Yup - Couscous are your friend - whenever I need a fast starch - I have something in 5-10 minutes. I add ground pepper (and I did add this to the BC version), Parmesan, Gruyere, etc. My DH thinks I made something very special.... I won't tell him our secret! Dodge- lots of Floridans have nautical themes for their kitchens. My parents had lots of ocean items in their condo. Andrea - I don't have many non-stick pans anymore- even before I switched to induction, I was slowly replacing my pans - but when I make omelets - sometimes I want the option - and used the new scan pan tonight based on that wonderful video - and mine looked just like the chef's! Maybe there is hope for me as a cook yet!

depends on how gross it is. murphy's oil soap cleans real well as does 409 spray. often grease will dissolve grease so rubbing baby oil on the mess and then cleaning the fresh mess may help. but if it's really gross... my husband and i once cleaned the wall behind our stove with easy off oven cleaner - the fume-free kind... it worked great! you might want to spot test an area before doing your whole cabinets but it didn't effect the paint on our walls at all. we sprayed it and let it set for a while and all the funk wiped right off. i can't remember what possessed us to clean the wall, though. i think we got a new stove and it didn't match the imprint of the old one so there was lots of funk revealed... it was a rental, not too spiffy a place. :-)

My collection of pots isn't big, but it changes from time to time. Also, I have reorganization fits and change the way they are arranged. I admire people who can get fine organization right the first time, but it takes me a while of trying it out. So, maybe think about that before choosing a final system. If you're not into peg board, there are grid systems (I linked to metro below) - a metal grid that attaches to the wall through small stand offs. Pots are hooked to the grid, the grid and stand offs keep anything from touching the wall. In the system below, you can get narrow shelves and other stuff that can hook in. Also Ikea sell some inexpensive rails that you can use to hang pots. It will hold most of the pot off the wall and also prevent hands from touching the wall. It reduces the amount of "wall protector" needed. Here is a link that might be useful: One grid system.

Windows and cross ventilation only handle smoke, and then only to partially dissipate it. They don't deal with the steam that makes the kitchen walls sweat and damages your cabinets over the long run. Natural ventilaion won't remove the odors that the steam of even boiling veggies will carry through the home and deposit into your soft furnishings. Permanent boiled cabbage smell in grammas house, anyone? Open windows can help some with the heat buildup in a summer kitchen, but not enough. Especially if you live in a climate that uses AC. You'd be letting in hot moist air that was not any better than the stuff you wanted to get rid of. In the olden days in the South, that's why the big meal of the day was at 11 a.m., because you couldn't stand to be in the kitchen with a hot stove during the apex of the hot summer day. Then the stove was shut down for the rest of the day. You got a cold biscuit, buttermilk, and maybe leftover ham or fatback at 6, and then you were in bed to get up at 3 with the chickens. That's the natural lifestyle consequence of dealing with no ventilation or climate control. The big offender that windows won't handle though is grease. You needn't ever fry a thing to have grease coat your cabinets, walls, and soft furnishings. Just boiling that cabbage causes it to render some of it's natural vegetable oils into the steam that carries it onto all of those surfaces, creating an icky sticky film that attracts dust to it. Which forms a really difficult to remove shellac type coating over time. And this is why even homes in the 50's realized that you needed some form of active ventilation over passive ventilation. So, through wall fans were born. And quickly went out of favor, because they had no real capture ability, no cleaning ability, and were giant fire hazards as a result. It's amusing that so many people want to recreate those useless and dangerous fans as a nod to ''retro''. They were only popular for a relatively short period of time before better design sense prevailed and the overhead vent hood with cleanable capture aea was developed and took over the market. Hood technology has improved over the intervening 70 years as to sound, cleanability, and CFM. What has not changed one iota is that an ovehead hood works naturally with Mother Nature's rising, heat, odors, grease, steam, and smoke in order to capture it, and remove it from your kitchen. Not just blow it back and forth. There is no need to attempt to reinvent the wheel for much poorer results, even though Jennair tried. Every kitchen needs a good quality overhead vent fan. Period.