Taste sensations from the land of my birth

I love Melody McFarland. Melody's a regular commenter around here and a dear, dear friend of mine. Melody and I grew up in impossibly small towns in rural Pennsylvania though I never met her until around five years ago. When we met she lived in Japan and I lived in Florida. We bonded over our shared roots in the rolling farmland of Lancaster County, PA.

Well as fate would have it, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last year after having spent the previous 20 years of their lives living all over the world. Hearing her tales of culture shock have been amusing but in re-experiencing my home town through her eyes I've come to see that it's really not such a bad place after all. After all, Melody's finding it to be a great place to launch her photography empire.

Lancaster's only 60 miles from Philadelphia but in a lot of ways is separated by time rather than distance. One of the apparent examples of this is the continued existence of mom and pop snack factories. It's an odd  but  remarkable thing to go down a snack aisle anywhere in eastern Pennsylvania and find that small, local brands of things like chips and pretzels outnumber the national brands.

Well in a gesture I'll remember for the rest of my life, Melody raided one of those snack aisles and sent me a box of mom and pop junk food yesterday.

I grew up in a household that had a chip can in it and potato chips were something that we had delivered the same way we had milk delivered. There was nothing unusual about it then but in looking back, it's unusual.

The chips we had delivered every week were Good's Red Label. My parents weren't natives and the Blue Label must have spooked them. I'll explain the difference in a moment.

So in the box of wonders Melody sent yesterday, there was a bag of Good's Red Label and a bag of Good's Blue Label. Blue Label Good's are cooked in lard, Reds are cooked in vegetable shortening. And now you know the difference between the two. As I was saying earlier, Lancaster County, PA is separated by time rather than distance from the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. There's no stigma to cooking with lard there.

Until you've eaten a potato chip that's been cooked in lard you are not allowed to judge. Lard gives them a crunch that's not possible to achieve in any other way. Trust me.

As if to drive home that point ever further, Melody sent me a bag of King's chips. King's are only available in the lard-cooked variety. Second only to my love of Good's was my love of King's. Melody has no idea what she's done for my soul here.

But the best was yet to come. Also in that magical box were two bags of Hammond Pretzels. People outside of Pennsylvania really don't eat pretzels, let alone handmade, hand-baked ones. If Lancaster, PA had an ounce of pretension, Hammond Pretzels would be sold at ten times their price and they'd be called artisanal pretzels. But there is no pretension, so they're just plain old Hammond's.

There are few things as sublime as a real pretzel and I am now in heaven. From the bottom of heart Melody, thank you.

Guest hosting Interior Design Chat on Twitter

Twitter has changed my life in ways I never could have imagined it would when I was fumbling around with it in the spring of '09. I remember thinking that it reminded me of radio static. It was noise and snippets of out of context conversations. "What's the point?!" I remember asking everybody who was telling me was an amazing thing it was. I kept at it because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

By the beginning of that summer I could see what all the fuss was about and then some. In a matter of months I went from being an outspoken doubter to an evangelist. Every great career opportunity that's come my way since last summer has come my way through Twitter. Someone very wise once said that Facebook reconnects me to my past, Twitter introduces me to my future.

And so it was on that note that the great Nick Lovelady asked me to host Interior Designer Chat tonight from 6pm to 7pm EST. Interior Design Chat is an hour-long discussion on a specific topic and it's attended by hundreds of design pros from all over the world. It's run by Nick and Barbara Segal. Nick's a kitchen and bath designer in Alabama and Barbara's an interior designer who lives in Newport, RI and who works in Chicago and LA. Nick Tweets as @cupboards and Barbara Tweets as @NoirBlancDesign.

Group chats on Twitter use dedicated tags to separate chat-specific tweets from the rest of the Twitter Stream. Everyone who participates in Interior Designer Chat tags his or her messages with the hash tag #IntDesignerChat and the conversation just flows.

A guest host's job is to introduce five questions at regular intervals to lead the conversation and my topic tonight is color. I submitted my questions last Friday to the Interior Design Chat website and everybody who participates knows to check the site prior to the Tuesday night conversation.

The questions (with accompanying photos) I submitted are as follows:

1. Gloss paint finishes are enjoying a resurgence in the design press. Do you like this trend? What sheens to you usually specify for interior paints?

2. Pantone's 15-559 Turquoise was named 2010's Color of the Year by Pantone. Has turquoise figured into your work this year? Why do you think they picked turquoise?

3. When there's a hot color out there, turquoise for example, are you more prone to acessorize with it or would you use on things that can't be changed easily (or cheaply) like a sofa? What role do color trends play in your work and why?

