We have our new kitchen! And when I say “we did it”, I mean “we survived with no kitchen for two weeks while builders did all the work.”  But it feels like quite an accomplishment. Plus, the builders did a much, much nicer job than we would have. It looks gorgeous.

(Secretly, I think the winners here are the cats, who were NOT PLEASED to be locked up all day while the builders were here, and they know we owe them one. They declined to be photographed for this post.)

As you saw from my last kitchen post, we replaced almost everything. New cabinets. New counters. New floor. New dishwasher and microwave. We even widened the entryway, making the kitchen much more open to the living room.

We went with wood cabinets, and granite countertops. The difference between this and the laminate countertops we had before… it doesn’t bear comparison.  There are lots of little nice things, too, like a deeper sink, and a much quieter garbage disposal – things we’re only just beginning to appreciate.

My favorite touch may be the floor. We decided on cork flooring, which came up when we were researching our options and didn’t really like any of them.  We had tile before, and it was cold and hard – no fun to stand on more than a few minutes. We weren’t eager to get tile again. The alternatives, like laminate or linoleum, just didn’t look right to us. Not that anyone was going to be scrutinizing our floors, but we wanted something that would fit.  Cork was the winner.  Not only is it sustainable, but it’s warm to the touch and naturally springy, very easy on the feet. I’m looking forward to cooking something elaborate this weekend so I can start enjoying it.

Which leaves me with just one question left to answer: when I haven’t been able to cook in over two weeks, and I want to celebrate a big accomplishment… what do I make?

We’re replacing almost everything: cabinets, counters, floor, lights, some appliances.  After a wild few weeks of decision-making – which we survived somehow, even though, under normal circumstances, we could have spent that long deciding about any one thing, never mind picking out everything at once – the builders started working this week.

So, while our kitchen looked like this last week…

… after one day of demolition, this is what we have left:

Goodbye, kitchen. There’s basically nothing left. I always find it a little disturbing to see behind the walls in my house – it’s a reminder that the structure I think is so solid is really just a few boards and some drywall.  Fortunately, they’ve already started patching up the walls, and any day now it’ll start to look like a room again.

Living kitchen-less hasn’t been so bad, though. We put a lot of thought into how to deal with it, and 4 days in, it’s working all right. We set up a mini-kitchen in our living room: fridge in one corner, and next to it, a little kitchen cart holding our microwave, toaster oven, plates, silverware, glasses, and a few useful odds and ends.

We did some cooking in advance to help us through. The weekend before we had to pack everything up, we spent a day baking empanadas (stuffed with potatoes and cheese) and spinach pies. We froze them, and we’ve been reheating them in the toaster oven for dinners. They are super tasty, especially the spinach pies, and filling enough that two count as dinner.

Will we get sick of them?  Probably.  The question is how long it’ll take. The builder has told us it’ll be 8 business days to get it all done.  My ever-cheerful friends and coworkers have used this to make their own predictions, ranging from 10 days to a month.  (If it takes a month, I swear I’ll be eating catfood before it’s over. It had better not take a month.)

So depending on how long it takes, here’s our strategy for feeding ourselves while we have basically no kitchen:

1. Homemade freezer food. So far, the spinach pies and empanadas are just fine. We will eat them until we’re sick of them.
2. Pre-packaged freezer food. We’ve already made a preliminary trip to Trader Joe’s, and stocked up on a few handy, microwave-friendly dinners.
3. Mooching. Last night, we had a great dinner with some friends at their house, which has such great amenities as a working stove.  I’ll make an open offer here: anyone who wants to make dinner for us while we’re kitchen-less, I will return the favor once our kitchen is done.
4. Restaurants. This is the most expensive choice, and the one that we’re trying not to do too much. But as long as we can’t really cook, we might as well enjoy some good dinners out.

We won’t starve. We might even have fun with it. But, in all seriousness – any suggestions of good freezer food we should try?

The roads are bad, and the government let us know that it won’t even try to plow local streets until after the snow stops.  One thoroughfare near us is blocked by several fallen trees (yes, that’s a road in the picture); other main roads are covered in slush that may soon turn to ice.

But we’re lucky to still have power (so far, so good), we’ve got nowhere to go, and I’m excited to spend a weekend hunkered down and eating good food.  How better to spend a blizzard than by baking?

Other people seemed to have the same idea.  Our local grocery stores on Thursday night were out of things like bread and milk (for the panicked pantry-stocker), chips and beer (for the panicked sports fan – no one’s going shopping between now and the Superbowl), and dangerously low on chocolate chips (which was my priority).  Fortunately, Nathan secured us some chocolate chips, and we’re well stocked to spend the weekend eating.

