Meanwhile, over at The Infomaniac...

...Mistress MJ is tapping her tiny, lady-like toe waiting for recipes for her Kitchen Queen contest.

Cookie has MANY recipes to tease the palate; the problem is cooking them in this wreck of a kitchen at the new Casa Del Cookie.   It's so bad (and how bad is it?) that Cookie and the husband are taking the drastic step of doing an intermediate remodel that will see us through the next five years until we can afford the kitchen of our dreams and start knocking down walls.

We'll post pictures as this stop gap measure comes into focus, best lest you think that we are throwing good money away at bad space, we are going to reuse someone else's kitchen at a fraction of the price.  How can this be, you ask.  Well Cookie found a place in Baltimore called Second Chance that trains people coming out of prison how to carefully dismantle unloved houses (and unloved rooms in houses) and salvage everything so it can be repurposed.  Some of these kitchens are ten years old and look like brand new.  And they cost about an eighth of what a new material would cost.

The challenge is that you may have to over buy to get what you want.  So we could end up spending a couple grand to buy a kitchen and only use half the cupboards.  AND because you take everything, it becomes a bit of a puzzle because our room is not the room that these were purchased new. But for storage and counterspace?  I'm all in.

People learn skills, this stuff stays out of landfills and Cookie gets a kitchen with only  the price of a new countertop to speak of.  What's not to love?

IN THE MEANWHILE we wonder if any of you have ever been to James Lileks wonderful web site, The Gallery of Regrettable Food.  The site pays homage to the illustrated cookbook books of yore, mostly from the post WWII era when our mothers and grandmothers thought adding a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup over a meatloaf dinner equaled fancy French Cooking.  To whet your appetite I give you this, with James Lileks comments, complete and unedited:

via

Sayeth Mr. Lileks: "One gets the impression of peas re-enacting the evacuation of Dunkirk."

If you have NEVER been to the Gallery of Regrettable Food, quick: click on the glowing Jell-O mold below and enjoy.