COUNTERTOP COUTURE

Hi crowd, it's Karin (and Mouse!) of Beautiful Bones Design sitting in for Paul while he's off somewhere just lovely. And we're not. Although tempting to take our "We only had a staycation" envy out on him, we'll resist and stay on topic with more great kitchen wisdom. But.. this is the voice of a girl and a dog who wear matching jewelry, so a little fashion has to play into the topic as well.

You know the expression "It's not the clothes you wear but how you wear them?" Well it's the same with kitchen design. Materials only make the difference if you know how to parade them, play with them, and, ultimately, push them to your best advantage.

So let's stop thinking what comes next after stainless steel. Because the answer is more: More stainless steel, more wood-stain cabinets, and more stone. Knowing this..Can we be as innovative as the Romans? or Corbusier? Some of the greatest contributions to architecture, after all, owe to rethinking the most traditional materials. The art lies in the application.

So let's take a closer look at the most commonplace kitchen materials, one at a time.

WOOD

Wood is easily cut, carved, pierced and joined. So why not manipulate the same wood in different ways, as seen in this highly textural kitchen by Jim Livingston of Livingston Kitchens in Deer Park, Illinois? Lattice work, decorative aprons and baroque corbels are lively layers when harmonized with the same wood stain.

Grain is another consideration. The less seams, the stronger a grain's graphic impact. Try matching long expanses

of grain from surface to surface, as seen on this zebrawood island by Zack Simmons of CKS Design Studio in Durham.

Or consider how distinct grains can be artfully combined with shape and volume, as on this complex edge profile by Craft-Art wood countertops.

MARBLE

Anyone with deep pockets can impress their neighbors with a huge slab of beautifully veined marble. But who would think to bookmatch smaller slabs into a butterfly pattern? The cost of the material is often less and any extra installation time minimal. But as Bethesda MD designer Bradford Creer proves in this marble-clad kitchen, the return makes a one-of-a-kind pattern out of a naturally varying material.

Now up the ante a bit more. Marble isn't quarried by the slab. It comes in blocks that can be cut into several slabs of the same grain.

Karen Williams of St. Charles of New York shops this way, always on the hunt for blocks of stone that can be cut into slabs of different shapes and thicknesses and installed one luxurious layer over another.

Combine the potential of nature and technology, and you have Stile Artistic Design who create intricate inlays of aluminum in marble using laser-jet technology.

STAINLESS STEEL

As restaurants have known for years, this cool industrial surface is virtually impenetrable, easily cleanable, and therefore both safe and hygienic for use on hardworking countertops and appliances. But why lay it flat only? It can be quilted (as seen in 1950s diners), woven in strips, or manipulated in more painterly ways as seen on the Coquille hood by Cheng Designs. Here a 16-gauge stainless steel is hand burnished with a ribbon finish that brings hard steel the look of streaming water.

Another cool option is to juxtapose machined steel with its thermal opposite—natural, warm-stained woods. The pairing is even more striking in the kitchen below, another by St. Charles of New York, where the choice to wrap wood cabinets with a steel toe kick makes every use of the material appear purely decorative.

And speaking of decorative, the ever-practical stainless steel sink is also available with couture touches. Among the many new customizations offered by Elkay is a new etching technology. Choose a greek key border design or your own monogram—however the surface is etched, its smoothness (as well as durability and longevity) remains the same.

Some may say what's old is new again. Cliché or truly unique, even when using the most common materials, the choice is up to you.

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For the Greater Green

Hi everyone! Saxon Henry here. For my guest-post, I’m going to turn an old adage on its ear. Though there is great truth in the caveat “while the cat’s away the mouse will play,” my homage to Paul’s terrific blog is a bit more like “while the cat’s at play, the mouse doesn’t stray,” as I’d like to mention the importance of sustainability in the kitchen. With 41.5 percent of a home’s energy consumption centralized in the kitchen (according to the U.S. Department of Energy), going beyond Energy Star appliances, compact florescent and LED light sources, and water-conserving faucets is becoming increasingly necessary if we want to be truly “green.”


