There are many good things about posting about food and cooking. Even if people disagree about my recipes, my tastes, my process, the comments and reactions tend not to get personal or nasty. 🙂 If I’m thinking about food, I’m NOT thinking about other aspects of reality. On many days that is the REAL reason I write about food. I like creating things and cooking and baking are creative. My friend Honour talks about the difference between cooks and bakers, that one has more leeway and room for error than the other. I’m still not sure I’m convinced about that, but again, it doesn’t (usually) get personal when we discuss it. *grin*
Today I want to write about leftovers and collaborating and when cooks and bakers work together. 
My husband does not bake – he cooks. Oh wow, he is SUCH a great creative cook. I love to bake and while I enjoy cooking now in my new kitchen, I’m nowhere near as innovative as he is. I’m getting better, but I’m not at his level by any means. I mentioned he brought home a store-cooked chicken the other night. That meant we had leftovers. We also had rainy cold weather all day Sunday, as well as other annoying reality. 🙂 I started thinking about cooking. I decided that a chicken pot pie would be perfect for dinner. I mentioned that to my husband and he agreed.
Now *I* was thinking more of the kind of pot pie I had growing up – basically a white creamy inside. I found a picture of one online to show you what I mean but we grew up on frozen pot pies, not home-made. It was something my father would make for us for dinner when my mother was at rehearsal. 
As we don’t mix meat and dairy, we use coconut milk to get our “creaminess”. I also thought I’d take my leftover steamed vegetables and throw them in too – sort of a vegetable chicken pot pie. I’d already decided to use the coconut oil for that hint of flavor while making the pastry crust. I was browsing recipes online and thinking about concocting when my husband came down with a piece of paper and said “This is what I plan to make for the pie.”. *grin* Of course his recipe looked nothing like mine (his had curry and more asian flavors) and he had no intention of putting in the leftover vegetables, only the leftover chicken. I told him his concoction sounded great to me and I’d make him a crust.
That’s what we did. I made up my pie crust using margarine and coconut oil (remember, no dairy). It was a beautiful flaky crust. It’s interesting – I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem making pie crusts (except for 2 crusts for our New Year’s Day party, but that’s a different story) since I first began. I use the recipe in The Settlement Cookbook. 
It says that the key to a good crust is very cold ingredients and as little water and handling as possible. That very morning as I listened to the radio talk show host, she was talking about making pies and bemoaning how difficult it is to make a good crust and how it took her so long to learn. I’ve just never had that particular problem and I know people love the pie crusts I make. Thank you Lizzie Black Kander and your fantastic cookbook (which is, as I’ve mentioned before, my #1 go-to cookbook).
The new kitchen gets another rave review here because while my husband was working on the stove, there was room for me to be rolling out the top crust. That NEVER would have been possible before the renovation. 🙂 I probably should have ‘over-ruled’ him about temperature and time (I’d have picked the higher temperature and the shorter time, which is more typical for pies) but dinner was delicious. Yay us!!
The day dawned early with the plumbers there before 8 am. I was lucky I was ready for them because I’d slept late that day. If they’d been any earlier or I’d slept longer, I might have had to leave them idling on the sidewalk. They began attaching water to the sink and refrigerator, and gas to the stove, and 
Tom came by soon after the plumbers to begin hooking up appliances, installing hardware and all sorts of other “putting things right”. I love love LOVE my cabinet knobs and pulls. That day’s big decision was where to situate the knobs on the various cabinets. I have no experience in this – I’ve never had a new cabinet without some sort of knob or pull. I started the morning thinking that every knob had to be situated in the exact same position on every cabinet. Tom assured me that these were my cabinets and I could do what I wanted. It’s very hard for me to visualize some of these smaller details. I went across the street to see if my neighbor Stephanie was home. She is an artist and has a great eye for placement (we both garden and I often check with her about placement of perennials). 
