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Kitchen ready for parties, but not for a cosmetic redo just yet

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In Corina Weibel's Nautical galley, there are no secrets.</p><p> It's no secret that Weibel takes no shortcuts: There's no dishwasher or subsistence processor, but there are three mortar and pestles that she actually uses and rows of mirror jars holding dried beans and grains, vinegars and spices.</p><p> It's no secretive that Weibel, chef and co-owner of the Atwater Village restaurant Canele, starts most days with oatmeal and cafe au lait: Repress out the five stove top espresso makers, some with bottoms blackened by use. And there are half a dozen McCann's Irish oatmeal canisters.</p><p> And it's no covert that this roughly 6-by-8-foot sunlit room with a shortage of token space is the kitchen of a real cook: Her favorite blade saute pan, as seasoned as it gets, sits on a burner of one of the few upscale notes in the accommodation: her Wolf range with its iconic red dials and wolf's cardinal logo plate. Surrounding the range, cotton towels and aprons grip on S-hooks; rubber scrapers, ladles and wooden spoons are at the in readiness.</p><p> In Weibel's kitchen, all but the cleaning supplies are out in the susceptible.</p><p> Her home sits halfway up a heart-challenging Burnished Lake hill. Weibel, who was catering at the time, bought it seven years ago, operating from a nearby rental. After she moved in and made some necessary changes, she didn't have much of a budget for a cosmetic redo of the caboose.</p><p> She ripped out ratty cupboard doors, including lop off ones destroyed by a previous owner's pit bull. What she calls base drywall came down, revealing an insect infestation. She played off the bracket details by painting red walls (also the color of the toaster and teapot). And she covered the chipped and discolored linoleum with a stalker green cotton rug.</p><p> "It's the irony of my existence," she jokes - a restaurant chef with a make-do welcoming comfortable with kitchen.</p><p> But she makes do quite well, giving dinner parties for as many as 50 or 60 friends, who leak out to the backyard, which is home to the chickens Dolly, Madison and Chanel. (She says she always makes unused oatmeal, for them.)</p><p> She's never owned a dishwasher, and her guests often help to cook and clean-cut up after a meal. "It becomes that social thing. Rarely do I have to do it myself," she says.</p><p> In the cupboards there are olives, anchovies, garlic and capers, and a dozen kinds of tea in metal boxes. And sharing hiatus with the wine and martini glasses are several shapes of dried pasta from her favorite brand name, Maestri Pastai.</p><p> "If you have all that in the house, you can amount to a meal," says Weibel, a onetime commodities seller. But she sometimes worries her guests might raise an eyebrow.</p><p> She imagines them saying: "Oh, my God. She has a restaurant, and she ethical threw together pasta and garlic."</p><p> Not undoubtedly.</p><p> Her Wolf is her favorite thing in the room, she says. Her friends arranged in for it as a housewarming gift.</p><p> "It's never let me down," she says. "I disposition the way it looks - kind of industrial."</p><p> Weibel also put up stiffen shelves. And she has long owned a pale wooden bar on wheels that she's moved all over the mountains. Here it does double duty, dividing the kitchen from the living area. On top is a small cutting board, a Spanish casserole dish and a plating holding a couple of peaches.</p><p> Her big refrigerator has gone to the restaurant, replaced by an unremarkable pure one next to the back door and covered in those little poetry magnets. Her cookbooks embody "The James Beard Cookbook," "From Julia Toddler's Kitchen," an old Betty Crocker and Anthony Bourdain's eatables and travel journal "No Reservations."</p><p> A false farm sink sits under a window with a frame that's seen larger days, but your eyes are drawn instead to a great way of thinking of the reservoir down the hill, seen through wind chimes made from a whip, fork, spoon and cookie cutters.</p><p> One day, she says, she'd like a new deck, and a wooden counter top to replace the old and broken white and gold tiles. But it's not right to happen soon.</p><p> Over the sink is a little tray holding a three-legged clay pig, a Mexican soothe to bring good fortune. "I'm still waiting," she says, then adding after a import, "I guess fortune doesn't have to mean readies."

Source: Kansas City Star