General

Larry and I went to a Slow Food picnic in the Sonoma wine country today. Fabulous food:

• Inglehaven Ranch Grass-Fed Beef Hamburgers
• Rosie Organic Fried Chicken Wings
• Jen's Pickled Organic Veggies
• Cannellini Bean Salad
• Heirloom Tomato and Basil Salad
• Potato Salad
• Della Fattoria Sonoma Gravenstein Galette

There was also wine, beer, and delicious ciders. I got to meet one of my idols, Alice Waters. She's doing some amazing work with the schools in Berkeley. She's also very tiny - I'm not exactly tall, and I towered over her.

Carlo Petrini, the founder and President of Slow Food International was also there. He's Italian and doesn't speak a lot of English, so he had a translator. He's charismatic, fascinating, captivating. His translator was excellent, too.

When Amy posted photos of her kitchen on Not As Good As Pork Cracklins, I couldn't resist doing the same. We live in an old home (built in 1928) in a Silicon Valley suburb. When we moved in, our kitchen needed a whole lot of work. We ripped out the old electric stove and replaced it with a gas range. We took out the dirty linoleum and replaced it with WilsonArt flooring. We stripped and repainted the cabinets, but decided to leave most of the doors off.

Bowls, bakeware and tupperware on the left side, along with all of the Good Eats DVDs. There's a reproduction of a Time magazine cover on the wall - it's Julia Child on the cover. The butcher block holds my kitchen computer, which I use to watch TV and movies, listen to music,and look up recipes. I also have an iSight camera hooked up to the computer - it's my Kitchen Kam.

On the right are baking dishes, measuring cups, and spices on the bottom, on carousels. I have a huge collection of cookbooks and many of them are on the shelves there. I want to put in built-in shelving underneath the existing shelving. All of my Fine Cooking Magazines are there on top also.

We have a portable dishwasher, which holds an extra cutting board. I do all of my baking-type stuff on top of the dishwasher. It's got a nice smooth surface.

Here's the view opposite those shelves.

Our counter on this side of the kitchen is oddly narrow. We replaced the sink and faucet, but it took many, many trips back to Home Depot for them to get the sink right. Quite an ordeal. I keep all of the everyday dishes and prep bowls on the shelf to the right. Near the microwave is the toaster/convection oven and Cuisinart. The panini machine and Kitchen Aid are easily accessible in the cabinet below. I do most of my prep on the Boos block.

These are the shelves near the microwave. I'm overly organized, especially since the cabinets don't have doors. On the left is what used to be a medicine cabinet. It holds old cookbooks that belonged to my grandmothers and Larry's mom, plus some kitchen things I found in my grandmother's kitchen after she died. My favorite is the angel food cake cutter. It's got a really pretty handle.

I put prepped food on either side of the stove. The rust-colored bowl holds little plastic tasting spoons. I first got them in Austin when I visited Amy one time. Then I ran out, and couldn't find them anywhere! Amy looked in Austin, I looked here. They were nowhere to be found, until the last time she visited. I now have 3,000 plastic tasting spoons because that's the only quantity we could find.

The hood was replaced after a bit of a fire soon after we moved in (during a dinner party, no less!). I keep all my wooden spoons and spatulas next to the stove, but they all have to be the same color wood, and the spatulas have to be white or clear. Yes, I'm compulsive.

The pantry is the door to the right of the stove, and the refrigerator is waaay back in the laundry room.

The disadvantage of living in an old house is learning to deal with the quirks of an old kitchen that's been half-modernized. The advantage is that we have something many Californians don't have - a basement! Besides holding several hundred bottles of wine, it also holds my grocery store and things I don't use on a regular basis.

Technorati Tags: kitchen photos

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Julia Child, the grande dame of U.S. television cooking shows and books, has died aged 91, her publisher said on Friday.

Alfred A. Knopf said in a statement she died in her sleep on Thursday at her Santa Barbara, California, home.

I've updated the look of Pork Cracklins, but only temporarily. The site is undergoing renovation and integration with the rest of larryandsheri.com.

The good news is archives can be viewed by category (appetizers, seafood, vegetarian, general), listed on the right side of the window. Some items will appear under more than one category, because I assign multiple categories in some cases.