Luckily for me she was available and came back to look. She agreed with Tom that I could place the knobs in different areas on different cabinets, depending on where it felt natural to me to open the cabinet. She said it would look fine. Then she did something I would NEVER have considered: she rotated the knobs 90 degrees. Oh. Em. Gee. I LOVED that look. Not only did it give more space between adjoining knobs, but the new angle worked so much better with the tall slender cabinets. We did all of the knobs at that angle with the exception of the 2 roll-out spice cabinets, where a horizontal placement was better (and thanks to Tom for suggesting that). The knobs and pulls are worth every single penny. They are, I believe, hand-made for Schaub and Company: 
The pulls were a bit larger than I was expecting but that worked out beautifully as well. 🙂 SO HAPPY!!!!
and giving me an overview of 
Today was our day to go see the quartz slab that would become our counters. I needed a fun day because yesterday I was beginning to feel that this project would not complete until the new year. The estimate was 10-12 weeks, which I never believed, but this is week 13 and NOTHING seemed to be happening. Combine that with a gray overcast day and it was a bit dispiriting. 
We certainly had no idea how things happened, all we knew was what we wanted as an end result. They took us into the warehouse and there were scores and scores of slabs – quartz, granite and who knows what else. I could hear a lot of cutting noise from the other half of the warehouse. They led us to OUR slab. It felt a lot like being presented with a prize, or a relative’s new baby or something momentous. OUR SLAB. *grin* We loved it. The color was less gold than I expected, but it still was in the range of what I wanted. My husband loved it, and the counter is really one of ‘his’ aspects of this project. I mostly vetoed all the other patterns we’d been shown – he was the one with strong opinions. I just knew what I didn’t want.
Some of them were gorgeous and some were quite hideous, no matter WHERE you might want to put them. I have tried to get my photos to reflect the true color, but have not really succeeded. For that matter, my husband and I were editing the photos to try to get to the true color and we didn’t agree on which version was correct. Which merely proves the point that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and 
While this wasn’t quite as exciting as the time I watched a railroad train engine lifted up in the air and settled into place so workers could reach the underside, it was still a smooth ballet of lifting and moving the slab from one position to another. Once we could face it head-on, we began the process of placing the counter templates on the slab, trying to get the ‘best’ patterns for each piece.
We don’t care if the sink is centered in the counter or centered over the cabinets. It never was and we don’t care if it is now – that is not how we view the whole. What we wanted, and what we will get, is one unbroken piece from the one end all the way to just past the sink. For those of you who know the kitchen, that unbroken piece runs along the wall adjoining the bathroom, and hangs a left along the driveway to the sink. They will cut the adjoining rectangle to hold the sink and continue to the end of the counter, closest to the basement door. 
Next we arranged for the pieces that will flank the stove. Again it’s not just a question of how much pattern you can get into the template – the grain must face the same way on both pieces. The last bit was for the cabinet in the breakfast room which is really stand-alone, so it doesn’t matter which way we oriented that template. When we were all done, I asked what they did with the pieces left over between the template. They said it was scrap and they toss it. I asked if I could have one of the pieces to use as a cutting board or cheese tray. They said absolutely and so that is marked out as well, with marker, not with a template. I’m guite pleased I thought to ask that. 
They asked us questions about the sink – where does the faucet go, will we have a soap dispenser. I told them I wanted the faucet near the bulge in the sink but that I had no idea about the soap dispenser. So many details!!!!! I said I didn’t even remember what the sink looked like, much less if it had a soap dispenser. They had the sink there (of course – they need it to cut the counter) so I have finally seen my sink since we picked it out back in April. It also took me a little conversation to grasp that the holes for faucets and dispensers are not in the SINK, but in the counter. I need to do more verification, but I’m fairly certain that there is no soap dispenser that matches our faucet, or we’d have ordered that as well. 
I went online and see that they sell the hardware for installing in existing cabinets, and I have picked out the cabinet for it. We are having one of the cabinets reconfigured to be part broom closet, removing the shelves and adding a vertical divider. I think the garbage can go on the other side from the broom. The recycling bin will stay under the sink. Now I just need to figure out where to put the compost bin.
Ahuva's Blog 