Monday, March 7, 2011

sustainable living, post-oil kitchen!

The kitchen of your dreams? Kitchen of your nightmares? I've heard both when it comes to this piece...but personally I would love to have/ inhabit such a kitchen!
A wood-burning stove that not only smells great and heats your home, but also adds a wonderful smokey flavour to your breads, roasted vegetables, and other dishes that you cook along side the burning wood. You can use your frying pans, cast-iron pans on the stove top, as well as using the hot surface to boil water for washing dishes or for tea or coffee.
About you hang various plants - harvested from your own garden - that are drying out for use later on, to add flavour and spice to your cooking; and on the wall a variety of earthenware jars - perhaps created by the potter down the road, with whom you traded some preserves and vegetables to obtain these vessels - containing various essential oils, and sometimes spices, that you have made yourself.
The old electric stove lies dormant: A nice piece of pine covers up the old stovetop, upon which you have placed a beautiful assortment of potted plants.
Your water does not come from some huge industrial water-purifying plant that adds fluoride (and who knows what else?) to your water, it comes instead from an underground source that has past the test for safety and purity. You collect rainwater for menial water purposes - often boiling it first just in case if its to be used for things like dishes.
At night your light comes from candles - that have been made by the bee-keeping and candle-making family who live in the hills nearby - as well as lamps that burn kerosene, or animal fat (?), and the glow from your wood stove.
The rug is a braided one, made from strips of old material, braided and sewn in a circle.
Alternating between your stovetope and your old - but sturdy - wooden table you work, going about canning and preserving fruit and vegetables, making jams and sauces that source mainly from your own garden, and if not, then the garden of someone nearby, with whom you have traded.
Perhaps you tune in to music or interesting talk on your antique transistor radio as you do so, and in the afternoon take a break to go puruse your garden or the fruit trees and streams and forests in the hills nearby...

2 comments:

Aubielicious said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Aubielicious said...

Sounds like heaven to me!