She wants to buy my baby?

How much can I bake and butter in worship of Nigella Lawson? When I got hold of her latest cookbook – Kitchen – I planned to read it cover-to-cover. Pure salve. Long before any recipes, though, is Nigella’s take on kitchen design.

What works best for Britain’s most prolific home cook? No huge surprise that comfort and function precede design and fashion. So – if Nigella wanted to buy my ugly baby… how would she rate its kitchen?

Round 1: Kitchen counters

Of her own countertops: “The surfaces are cluttered, the layout messy and getting messier by the day …” (Lawson, xv).

Nigella! We really would be best friends! 1 big, fat point for the ugly baby.

Round 2: Good kitchen clutter

“The clutter of a kitchen is part of its charm, so why worry that it isn’t as clinically bare as a restaurant kitchen: it shouldn’t be”.

If we’re all charmed by paint rollers and putty knives, I’ll award a second point.

Round 3: Bad kitchen clutter

“My advice is not to buy anything…if storing it is going to outweigh the advantage of using it” (Lawson, 2).

Nigella, if you could advise Paolo in such artistry, that he doesn’t need two French presses and an automatic coffee machine… I could have this third point.

Round 4: Drawers

“[The ideal kitchen] banishes drawers as much as is feasible. [The] fewer drawers a kitchen has, the easier it is to work in” (Lawson, 5).

Right, well you might have missed that specific post, Nigella (I know you’re busy), but we’re super cheap and drawers are expensive – so we’ve just a meager pair. Two drawers for two people. Shall I open one and find a butter knife for you?

“Everyone thinks they need big capacious drawers to fit all manner of things in…. [T]he wonderfully roomy drawers become a disorganized disaster zone in no time”.

I don’t think that Nigella! Everyone else who reads this blog thinks that… but I don’t. I’m anti-disorganized disaster…. that why I keep our drawer contents to an absolute minimum.

Round 5: Cupboards

“I try and minimize the amount of cupboards in my kitchen, too. Having started off with fairly small [kitchens], I always felt that cupboards would intensify the feeling of constraint and narrowness”.

You’re pretty and you’re clever, Nigella.

“[I]n a small kitchen definitely…it is better for those cupboards you do have to be below the work surface” (Lawson, 6).

This is cosmic! It’s like here I was saying how pretty and clever you are, Nigella, and then the very next line you confirm that I’m pretty clever, too!

Because we took all our upper cabinets… and banished them to the bottom! And because that cost us… nothing(!)… we went out and used our spare money to buy bacon! Do we get a free point for eating bacon, Nigella?

Round 6: Open shelves

“[I] speak as a messy person: even a clutter of crockery looks better to me than an imposing wall of cupboard doors.”

And I listen as a messy person, and I agree! +1 conceptual point for the open shelves that will appear on the very bare walls sometime in the future.

Round 7: Rails, racks & hanging space

“Any wall that can be used for the purpose, I fit with rails from which I hang all pots and pans, spatulas, measuring cups, colanders, sieves, scissors, indeed anything that can be made to hang”.

Does it count if there’s just such a rail still in its Ikea packaging hidden under the couch?

Round 8: On grease and grime

“The trick…is to keep only those things that you use often enough so that they will be regularly washed as it is. Besides, we live in the dishwasher age now, so a quick de-griming cycle is generally possible”.

First of all, a humanitarian point for having a dishwasher, and a second point for telling it (daily) how much I love it. One should never be ungrateful, should one, Nigella? And then the generic Round 8 point for having proved myself an avid de-grimer.

Round 9: tea towels

Nigella concludes the introduction with a final thought – buying a tea towel whenever you travel (“no matter how embarrassingly touristy”).

Bonus round: Real life

“A kitchen should never look decorated; it just needs to feel lived in” (Lawson, 20).

I just gave myself about six thousand points. Chugging back Nigella’s home-made kool-aid, let’s toast exalted permission to ignore magazine perfection. Tea towels folded just so? Just give me the bucket of bacon.

Hey, you want a s'more? Some more of what?