Cabinetry companies with eco-friendly features like non-toxic paints and lacquers, and heavy metal-free compositions for fewer emissions are more plentiful than they have been in the past. A great example is ALNO, whose cabinetry was used in the Healthy Child, Healthy World green home in Austin, Texas.


Another segment of the Kitchen & Bath market that is making a commitment to green practices and materials is the tile industry. Ceramic Tiles of Italy’s contingent of manufacturers was early on the scene with state-of-the-art facilities that allow for sustainable production. Products of the organization’s companies have received some important certifications, from the prestigious European Union’s Environmental Management Program (EMAS) and ISO 14001, which mandates guidelines dictating limitations on pollution and energy consumption during the manufacturing process.

Examples of the certified products are Casalgrande Padana's Granitoker and Pietre Native collections, which received both certifications; the company’s Marte tile, which received an EMAS; and Caesar's More, Feel, and Glam collections, which received the ISO 14001 certification.


One of the best examples of stateside companies making a dynamic commitment to sustainability is Trend USA. The company’s entire Trend Q Collection has just received Greenguard certification for Schools and Children, which represents the strictest standards for low VOC emissions. Trend Q has actually received one of the lowest emission rates in the industry with a total VOC emission of 0.012 mg/m3. The collection of 49 colors contains up to 72% post consumer recycled content, which is integrated with glass from recycled beer, gin, and water bottles, copper infused Aventurina, and mother of pearl. Trend’s FEEL collection, which comes in 12 colors and a variety of patterns, has a minimum of 80% post-consumer recycled glass.

Brazilian manufacturer Eliane has brought EcoStone to the U.S. The porcelain tile contains 60-percent post-industrial recycled raw material, and is manufactured with a sustainable process that reuses 90 percent of the water, and nets energy savings of up to 50 percent each cycle. EcoStone won the 2009 Fritz Muller Award for being the first ecological porcelain from Brazil. I featured the company on Design Commotion this month, as Eliane’s CEO Edson Gaidzinski will accept the award on August 31.

Summer’s end is approaching fast and we’ll all soon be spending more time in the kitchen. Wouldn’t we breathe a little easier if every material used in constructing our environments were considered so seriously? In case this post feels a bit preachy, I’d like to point out that there’s no need to sacrifice beauty and style when going green, as the images I’ve posted here illustrate.

Great Spaces

My name is Leslie Clagett, and it's my pleasure to contribute to this terrific blog while its author, Paul Anater, is taking a well-deserved break.

Being the middle of August, I have the impression that even those who are madly passionate about things kitchen and bath are taking it easy right about now. [Am I right, Paul?] So instead of a roundup of products or a trend forecast, I'll make this a pictorial post: Here's a portfolio of a few of my very favorite spaces, and the people behind them.

History Recrafted

Period Pastiche

Modern Update

Noir

Room for Reflection

If you've liked what you've seen, please come visit my blog, KBCULTURE, for more. By the way, one of the above kitchens is mine—take a guess, then click to find out which one it is.

Have a lovely day, and thanks for reading.

P.S. I tweet, therefore I am.

Comfort Food: Fried Mice

Hi everyone! Melody here. I had this post all written up and then visited Paul's website to find everything all fun and sun and booze! Fabulous posts! I waffled on not following suit, but figured that I'd spent too much time writing to relegate it to the trash bin. Read on...



I was born in 1970 and grew up in a small town near Lancaster, PA, not at all far from Paul’s childhood home. Cue the violins...it was the stereotypical Irish household as brought to the American consciousness by Frank McCourt, consisting of all its requisite elements; a bombastic, selfish, alcoholic father, a depressive mother and three ragamuffin little kids. I was the oldest ragamuffin. It wasn’t nearly as bad as McCourt’s situation though. Our home’s first floor wasn’t perpetually flooded with sewage and I never suffered from debilitating conjunctivitis brought about by coal dust.

