Scratch It -- Getting Started or "Scratch out the Old"

When I first came up with the idea for writing my blog about cooking from scratch, my daughter, Jaimie, suggested that I call it "Scratch It".  Well I am sticking with my original idea, but I am using Jaimie's idea for this first one.  The first thing I am scratching is my old kitchen.  I want you to know where I was and where I am now and why cooking is really taking a front row in my life these days.

Our house was built in 1898.  Someday, I will post the story about our house. We have lived in this house since about 1993 or so and have done a fair amount of work on it over the years. However, up until last year, the kitchen was a mess -- we started to redo it ourselves and never finished!  Somehow I managed to cook just fine, but it was challenging.  August of 2008, we started our kitchen renovation project (hired a contractor this time) and it was finished in early October.  Here are some pictures of the worst parts.  Next time I will show the 'now' pics of my new dream kitchen.  Then we will get into some cooking basics and really get started!

 

The layout of my kitchen was horrible, since we aren't architects and hadn't really given any thought to how to best do this.  In fact, this room where you see my old kitchen is now our family room.  We knocked a wall out and moved the kitchen into the old family room area.  It's all opened up and I can cook and still be part of the action that's going on in the family room.  Thanks to my good friend, Meda, who is an architect, the design of everything is so much more functional -- you'll see in the next posting.