blue and white ironstone, or vintage canisters that peep from behind sparkling glass doors in the white-painted custom-built wooden cabinets. A sea-green granite counter gleams, the appliances are state of the art, the white floor is artfully accented with an area rug whose tones pick up the colors of the cabinets’ contents and the sea-green granite. The “City Chic” kitchen sports immaculate white dinnerware on pristine glass open shelves. The walls are deep, saturated purple, blue, or blazing scarlet. The granite counters are white, the floor is reclaimed wood from an 18th century Parisian mansion, of course. What is wrong with these pictures? Where are the photos of our granddaughter, one for each of her 21 years, stuck to the fridge? Where’s the tiny, ancient TV perched on a small ledge for my husband’s morning dose of news? Why no favorite mug, chipped, waiting on the Formica counter? And where did they put my step-stool? Would I dare cook in any one of those kitchen? Perhaps, but I’d make such a mess! On second thought, my lust has evaporated. The affair is over.
    - Sue Norvell


See this photo of me in the kitchen with Teo. It is our first night home from the hospital, the third night of his life. I don’t know what I am warming up in the microwave, can’t remember what I ended up eating. In my face, see the softness, but the new edge, too. This is the face of somebody’s mama. See the pride: I grew him. I pushed him out. See the way he belongs. See the way the wrap I’m using to carry him is tied all wrong, though I practiced and practiced with a stuffed bunny while still pregnant. See how I don’t know it. See how I look like I know what I’m doing. See the way you just can’t know what’s to come. See me standing in the kitchen on Albany Street, believing I can fathom what it means to really love somebody.
    - Summer Killian


My grandmother’s kitchen, in Parchman, Mississippi, had a tiny pantry tucked away in a corner of the room. My grandfather had put in ceiling to floor shelves as well as a pull out counter for extra prep space. The shelves held colorful, beautiful jars of jams, jellies, canned vegetables, and jars of pickled everything. By everything, I mean not just pickles from cucumbers but things like peaches with cinnamon and cloves floating with the peaches, bright pickled corn relish, and green beans. There were big bins in the pantry holding flour, sugar, and cornmeal. She often went to the pantry, pulled out the counter and an enormous blue bowl (that my brother now has after I gave it to him in a sentimental moment) and she began making buttermilk biscuits. She never measured anything but simply spooned flour, baking powder, and salt into the bowl. She added butter or lard, crumbling it all together with her fingers, and then she added buttermilk that had been delivered that morning. Some of the milk she set aside to be churned into butter. She had a glass jar churn with a crank handle and all of us grandchildren clamored to be the one to turn the handle until — magically — butter appeared. She poured off the milk, scooped out the butter, and patted it into a stoneware dish that imprinted a design of a wheat stalk onto the top of the butter as it chilled.
    - Susan Annah Currie


It was a long ago July and I was 12 years old. After several relentless days in the car, my mother, brother, and I had traveled the last 12 miles by boat to install ourselves in a turn-of-the-century summer cottage on the Georgian Bay. My father would join us from our year-round home in Texas on the 1st of August. The dwelling was large and sprawling. The kitchen boasted a four-burner wood-burning stove, a pump handle fixed to the wall just inside the back door for pumping water straight out of the lake, an enamel dishpan, a kettle for heating water, and several drawers of utensils and tea towels. An electric light hung from a high rafter and a string was pulled to turn it on and off. There was a large window made of screening only, covered on the outside by a heavy wooden shutter. The second morning we were there, having breakfasted on bacon, I’m sure—there was always bacon—my mother decided to find out just what was in those drawers under the window. The first one she opened held a collection of ironed and folded tea towels at the front. But it was a deep drawer and she kept pulling it out as I watched. All of a sudden she screamed and snatched the drawer out, dashing it to the floor. My mother jumped up on a chair. I jumped up on another chair, as a clutch of tiny naked baby mice writhed and wriggled on the green linoleum floor. We looked at each other from our perches atop the chairs, my mum and I. And I laughed at her, and she laughed at me, and we stood there for the longest time just laughing atop our perches before we descended warily to the floor. I’m not sure what happened next, but I believe my mother used a broom to sweep the entire mess out the door. By the end of August, I had learned to bake a rather excellent cherry pie in the oven of the wood-burning stove.
    - Susan Lesser


