Kitchen 20/20 » Books

Do you want to blog about your kitchen remodeling project?

martin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:48:00 +0000

We’re looking for a few intrepid homeowners who would like to share your experiences during a kitchen remodeling project- good, bad, surprising, cool, etc. Photos would be very dyson* too. We’ve been through many kitchen projects but most have been as designers rather than our own, although we’ve done that too.

If you’re interested send us a note at sammy at supernaturalagency dot com. Tell us a little bit about your project, where it stands, your design approach, budget range, etc. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

*There’s a movement afoot to turn the word ‘dyson’ into a replacement for the word ‘cool’, as in Dyson (vacuum cleaner) sucks- opposite of which is doesn’t suck= cool. Whatever.

Introducing Kitchen Design Insights

martin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:07:14 +0000

We have just launched a sister site called Kitchen Design Insights that offers a complete guide to the entire kitchen design process from initial planning to finished construction. The site covers everything from cabinets to appliances, from contractors to architects- you name it.

Be sure to bookmark it as we are just beginning to add Photo Galleries, expanded Resource Sections and more.

Visit: www.KitchenDesignInsights.com

Need a recipe? CookThink it

martin — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:20:22 +0000

Cookthink is a new site that is a kind of Google for recipes, not just a recipe site but a place where you can enter ingredients and dishes and it serves up possible recipes. So if you have potatoes, capers, rosemary and parmesan on hand you can plug them in and get a bunch of recipes that use those ingredients.

From a kitchen design point of view, sites like this foreshadow the end of cookbooks in the kitchen. With a simple Internet access point (laptop, PDA, iPhone, computer, etc.) in the kitchen and a big database of recipes you can, theoretically, have access to an entire bookstore’s worth of cookbooks that are smart enough to serve up recipes that you need without resorting to endless index searches in actual books.

I love cookbooks and own dozens but I often need to find things the way CookThink works. Pretty cool.

About This Site

martin — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 20:59:59 +0000

This site is about kitchen design and lifestyles. We wrote a book that has sold steadily for almost ten years because it is a practical guide to creating your dream kitchen, rather than a coffee table book full of pictures of $100.000+ kitchens. This site is a continuation of that approach. Your options for equipping and using your kitchen are expanding almost daily so covering the subject in a web site makes more sense than writing another book. Check out the links to resources and shopping options. We feel they are an extension of the whole kitchen design research process. That’s why they’re here.
Thanks,
Martin Edic

Book Review: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford

martin — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 23:34:34 +0000

The title says it all- if you ever wanted to know what it’s really like to work in a famous NYC restaurant (Mario Batali’s Babbo), to slaughter pigs in Tuscany with a crazy opera singing butcher, to make tortellini by hand, to cut and burn yourself daily and to obsess about food to a degree previously unfathomable, then this book is must read.
Buford is a New Yorker writer and editor who made the mistake of inviting Molto Mario to a dinner party. This led to the events just listed and a true exposure to professional cooking. The writing style is fantastically readable and the excesses of the characters are something you couldn’t make up (eating 35 course meals with cases of wine with Batali, handing out fresh raw pork to patrons at an Italian butcher shop, etc.)
Great stuff!