If you’re snowed in, now or in the future, here are some of my favorite storm survival techniques:

• Hot cocoa is a must.  None of the instant powdered stuff, please.  Put milk in a saucepan, add cocoa powder and sugar (in roughly equal quantities for your standard cocoa – make it sweeter or more chocolatey depending on your preferences), and heat it until it’s steaming.  Or, add pieces of real chocolate for an even richer drink.  Then spice it up with cinnamon or cayenne (for a Mexican flavor), mint or almond extract, or your favorite liquor (rum, kahlua, and Bailey’s are some of my favorites), and enjoy.
• Cookies!  I made a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough last night, formed it into rolls, wrapped it in plastic, and chilled it in the fridge.  Now it’s ready for us to slice off and bake cookies anytime, and have fresh hot cookies whenever we want them.  But really, in a snowstorm, any sort of cookie will do.
• Bread can be an all-day activity, and is satisfying in an entirely different way that cookies.  I’m making pretzels.
• Soup of any kind.  Tomato soup, lentil soup, vegetable soup, all perfect.
• Chili.  I’m making chili tomorrow for my coworker’s Superbowl chili cookoff, but I would make it anyway.  If I can’t make it to the party because the roads still aren’t clear, I WILL make it anyway.
• Macaroni and cheese. Need I say more?
• Baked potatoes, which we had last night loaded with cheese and broccoli.
• Something extravagant – because, has there ever been a better time to spend all day in the kitchen?  It’s the perfect excuse to try your hand at pasta-making, make a four-course French dinner, or simmer a curry for hours on the stove. Make enchiladas with homemade tortillas and sauce.  Use one of the 5 gallons of milk you stocked up on to make your own cheese.

Wherever you are, if you’re in this storm, you’re not going anywhere.  So flip through your cookbooks, and make something tasty!

Are you stuck in the snowpocalypse this weekend?  What are you making?

My extra motivation to sleep in came from my Sunday farmers’ market haul.  Nathan and I had trekked up to Baltimore, where their farmer’s market is impressively large, hugely diverse and, while it’ll never compete with my local market in my affections, does have better prices and some good bargains.  For instance: a great big basket of seconds tomatoes for $2.50.  The basket was probably over 3 lbs of tomatoes, and it was too much of a steal – I had to get it and make sauce.

Tomato sauce, simmering away

Making tomato sauce is a little labor intensive, but the real reason I haven’t done it in years is that it’s just not economical.  No matter how good the sauce comes out, it takes a huge volume of tomatoes to make a respectable amount of sauce.  Even mediocre fresh tomatoes tend to be pretty expensive, and good fresh tomatoes are really, really expensive if you buy them in quantity.  Maybe you’ve got a great big garden, but the odds are you don’t have enough tomatoes to make sauce.  If you do have that quantity of tomatoes to spare, you’re living the good life.  That’s why, if you ever get a good deal on a big box of tomatoes, you should pounce.

Because these tomatoes weren’t great, but let me tell you, they made a damn good sauce.  Most of them had huge, ugly bruises; a couple were starting to turn fuzzy; and several felt too hard when I cut into them.  But once I chopped them up and cooked them down, some sort of magic happened.  They tasted like the most tomato-ey tomatoes you’ve ever had.  And that’s the reward for spending a rainy afternoon chopping tomatoes and making the house smell delicious – the best sauce you’ve ever had.

There are two keys to making sauce (besides having lots of tomatoes): peeling them, and seeding them.  Neither of these things is hard to do.  But, they can take a little time if you are doing them a lot.  It helps to crank up the music, or bring a friend if you can.

Peeling tomatoes is actually a neat trick, if you’ve never done it en masse before.  The secret is blanching: dipping the tomatoes in hot water long enough to release the skins.  First, get yourself set up with a pan of boiling water, deep enough for a tomato, and a bowl of ice water.  Then just cut a small, shallow ‘x’ in each one with a serrated knife, dunk them one at a time in boiling water and let them sit just until the skin starts to pull away – about a minute.  Then, move them quickly to the ice water, and let them sit until you can handle them.  The skin will just slide off: magic!

It takes a lot of tomatoes to make sauce!

Seeding is similarly easy: slice the tomato in half along its equator, and then squeeze each half over a bowl until the seeds and pulp come out.  (Did I mention it helps to get meaty tomatoes, the kind that are more flesh than juice?  No surprise, but it helps!)  You don’t have to be a perfectionist, either.  A few seeds in your sauce won’t hurt you.  Once the seeds are out, just coarsely chop the flesh.  (When you’re done, you can strain the seeds out and save the tomato juice, which you can drink or use in place of stock; it’s like a bonus.)

Then, you get cooking.  There are lots of variations on tomato sauce, and you can get as creative as you want.  My rendition was, I feel, pretty classic: I sauted an onion and a few cloves of garlic in olive oil, until they were just starting to brown, then added the tomatoes, along with some basil, oregano, salt, and pepper.  I let it simmer for about an hour and a half, until most of the liquid cooked off, and was left with a nice chunky, flavorful sauce.

The best part was that I served the sauce over homemade gnocchi – but that’s a story for another day.  The moral here is that homemade tomato sauce is amazing, and if you get a good deal on a couple pounds of less-than-perfect tomatoes, you should take it!

Have you ever made sauce from scratch?  Was yours more creative than mine?  What did you do?