WALL STREET JOURNAL
We published our best in last week's blog post but the WSJ only mentioned our worst. Here's the whole story of what we sent them
THANKSGIVING OVEN
It was the late eighties. Rick had started his campaign for a weekend home. I was only willing to agree if I could get a dog but it became a pretty regular weekend activity to go a little farther away from the city to meet with realtors to look at properties. The fantasy went on for months before the fantasy progressed to a possibility and then to a serious option. We ended up about a three and a half hour drive from the city in the Upper Catskills when Rick's dream home finally manifested itself. Now he had to convince me. It took several months before we purchased a six bedroom board-and-battened Carpenter Gothic cottage built in 1869 in need of some extensive updating. This was not our first rodeo with kitchen design but this was going to be our first kitchen that didn't involve a paying client. We were going to get to do this one just the way we wanted or so we thought. First, came the concept and we wanted a kitchen that would serve as the heart of our home. Those six bedrooms were going to be filled every weekend with friends and family. Since the small town we had settled in had no amenities, the nearest grocery store was a twenty-five minute drive away; food was going to be a major activity and daily concern. Our first construction decision was to blow through a wall and double the footprint for the kitchen. In order to accomplish this renovation (the total project would stretch over seven years) we ended up having to call on our gracious vendors, old friends, new local friends and talented family members for a boat load of favors. Cooking was going to play an important part in our entertaining so everything in this kitchen was going to get the soup to nuts treatment. We researched tiles, floorings, and cabinetmakers. We ended up with a local cabinetmaker that built out our kitchen using the auto body repair shop in the neighboring town to spray paint our cabinets with an auto grade enamel finish. The beveled glass cabinet doors came courtesy of my brother's stained glass studio back in Wisconsin. We looked at Sub-Zero, Viking and Miele appliances going over options like side-by-side versus separate fridges and freezers. We looked at commercial versus residential appliances. We looked at every bell and whistle kitchen manufacturers could dream up in the era of eighties technology and that's how we ended up with an actual industrial restaurant grade six-burner range with a griddle and oversized oven so large we could roast a 28-pound turkey in it. Unfortunately we hadn't done a commercial project yet. So we weren't aware of the peculiarities of a commercial oven and the early eighty's was before the "professional kitchen" trend had taken root and options were limited.
It was our first Thanksgiving after we had completed our kitchen renovation. All the bedrooms were full for this our first Thanksgiving and christening of new kitchen with our commercial range. An incredible menu had been written out. A 24-pound turkey had been reserved weeks in advance and picked up on the Wednesday before Turkey Day. The master plan for beginning our Thanksgiving prep had us putting the turkey in that brand new oven around nine in the morning. It was going to take eight hours of constant basting to get the turkey ready for a six o'clock sit-down dinner for sixteen. At exactly nine, just as the Macy's Parade television coverage was to begin the turkey that had been wrapped in herb and butter soaked cheesecloth was ready to go into the oven. Rick flipped the dial to lite the oven. Nothing happened. He tried again and again and again. What we didn't know about commercial equipment was they need to be used constantly or they don't perform. You can't leave them dormant. A weekend home by definition is only going to get an oven fired up a maximum two out of every seven days at best. Some two hours later, after taking input from every guest in the house, we got ahold of Bill, the local handyman and a neighbor with a blowtorch. Bill lit his blowtorch and with a bit of finagling got the oven going. The blowtorch method from then on became our only way of ever getting our oven to work. The lesson here was unless you're going to turn your country home into a farm to table restaurant don't go commercial, stick with high-grade residential. But just in case keep a blowtorch handy for those special occasions when you really need to fire up your bird.
THE GALLERY
From "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"
Corinne May Botz, photographer
Represented by Benrubi Gallery
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