4. Sherwin-Williams recently issued four palette forecasts for 2011. I wrote about them on my blog here. http://www.kitchenandresidentialdesign.com/2010/07/sherwin-williams-2011-color-forecast_30.html The palettes look like this:

Do you see these color combinations taking shape in your work? Is Sherwin-Williams onto something or have they missed the boat? What color combinations do you find yourself coming back to time and again? How do trends influence that?

5. What message do you wish you could send to the people who decide which colors are used or ignored (in any product category) in a given year?

So if you're a design professional, no matter where you are, please join us tonight when I host Interior Design Chat at 6pm EST. If none of this makes any sense to you, get thee to Twitter and meet your future.

Back to basics: how to measure a kitchen

Every once in a while it hits me that I'm straying too far from my niche. I am after all, a kitchen and bath designer. AS much as I enjoy my regular forays far and wide; the name of this blog after all is Kitchen and Residential Design.

I get asked questions constantly about how to start a renovation project. Everybody it seems, has an opinion about what they should look like when they're done, but few people know where to start.

How do you get from something that looks like this,

photo via Luxurbist

to something that looks like this?

photo via Medallion Cabinetry

Well, everything starts with a good set of measurements.

Measuring a kitchen is a bit more complicated that figuring out the square feet of a room or even the length of the walls. Because nearly everything that goes into a kitchen is built in, accurate measurements are vital, and know how to measure things like windows, doorways and plumbing stacks is very important.

While any professional you meet with with measure your room him or herself, there's nothing stopping you from measuring everything now so you can start planning even before you call in pros.

AK Renovations is an Atlanta design and build firm that was started in 1995 by Ed Choflin and Ed's somebody I've come to know through Twitter. Ed and the entire team at AK Renovations are consummate professionals and highly skilled tradespeople. They do great work in Atlanta and they put together a terrific website. It's chock full of great information and advice and about a week ago, they published one of the best How To Measure Your own Kitchen Guides I've ever seen.

You can download AK Renovations' .pdfs here and I encourage you to go to the site for the download if you're going to attempt this on your own. The resolution as .pdfs is far better than the reduced version of them here.

AK Renovations' guide will take you through the whole process is a systematic and painless way. In less than an hour you'll know exactly how big your kitchen is and you'll know exactly where the windows and other obstacles are.

See? Going back to basics isn't so hard. Many, many thanks to the gang at AK Renovations.

Sunday diversions

I was all fired up to write the definitive blog post about the near criminality of the 400+ Eat, Pray, Love-licensed gee-gaws now being hawked to promote Julia Roberts' latest, simpering attempt at being an actor when she grows up. Then I thought about it some more and realized that I would be adding a pointless endeavor to the publicity machine surrounding a movie I'll never see. So instead I'm going to run through some oddities I've come across recently.

None of them merit a post of their own but together, they're actually related to my niche so I'm going to forge ahead.

If you're the kind of person who just can't get out of the kitchen, the Italian firm Rapsel will help you bring some of that kitchen magic to your bathroom. This would also work for fans of the movie Ratatouille as well.

Oh wait a minute, that last image was a bit of projection on my part. Apologies.

I was on a roll a couple of weeks ago with ideas for switch plates and outlet covers, but these babies from The Spanish company Fede put all of my ideas to shame. How about a little Swarovski?

Speaking of Swarovski, Polish designer Lukasz Jemiol came up with with this crystal-encrusted vacuum cleaner for Electrolux.

I love the pearls.

Finally, from an unknown German manufacturer but sold on the website fitsu, come a set of kitchen brushes.

How thoughtful that it has a gold toof. You know, it's being sold as a kitchen brush but it would be infinitely funnier if it were sold as a grill brush.

And there you have it, a bit of diverting fluff for a Sunday morning. Seriously though, what do you think of those soup pot vanity sinks?

Natalie Blake for kitchen and bath

I love the work of Natalie Blake and her sgraffito tile. I've written about it before. Several times before. Here, here and here.

Any time I see it, it's always displayed as an art installation. It's fitting that it should be treated as art but I always wonder how it would be when it's used as a real, functional tile.

I don't need to wonder any longer. Natalie just sent me a new batch of photographs and they feature her work as bath and kitchen back splashes.

I'm in love with her work all over again.

The series shown here is from her Unalun studio and it's available exclusively through Ann Sacks. As always, Unalun is happy to work with you to customize their products. Check out the collection on Ann Sacks' website and learn even more from Unlaun directly.