Vegan Mofo Day 13 - It's Kitchen Tour Time

Yay, I love a kitchen tour! I first blogged one back during Mofo 2011 when I was still living in my flat with the tiniest kitchen in the world. It was so small that I had to keep my dried goods in a cupboard in the hallway!  I also recently did a mini-tour of the food related artwork in our kitchen where we live now.

Since that post I've made another purchase. Just need to get a frame for this now!

Our house just has two rooms downstairs, a lounge and a kitchen so the dinning table is in the kitchen next to the orange wall. We have two chairs and two benches which had long been covered in denim and were starting to look a bit tatty. When we moved I decided I wanted to recover them in Mexican oilcloth but I couldn't find any I liked that wasn't incredibly expensive because of shipping costs. I knew I'd 'psychic shop' some eventually and sure enough a huge table cloth came up on eBay with free postage for the grand cost of £12. The print was exactly what I'd envisaged and with the use of a staple gun it was big enough to cover the kitchen seating, a bench for the yard and to make some bunting!

I have to say though that we don't eat at the table that often and are usually found in the lounge eating our meals off these vintage Marks and Spencer melamine trays from the 1970's. We have the matching place mats too. Matt has a love of 70's stuff as you will see in the rest of these pics.

I think these guys are from that era. We call the onion pot 'Scratey Onion Boy' (scratey means crying where Matt's from) and we keep garlic in him. His mate is 'Startled Celery Boy' who also doubles up as a vase.

We've got a few inherited pieces too in the kitchen from Matt's Nana Ivy who was a famously good cook. These were her scales.

And her jam pan which we've only recently aquired and are yet to use but I'm excited about trying my hand at some preserves this autumn.

This is no framed print, it's a sheet of Nana Ivy's stickers for tupperwares which seemed to fit so well with our kitchen art collection that we got them framed.

I thought I'd include a few of my favourite useful kitchen objects in the tour. This ceramic strawberry pot is our compost pot.

These Orla Kiely pasta tins were a present when we moved. They sit on my Ikea mini filing cabinet which houses our herb, spice and seed collection. The cross shaped object on the right is a 1970's melamine cookery book holder. The enamel bread bin is acutually where I keep my flour collection for baking.

The mortgage company made several errors which caused a big delay when we were moving. We did get some compensation from them and we put it towards a Vitamix. Yes, they are expensive but I don't regret this purchase at all!

Living with one of the world's biggest Elvis fans means that he creeps in everywhere, even the kitchen. We got not one but two of these vegetable Elvis boards for house warming presents. One is near the toaster and the other near the kettle.

Whilst your deep in thought doing the washing up you can look up and ponder on these words.

And finally my absolute favourite part of my new kitchen (apart from the oven) is the pantry. These sort of Derbyshire terraced houses were built with pantries under the stairs. In lots people have removed them to open out the stairs and kitchen but we were so pleased to find a house where it still has one. My little old nephew loves it and calls it 'The Shop'!