My Italian grandmother was certainly mistress of the kitchen wherever she went. I remember visiting her in Manhattan when I was very little. While she waited for us at the top of the steep staircase to her apartment, my nose filled with the scents of oregano and garlic emanating from above. I'd look up, up, up to see her beaming face as I climbed each step. She'd laden the table in the cramped dining room with many of her specialities: spaghetti with meat balls, braciola, eggplant parmigiana (my favorite), sausage, and various fresh breads. When Grandma moved to New Jersey to be closer to family, she brought her kitchen with her. I remember eating her inimitable thick-crust pizza piping hot from the oven. Once when I was running late to a babysitting job, I put a wedge of veal parmigiana between two slices of her bread, wrapped it in foil and stuffed it into my purse to savor later. I've never quite figured out the exact combination of spices she used. She loved to add bay leaves to all of her sauces as they simmered on the stove. But I'm sure there was something more.
    - Theresa A. Cancro


I love my camping kitchen — enclosed in a big blue rubbermaid container heavy enough to sway the closet shelf, didn’t bring it in from the jeep until almost Christmas. Grills aluminum and cast iron, pot holders and a towel, detergent and sponge in a dish tub, kindling twigs and newspaper, a long lighter, matches and food gloves in a plastic bag, a small first-aid kit, paper plates, towels, and cups, sharp knives and a few utensils for fire and food (also a few plastic utensils in case of guests, you never know), a thin “cutting board” like a placemat, one checkered tablecloth and a nice blackened pot and lid. There’s a box with salt, pepper, sugar and terrible instant expresso that tastes great when I am relaxing at a picnic table near my tent, morning campfire almost ready for a bit of sirloin — first grilled last night — and bread that will toast with black stripes.
    -Tina Wright


His kitchen should have been a dead give-away that our upcoming marriage would not work in the end. Granted, there were high end appliances, copper pots, and Le Creuset cookware. But there were also Flamingo pink cabinets. What man paints his kitchen cabinets bright pink?  Blinded by love and the view of the Pacific ocean from the kitchen window, I took this palette choice as a sign of his rejection of our culture's restrictive social gender constructs. Here’s a man in touch with his feminine side, right? Curiously he spent little time in the kitchen, choosing to eat out whenever he could. His work as a gourmand and wine promoter required that he appeared frequently at restaurants and winery dinners. When he did entertain at home, which was rare, he hired a chef. Over time I came to realize that the kitchen’s pink cabinets were one of many signs of his narcissistic personality disorder. It was in the kitchen that his cruelty and subtle abusive behavior showed up for the first time. It was in the kitchen that one day I realized our marriage was in trouble.
    - Yvette Rubio
 

Many years ago I lived in London, in a bed-sitter not far from Hampstead Heath. It was a small room with a narrow bed, an over-stuffed chair, and a large clothes cabinet that tilted slightly to the left. There was a bathroom down the hall, and I had access to the back garden, but there was no kitchen — just an electric kettle for boiling water. I drank a lot of tea. I was a Bronx girl doing my best to appear English. Most evenings, on my way home from my job as a library assistant, I’d stop and buy a small bunch of anemones from a woman who called me “Love.” Then I’d pick up a spinach tart for supper, or some bread and cheese. As often as possible I’d eat out with friends, in one cheap restaurant or another. Sometimes a kind co-worker invited me to her flat for a home-cooked meal. I never asked anyone to visit me in my room. Except once. A friend was visiting from the States, spending a week in a posh West End hotel. We went together to museums and parks, saw a play, heard a concert. It seemed only right that I would have her over for a meal. I boiled water in the kettle and made us tea. I picked up Cornish pasties from the local pub. For dessert I made a little concoction with plain yogurt, a handful of cashews, and a few currants. My friend was polite. “Lovely, lovely,” she said, “everything is so lovely.” She was also trying to be English. Later, after she returned to America, she sent me a blue aerogram. “Get the hell out of that room,” she wrote. “Find someplace with a kitchen. Grow up already.” I crumpled the thin blue paper and tossed it in the waste basket. I was perfectly content in my bed-sitter. I didn’t want to cook, anyway. What did I need with a kitchen? 
     - Zee Zahava