The acid test of a kitchen is its performance at Thanksgiving. How's the design? How's the performance? Our new kitchen just got its first workout, so I thought I'd review it for those still in the planning stages:

The fridge: We had a 33" space to work with, and that was that, no option for a wider space. We really wanted a french door, bottom freezer fridge, but just couldn't find one that had adequate space inside. We were the people wandering the appliance section with a Costco pizza box and a 1-gal. water jug. In the end, we went with a Whirlpool Gold single door, bottom freezer model. We were right! Although we don't have those cool doors, we did have space inside for the 24.8 lb turkey (middle shelf, brown paper bag), the really big salad bowl with the remains of last night's Taco Salad, lots of veggies, and the misc. milk, wine, water, etc. This is a winner:

Counter space, lighting, sink: Turkey prep takes a lot of space. By choosing the 90 degree corner upper cabinet, we had lots of head room where we needed it to deal with the turkey on the counter, the large bowl of dressing and a place to put the innards while working. The stainless steel dog bowl has the onion bits and celery ends waiting to go to the compost pile. The undercabinet lights were such a help in being able to see what we were doing (it always takes 2 of us to deal with turkey prep). Having an undermount sink made the clean-up so much easier-just sponge the mess straight into the sink! The large single bowl sink is so great for dealing with all the extra large washing up. Overall, this arrangement is a huge improvement over the previous kitchen even though the footprint is almost exactly the same. (The fridge is just to the left of the stove with a 15" counter between them.)

"Baking Center" (directly opposite stove/fridge wall): We've always had a peninsula here, but this time we set it up with all drawers and I spent (agonizing) mental time thinking about where I used things. The measuring cups and spoons, the baking spices (cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, ginger, etc.), and spatulas and such went in the top middle drawer. Mixing bowls are in the next drawer down. I used a small drawer to the right for pie pans, rolling pins, turkey lacers and such that get used occasionally. Some large things didn't fit here like the mixer, flour, and sugar. They went in the bottom shelf of the pantry, which turns out to be close enough. (That towel doesn't normally hang there, but we were going through lots of dish towels yesterday.) The pantry is in a space where there was a stub wall originally. The demolition of that short wall was our only change to the footprint. This is a much better use of space. This "baking center" worked out even better than I imagined. Everything was easily at hand (and findable!!) and there was lots of space to create four pies and a birthday cake. The peninsula used to have overhead cabs, the lack of which makes us rejoice! This photo was actually taken this morning, but you get the idea.

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