Not one to spend any money on anything other than himself, my father didn’t deign to even supply his family with a reliably heated home. Our house was largely heated by this (ignore the man in the foreground, a friend of the family having a beer. It’s the only picture I could come up with):

An old Sears and Roebuck cast iron cook stove. Believe it or not, that’s what I learned to cook on and what we used until we moved to a more modern home when I was sixteen. We had an electric stove as a backup, but that was kept in an unheated summer kitchen and was mostly used during the warmer parts of the year. My parents bought the iron stove for $25 at a public auction when they purchased the house in 1973. Twenty-five dollars to install a heating system!? Not bad strategizing for a crazy bastard!

We had another wood burning stove in another room of the house that supplied little heat for the upper floor. And I do mean little. It didn’t matter anyway, because by the time morning rolled around the fire had long since gone out. Getting out of bed in January took Herculean effort…but when I finally did get dressed under twenty pounds of blanket, steeled myself to exit my warm cocoon, and worked up the nerve to make a frenzied dash to that beloved old cook stove, oh, what exquisite relief. Pleasure like that is hard to come by in these days of perpetual comfort.

Needless to say, I was never the first one out of bed. And I also did my best to ensure I wasn’t the first one home from school in the wintertime. I’d try and hang out at the neighbor’s house until an adult came home and built a fire. That plan didn’t always work out and safety was not a concern, so many times at eight and ten years of age, I’d find myself playing caveman and starting a fire. Unfortunately, we never managed to burn the house down.

I doubt many people alive today have cooked over a fire in cast iron pots unless they’re camping or “rouging it” (it really makes me laugh when people tell me about their camping weekends and how cold it was and how they cooked their dinner over a gas stove. Hah! I hope you’re not trying to impress me!), but at one time in my life that was an everyday occurrence. And as insane as this sounds, I actually miss it. My mom never cooked anything more complicated than roasts, stews and pies, but for some reason apple pies and beef stew made with the most simple of elements – iron and fire – tasted so much more real and authentic than anything I’ve had since.

If I find myself failing mentally and get desperate enough for times gone by, I can buy a brand new wood-burning cook stove from Heartland Applicances:

Maybe kitchen fancier readers will know these are available, but I’m not terribly well-versed in the field and could hardly believe it when I ran across Heartland’s website. I had no idea such things were still manufactured. They have one with a little more modern styling, still wood-fueled:

If I was single, had an enormous kitchen, won the lottery and had plenty of backup cooking power that doesn't take 45 minutes to come to temperature, I’d buy one of those things and use it with aplomb just for old times' sake. Here's the old style for modern kitchens



available in gas, electric, or dual fuel. A more realistic and fitting version might be this one


with a hint of retro that would look smashing in our current house. I had never heard of Heartland Applicances before searching the web for information on wood-burning stoves, so if anyone has any information or opinions on their products, I’d love to hear about it. How my tastes skyrocketed from a $25 second-hand stove to a $7000 luxury range, I'll never know.

I look back on that stove with great fondness. After all, it kept us alive in more ways than one and, in all honestly, was not a bad experience despite what one might think. To this day, the smell of burning wood in the fall fills me with with an overwhelming sense of contentment and pleasure, no doubt a vestige of growing up dependant on it. I liken it to an experience of my favorite natural history writer and scientist, Bernd Heinrich. He and his family lived deep in Hahnheide Forest in northern Germany for several years after having fled their native Poland when the Russian Army invaded. They subsisted on whatever they could find in the forest and one of the things that kept them alive was the consumption of fried mice. To this day, Heinrich occasionally waxes nostalgic and indulges in a dinner of fried field mice at his Maine cabin.

While I have absolutely no right to compare my childhood to that of a pauper in Ireland and a wartime refugee, I like to think that when I fire up our fireplace this winter and make a Dutch oven dinner, I might understand, just slightly, what Dr Heinrich feels when he eats those fried mice.

DIY Kitchen Project: Infused Vodka

Hey everyone! Since Paul's outta town, let's all raid his liquor cabinet and have ourselves a party!

Just because times may be tough doesn't mean you need to skimp out on fancy hooch and late summer cocktails, especially with an upcoming season of "Mad Men" on the way. So in the 'sprit' of leaving kitchen renovations to the pros, I present to you a DIY kitchen project you surely won't screw up on!

