Food Lava Blog - Fun and Informative Stuff on Nutrition, Cooking and Recipes

Small kitchen strategies

by michelle on Jan 31, 2008 (Thu)

These past few days, I have been doing a lot of crawling on the web to pick up fresh ideas for our small (8X13 square feet) kitchen. Down sizing seems to the order of the day, but I learned that you don’t have to sacrifice style. In fact these small kitchens I found are beautiful! Here are a top to bottom strategies to make the most of the small space.

Have lots of light - Install window, skylights, compact lights under the cabinets and over the sink.
Cabinets - When using wood, choose those with a finer grain and keep the cabinet doors plain. Choose sleek simple handles or omit them altogether. Make the overhead cabinet and pantry extend all the way to the ceiling to visually extend the height of the room. Favor shiny surfaces to reflect light. You don’t have to be stuck with light colored cabinets. Dark cabinets can look cozy in small kitchens too! Just balance the darkness with light colored and reflective backsplash, floors and countertops. Here are a few examples
Edit your kitchen gadgets - Consider keeping only the things you frequently use for food preparation in the kitchen. Recently the small oven toaster we got for our wedding has gone kaput. So we began grilling our sandwiches in our big cast iron skillet. We discovered that the flavor is much better. We figured that we did not need the toaster anyway. I got rid of it so I now have more space on my counter top. In this renovating project the seldom used double oven that occupies to much space was removed to create space for a dining area.
Relocate - If you don’t want to get rid of things in the cabinets then consider storing seldom used items in other rooms. Dinnerware and cutlery may be kept in a cabinet in the dining room.
Use the space in between shelves and the space between the counter top and overhead cabinets to hang your frequently used kitchen utensils
Create an open floor plan - Breakdown walls so you can borrow space from other parts of the house
Backsplash - Use smaller tiles with a glossy finish. No big patterns please.
Install a big sink - Even small kitchen needs a big sink. It makes washing big pots and pans easier and it can hide dirty plates you have yet to tackle.
Island - Consider a movable island, it can be easily moved out of the way or double as a serving cart when entertaining.
Floors - Install planks or tiles at an angle. The diagonal lines visually ‘push’ back the walls.

I hope these ideas would help make food preparation in a small space more enjoyable. Do you have more ideas?

Posted in Cooking, General Interest

Happy Birthday Grandma!

by michelle on Jan 8, 2008 (Tue)

In our country, Christmas season starts September and ends around the first week of the New Year. But before the inevitable end to the jolly season, our family celebrates by Grandma’s birthday. She turned 87 last January 3. This year, we had a special surprise party for her at a restaurant. My cousins dressed up the place with a colorful banner and a life-size cartoon of Grandma.

My hubby and I ‘premiered’ a collection of pictures from family members reminiscing the old days. Some of the pictures went as far back as the 1920s! Grandma’s sisters, both octogenarians, were there to celebrate too. Great food, dancing and touching stories made it a party to remember.

These events had me thinking if I will live long enough to celebrate my 87th birthday. To increase my chances, I promised myself to eat better this year. So, these are the foods that will be in my grocery cart each time I visit the store. My top 8 this 2008:

Oats - our yummy breakfast staple
Walnuts - we love putting this in pancakes
Pumpkin - my hubby is not a fan but I’ll try to learn recipes that he will probably like.
Fish - the wild, fatty, cold-water variety (sardines, mackerel, herring, salmon)
Soy - my personal fave, although this is a no-no for people with a family history of breast cancer
Spinach - and other dark green leafy veggies
Tomatoes - gotta love the cancer fighting lycopene inside
Yogurt - this will be my default snack. Great as dessert too!

Posted in Nutrition, General Interest

I Love Spam

by sim on Jul 30, 2007 (Mon)

I love spam. I’m not talking about pieces of unwanted email or blog comments. I’m of course talking about the canned meat product from Hormel Foods Corporation. It’s not just food, it’s a pop culture phenom.

For those living under a rock or countries where they don’t get the internet, Spam is Hormel’s brand of canned luncheon meat. It’s supposed to be a contraction of the words ’shoulder of pork and ham’. Other sources say it stands for ’spiced ham’.

But the name was actually coined by Kenneth Daigneau, who back in the 1930s won a naming contest by Hormel. It was said that market share was slipping, so they held a contest to name the product then known as ‘Hormel Spiced Ham’. What bothers me is why they needed the contest in the first place, if all they were going to name it is spam. I’m sure it needed a lot of creativity to go from ‘Hormel Spiced Ham’ to SPAM.

Spam is supposed to be chopped pork shoulder meat, ham, sugar, salt, water and the ever wholesome, all natural sodium nitrite. These ingredients are pre-cooked and packed into a can that is neither round or angular. I actually like this unnatural union of ingredients. I actually like how it tastes. I eat it, even if I actually think that its jest meaning ‘Something Posing As Meat’ could actually be justified.

So what is really in spam? How you ever wondered? Could we all been had? Some say its all left over animal parts. This includes the eyes, snouts, hooves, the face and all those gross parts. But if that is the case, then I have no problems with it. Those things are edible and in fact they are eaten as delicacies in my country. There are worse things you can eat than random animal parts.

All these remind me of the famous Monty Python sketch, where they have this cafe where everything in their menu has spam in it. It’s a funny sketch. But in the Philippines, we actually have a restaurant just like that. Everything has spam except the french fries and the hotdogs. It’s called Spam Jam, which when I hear make me think of pureed sweetened spam. Which come to think of it, actually sounds disgusting.

So even though I don’t know what the hell it is, I eat and actually like spam. Hope I don’t die from hypertension due to excess sodium in my blood. If I do, then you’re free to pry the SPAM can from my cold dead fingers.

Posted in Humor, General Interest

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Small kitchen strategies

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