Word Around Town

This recipe is adapted, very distantly now, from the Ukranian Poppy Seed Cake recipe in Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook. It makes a relatively dense, buttery cake with a subtly Indian bent. The cake is not as dark as pictured.

3/4 cup dried sweetened coconut
1 1/3 c. milk
1/2 lb. (2 sticks) butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 cup rice flour
1/3 c. potato flour
2 T. corn starch
1 T. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. ground cardamom
1/2 t. coconut essence
3 T. fresh-squeezed lime juice

1. Place coconut and milk in a small saucepan and scald (heat to just before boiling and turn off). (I’m not sure if this scalding step is necessary if you are using coconut instead of poppyseeds, but I haven’t tried it yet). Let cool at least 15 minutes.
2. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each.
3. Sift together dry ingredients. Add to butter mixture, alternating with the coconut/milk mixture, beginning and ending with dry ingredients. Stir as little as possible, and add coconut essence and lime juice at the end.
4. Spread the batter into a greased pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until done, i.e. top springs back to the touch, and toothpick comes out dry. Cool for 10 minutes and then invert.

I topped this cake with seaons fruits and coated lightly with a syrup made by mixing 1 part jam with one part water and a little sugar, heated until sugar dissolves. If you’d like to use regular white flour, you can substitute 2 cups white flour for the rice, potato, and cornstarch flours.

• Wanting a Child. Edited and with an introduction by Jill Bialosky and Helen Schulman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

  A collection of stories about having (and not having) children. A lot of powerful stories.

• Rinpoche, Sogyal. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey. Harper San Francisco, c1992.

  Very powerful book on Tibetan Buddhism. Very profound, lots of death, suffering, and the way out of suffering through love.

• Nearing, Helen. Loving and leaving the good life. Chelsea Green Pub. Co., c1992.

  This is an autobiography of Helen Nearing who grew up in the early part of the century in a theosophist family in a New York suburb. She and Scott Nearing went “back to the land” early in the depression, practicing a simple life in Vermont and later in Maine, while writing and speaking on social and economic justice.

• Cobb, Nancy. In Lieu of Flowers: a Conversation for the Living. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

  A book about grief that was recommended by a friend. The strongest passages are those where the author writes about her own mother’s death. The generalizations about grief are less useful.

  - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

  Brian Weiss is a scientifically minded clinical psychologist who came upon past life regression when working with a patient. This was the beginning of a spiritual path for him and he has since written many books and used past life regression to treat a number of patients. These books all have the same themes, but the newest (or the second, “Only Love is Real” may be the most powerful. All are worth reading and, like The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying they deal with death, with fear, and with the primacy of love.

• Weiss, Brian L. Messages from the Masters : Tapping into The Power of Love. New York: Warner Books, c2000.

  Don’t be turned off by “The Master” language here. Master are people that Weiss gets teachings/message from. The books are about reincarnation, and mostly about principles for living.

• Weiss, Brian L. Only Love is Real: a Story of Soulmates Reunited. New York: Warner Books, c1996.

  This book is framed by the story of “Soulmates Reunited”, but, like the other books, has a number of other case studies and stories. Very powerful.

• Weiss, Brian L. Many Lives, Many Masters. New York: Warner Books, 1996.

  The first book. Primarily the story of Weiss’ first experience of past-life regression through a single patient and her story. Also very powerful.

I recently completed a kitchen renovation in which I used IKEA base cabinets and custom doors from Scherrs in North Dakota. The end result is stunning, and the prices compare favorable with an all-IKEA project. I’ve included a bunch of technical details below (and in the attached spreadsheet), but feel free to email if you have any additional questions.

Scherrs

The Scherrs web site has detailed information on a number of different styles of doors and possible woods. They also offer per square foot pricing in .pdf format for different doors styles and wood which can give you a ballpark sense of pricing for your project. They also offer stain/clear-coat, which is extra, and shipping is extra, of course, but reasonable, and the doors came extremely well packaged.

Materials and Features

I used select red alder for my cabinet doors, and chose a simple shaker style. The kitchen is not huge but has about 190 cubic feet of storage in total, which is quite a lot. The IKEA boxes and hardware cost about $2000; the doors, includind side pannels, shipping, etc. cost about $4500. A great value, I think, for an incredible result.

The Process

In order to get the custom doors made, I had to go to the IKEA show room and measure:

• The exact sizes of the IKEA boxes for the different cabinets I had chosen;
• The exact locations of the fixed interior shelves (for pantry cabinet styles);
• The size of the IKEA doors (doors are not same size as boxes for a variety of reasons)
• The boring locations for each door

This all took some running around, but I was able to locate each model by walking through a bunch of different displays with my tape measure. I had to go back several times because I didn’t know all the information I needed, but hope to spare you the effort but offering this list and explanation.

In working with Dea Herperger at Scherrs (a saleswoman extroadinaire), we adjusted some of the “tolerances” to arrive at door sizes that were somewhat different than those of the IKEA doors. Scherrs allows 1/8” for each door that opens and closes, rather than 3/16 at IKEA. And Scherrs allows doors/drawers to start 3/8” below counter, which I think it more than IKEA, and somewhat large in my estimation. I would adjust to 1/2” or even 3/16” for my next project.

I had Scherrs bore the holes for the hinges because my carpenter was reluctant to do this himself. I sent Scherrs a sample of an IKEA door and a hinge so they could see how the doors are bored, and then I gave Dea measurements for boring locations on the doors. This was tricky. First, it’s tricky to measure. And second, my doors are slightly different sizes than the IKEA doors. I think, though, that minor problems that I encountered with boring locations (see spreadsheet, link above) can be sorted out with a close evaluation of how each door fits on each cabinet. For example, 39” wall cabinets are really 39 1/8”. The doors, which we made to be 39” high (Dea at Scherrs explained that, for some reason, it should end slightly before the top b/e you look at it from below). So this door would be flush with the bottom of the cabinet but start just below the top of the cabinet. As a result, the bore hore for the bottom hinge would be farther away from the bottom edge of the door than the bore hole for the top hinge would be from the top edge of the door. The IKEA cabinets themselves had small holes (for attaching the hinge) at, I think, equal intervals (Dea refers to this as the something-millimeter system), so using this information it should be possible to figure out exactly where you bore holes should go.

Additional Notes

• The drawback to the IKEA products is that they have a limited number of sizes and sizes (compared to, say, the Kraftmaid line at Home Depot). It would have been nice if IKEA has some 6” base cabinets, or some end cabinets that were not open. We worked around these things. In one case, I bought two 6” base cabinets from Miller’s Pride (available special order from Home Depot), had my carpenter, John, make some adjustments (they were 1/4” shorter than the IKEA) and then I got Scherrs doors made for these. He just drilled the holes for the hinges in the cabinet where they needed to be and that worked.
• I waited to order side pannels until all of my cabinets were installed and until the doors were on, because I wanted to take exact measurements on site. This added about 3 weeks to an otherwise very short/tight time line. Scherrs finishes the filler for you, so it’s better to have exact measurements, though limited cutting can be done on site and not show up. Also, side pannel sizes can be unpredictable given irregularities in walls and floors, so better to do these after installation, as we did, order to the largest dimension, and trim down on site.
• Note that the IKEA toe kicks only come in limited heights (not high enough for my purpose) and attach with a special clip to the Akurum legs. The toe kick itself has a routed line in the back to help it attach to the clip. John had the great idea to make toe kicks from the wood that we used for the flooring and which is quite close in color and grain to the cabinets. They came out beautifully. John had to build a backing for the toe kicks since they didn’t have the special routed groove in back.