Kitchen Daydreams

It looks a bit like Joan’s: lots of hanging baskets filled with fruit. Orange cast iron pots mounting a modest hob. It’s small, because you don’t need much space. Just clever storage – and lots on the counters. The counter tops are wooden but the draining board is porcelain and the sink is big and deep and there are two taps, not one, and I’ll never forget to buy the washing up liquid.

It will be filled with objects made by friends, maybe even lovers, maybe even partners, and he will stand behind me watching me chop, knowing better than to gently touch my shoulder when I’m wielding a knife, but the sentiment is there and I can feel it. I’ll wordlessly signal for more salt and he’ll know where it is because we built this kitchen together.

There will be a lot of timber. (Did I mention it’s a cabin? Douglas fir. Open. Spacious. Forest outside. Maybe a river just beyond it?. We’ll swim in it all summer and occasionally in winter, knowing we can pull ourselves out of its icy grip and straight into the kitchen where there will be soup on the hob and bread on the counter and butter in the fridge, a fire whispering through embers, a dog snoozing in front of it, Nick Drake playing in the background, a pink moon on its way).

Anyway the walls and shelves will be wooden, lots of different types with textured grains and creamy complexions. Plates and big slabs of chopping boards too. Just two knives, one for each of us. A big one (mine) and a medium one (his). I’ll cook the chicken and he’ll carve and we’ll always say we’ll make pasta but we probably won’t, apart from the ricotta gnudi which he rolls into misshapen balls and cooks with butter and sage that I pick from the garden. I’ll rub it between my hands and smell it all evening, especially when we sit outside on low, wide chairs with a cigarette and a beer just as the sky switches off.

There will be no ceiling lights because they are truly the enemy of beauty; instead a couple of lamps, one in each corner, glowing a golden warmth even in the depths of winter. Candles in the morning when it’s still a little dark, when the many tools for making coffee are brought out to wake the other one up. We’ll take it in turns. I’ll use the percolator, because I like to hear when it’s ready, and he’ll use the Aeropress, and the amber cafetière only comes out when guests are around. We decide not to buy the Moccamaster, even though I still dream of the slow drip drip drip of it and its mustard hue.

The kitchen bleeds into the living room and the garden surrounds us, but we’ll create a little veg patch where we’ll attempt to grow tomatoes, dig up potatoes and round up a glut of courgettes in the summer. And sweet peas! There must be sweet peas trailing up something, and broad beans because nothing feels more lovely than picking, podding and shelling broad beans with the cabin doors flung open in spring, the air still crisp, the sun still warm, the beans ready to be thrown into a risotto.

There should be precisely four cast iron pots (one small, two medium, one large and shallow); and two cast iron pans (one for eggs, the other for chicken). We’ll have two stainless steel ones, and that camping one that I love so much which will hang from the shelves and be brought every time we take a trip. Everything will start off ‘in its right place’ but we’ll have a kitchen that is constantly in use, friends flowing in and out, a dog looking up at us hungry for food and love, and things will get moved around but we’ll never argue about it.

It will be very British but still feel like a Californian ranch – open, sprawling, a little wild – but also like my mother’s kitchen, small hints of Korean permeating through. It will probably smell of kimchi four times a year, stock at least once a month and granola when I remember to make it. And we’ll be glad that we don’t have walls surrounding our bedroom when the smell of coffee being made lifts us from a deep slumber, where one of us is dreaming about another kitchen in another life.

We’ll open the fridge and it will be full of things, sometimes more mine, sometimes more his, and every time the door swings open, we’ll feel a lick on our legs and look down at the dog who has never loved us more than when a meatball falls out of a Tupperware and onto the floor.

There will be versions of us imprinted on every pan handle, tea towel, plate, glass and dish. Maybe we’ll stop making the gnudi because we’ve argued, but maybe we’ll make something else because we remembered why we always stay. And we’ll never run out of things to say to each other because there’s always something to be made in this kitchen that we built together; the clamour of pans, the clatter of cutlery, the hissing and bubbling and crackling making conversation for us, until we climb into bed, still smelling the chicken – it’s always the chicken – and dreaming up tomorrow and the rest of our lives.