Miniature Kitchen

I am learning to cook in our new apartment's miniature kitchen.


The size is about six by eight and it has everything a kitchen is supposed to have. The neat part is you don't have to move your feet much--you just turn in place from refer to stove to sink to pull-out cutting board. Reaching up for the dishes and ingredients is pretty easy too. It's all right there.


No room for two people in this kitchen--it's an intimate  pas de deux if it happens.


Serving is easy too. Heck, you are out of the kitchen and to the dining table in less than a couple of feet--and the dining room, as it were, is all carpeted so you better  not spill the soup!


Now I keep my elbows IN while I am cooking. No flamboyance or Julia Child tricks! And chopping must be carefully controlled--you don't want to flip some cabbage onto the carpet.


Not complaining, just stating facts.


All the appliances are brand new Chinese quality--carpet the same--I suspect even the new paint and the cheap linoleum are from the very far east


The light is not good. Located at the back of the apartment far away from the large french windows which form  the wall on the north side of the room and tucked behind a sort of half-bar situation--not the kind you sit at and not big enough to use for cooking work or anything else-- the "kitchen" (I put it in quotation marks because it is really just a dark corner containing the usual kitchen equipment)-- is almost the darkest part of the apartment--but not quite as dark as the toilet-shower closet--which gets no natural light at all.


Oddly, the electric light switch for the kitchen is located in the apartment entryway--you have to walk around the around the "bar" from the "kitchen" to turn on the light and the electric fixture is so dim you can hardly see the sink or the tiny work surface where you are supposed to prepare your food anyway-- even in the daytime.


We think it would be a good idea if the architects who design these apartments had to LIVE in them for a few years! Maybe then they would not be so concerned with saving money for the owners but would actually THINK about what is best for the residents. Let the punishment fit the crime.


If this new apartment is so miserable then, you might ask, WHY did we rent it? I'll tell you why. It's a LOT better than the others we looked at in Temecula! And cheaper. And very quiet!

...