Thousands of small furry creatures are murdered like that every day, he said. If this cautionary tale affects you as it affected me you will never eat artichoke hearts or indeed anything else that comes in a tin ever again.But I was bemoaning the demise of the American kitchen as much for its effect on my Armenian friend Rima who lives in Sag Harbour on Long Island, as for its effect on home cooking in the Big Apple. Rima is a successful artist - she makes pictures from beeswax - but she's just started a new venture. He held up the incriminating evidence, the lid still attached by half an inch or so to the tin. Was I aware, he continued, of the horrendous consequences of throwing away a tin with its lid not fully removed? No I said so he told me.The rubbish gets dumped in landfill sites and sooner or later mice and voles and tiny baby rabbits burrow their way into the dump where, attracted by the smell of artichokes, they push their little heads against the lid, snaffle what's left at the bottom of the tin and then back out. Except that they never make it because the jagged edges of the lid they're pushing against decapitate them as neatly as a guillotine.
You know you shouldn't do that, he said, taking it out very carefully. Here we go, I thought, another lecture about recycling, but it wasn't. And because it had such a powerful effect on me I'm going to share it with you and talk about new trends in kitchen design later.Was it me, the young man asked, who had opened the artichoke heart tin Yes, I admit it. That, in fact, would be my only reason for wanting to get rid of the kitchen, to dispense with the bin. Is it just us or is everyone's swing bin as disgusting, as dangerous and as malodorous as ours? No, of course it isn't because every right-thinking person recycles, which means that glass and gloop have their own containers and don't contaminate everything else.We had a young man to supper the other night who saw me chucking away the empty tin that had contained artichoke hearts. I love eating out - no shopping, no washing up, no scraping hard little burnt bits off the bottom of the oven, no wrestling to get the bin liner out of the bin without the bag splitting and acres of broken glass and gloop spilling out on to the kitchen floor.
She keeps her jerseys in the oven, her shoes on the turntable in the corner unit that's supposed to be for saucepans and her make-up in the cupboard full of natty little drawers that are meant to be for spices. I could certainly do with extra space to keep my jumpers and shoes but a house without a kitchen sounds about as useful as a car without an engine Don't get me wrong. Earlier this year one of my daughters went to stay with a school friend who had recently relocated to New York for her job. Sophie has rented a small Upper East Side apartment and on the advice of her new American friends has converted her kitchen into a dressing room. All they need is a microwave to warm it up and a fridge for the cocktails, both of which items can easily be incorporated into the overall design of a living room.