What you will need:

* Vodka (the cheap stuff from the bottom shelf)

* Cucumber (english)

* Lychees (fresh or canned)

* Glass jar with lid

* White cranberry juice (but red will do)

* Cocktail shaker

* Martini glasses

So if you didn't already know, I am from Hawaii, a.k.a. "the Aloha State", home to beautiful beachfront hotels serving cocktails such as the Mai Tai, Tropical Itch & the famous Blue Hawaii (the latter of which no self-respecting Kama'aina would ever be caught drinking) However, if you venture out of Waikiki and visit a non-tourist restaurant or bar, you will find that one of the more popular cocktails is the Lychee Martini -- and today I am going to show you my personal take on this favored local drink.

drink these in secret, if you must ...

So I was thinking earlier about how I would describe the taste of a Lychee to someone who has never tried one before ... I would have to say is that it is a subtly flavored lightly sweetened fruit, with a very delicate texture, perfume, and taste. Other than that I really cannot describe it, nor can I compare it to any other fruit. The best I can come up with is that it tastes like a very pale lavender; not the herb, but the color. (If you are reading this and can describe the taste of a lychee better than that, then please by all means hit up the comment section below and let the rest of the world know!)

Unpeeled lychees

Lychee trees can be found locally here in Hawaii, and I have seen them growing in California. Native to China, the fruits are protected by a thick, red, leathery shell which must be peeled, and are in season from May to early October. If you are unable to find fresh lychee where you live, visit a specialty or Asian grocery store, and you are sure to find them year-round in the canned fruit section. Or, if like me, you don't enjoy peeling lychees, then canned is definitely the way to go!

The infused cucumber will add a slightly earthy, exotic, fresh kick to the lychee vodka that I think nicely balances the resulting cocktail, and makes it a little more masculine -- however if you choose to leave it out and only use lychee, that's fine too!

Ok, now to begin: start by slicing the cucumber in even slices, about enough to fill up half your jar. Then peel the lychees (if fresh) and remove the seed in the middle of the white fleshly center. Make sure all of the peel is removed as well as the stem before placing the fruit into the jar.

If using the canned lychees, remove all but a few of them from the syrup (reserve the syrup), and add them into your jar, leaving a little bit of room near the top of the jar.

Now comes the hard part: open the bottle of cheap vodka and pour on top of fruit. Close the lid and stick in the freezer. That's it. :)

You want to keep the jar in the freezer, taking it out every day to give it a good shake and check on it's progress, usually for about a week. There is no exact science involved, and I usually declare it's ready when it smells good to me (i.e. a strong fragrance of lychee and cucumber, upon opening). Then strain the liquid into a bowl, dump the lychee and cucumber, rinse the jar and pour the liquid back in, and store your infused vodka in the freezer.

You may be thinking, "What?!? I have to wait a whole week? After peeling all those damn lychees?!?" Remember the lychees & syrup I told you to set aside? Instant gratification! Take your cocktail shaker and add in your remaining lychees & about two spoonfuls of the reserved syrup, to taste (if using the fresh, add a spoonful of sugar). Muddle the lychees with a spoon, then add a lot of ice and about 4 oz. of cranberry juice and 2 oz. of vodka (or more) and shake vigorously for at least 30 seconds. You want the ice to continue to crush the fruit to release the lychee flavor.

Strain the now milky white cocktail into two martini glasses, serve and garnish with either a slice of cucumber on the rim, a lychee, or for added sweetness drop a maraschino cherry on the bottom of the glass.

ahhh ... the sun has set, what a nice time for a cocktail ...

A variation could be substituting lemon rind for the cucumber, or eliminate the lychee altogether and go for a lemon-cucumber infusion instead ... and after reading the Jamaica Hibiscus Tea post from yesterday, I am thinking a lychee-hibiscus infusion is in the near future!

Remember to drink responsibly and please, please, please, don't drink & drive :)

Aloha, and feel free to stop by our blog sometime!

-- Adrienne