Diatribe Against Kitchens of Today

There are three things I hate about current design trends in kitchens:  1)  Stainless steel appliances.  Why?  Because they remind me of all the crappy restaurant jobs I have held.  Why would I want to have something that hearkens back to an industrial setting in my home.  During college and in lean periods during my "career",  I am loathe to admit I have held part time waitressing jobs.  The restaurant business-- jeez what an industry completely devoid of labor regulations.  No, I don't want anything in my home that reminds me of the face of a walk-in cooler.  A walk in cooler is like a cave-- cold, dim, and filled with unidentifiable slimy things.
2)  Granite counter tops.  Polished granite reminds me of tombstones.  Memorials to the dearly departed are another thing best left out of the kitchen.  I've read that sometimes homeowners have to reinforce their basements to hold up said counter tops.  Please.  If you actually cook you know that granite is not an ideal surface to work on.  If I had to choose some sort of rediculously heavy stone I would choose marble,  at least you can roll a pastry on it.  I remember the first time I set down a wine glass onto a granite counter top, I thought it was going to shatter in my hands.
3) Many, many cupboards.  To hold what?  Tupperware with lost lids?   Enough preserved foods for a bomb shelter?  I was at a brunch where the hostess was giving us the tour of her new house.  There were half a dozen cans of Pam non-stick spray in her pantry.  I'm sure Home Depot and the like would love for everyone to think they need floor to ceiling cupboards so the can sell the designed kitchen packages.  Now here is a case where the home cook could use a cue from commercial kitchens.  Buy only a few high quality utensils.  Buy fresh foods and store them in your (non-stainless steel) refrigerator.

May these things go the way of avocado and harvest gold appliances.

Millennials

This quote is from the 1905 short story of Thomas Mann "The Blood of the Walsungs," so you see new century, new millennium, it doesn't matter.   The arrogance of youth is constant.  This reminds me of the my classmates in "advanced" high school English.

"They sat there at table, in their low, luxuriously cushioned chairs, with their spoilt, dissatisfied

faces. They sat in splendour and security, but their words rang as sharp as though sharpness, hardness, alertness, and pitiless clarity were demanded of them as survival values. Their highest praise was a grudging acceptance, their criticism deft and ruthless; it snatched the weapons from one's hand, it

paralysed enthusiasm, made it a laughing-stock. "Very good," they would say of some masterpiece whose lofty intellectual plane would seem to have put it beyond the reach of critique. Passion was a blunder-it made them laugh. Von Beckerath, who tended to be disarmed by his enthusiasms, had hard

work holding his own-also his age put him in the wrong. He got smaller and smaller in his chair, pressed his chin on his breast, and in his excitement breathed through his mouth-quite unhorsed by the brisk arrogance of youth. They contradicted everything-as though they found it impossible, discreditable, lamentable, not to contradict. They contradicted most efficiently, their eyes narrowing to gleaming cracks. They fell upon a single word of his, they worried it, they tore it to bits and replaced it by another so telling and deadly that it went straight to the mark and sat in the wound with quivering shaft."

Dinner Party

I went to a dinner party last night.  There was a couple there in their early seventies.  There were so vibrant and mentally acute, so interested in books and movies, theories and philosophies, living and eating and riding horses.  They were an inspiration for living life fully until the day when you can't anymore.