Amateur foodies take note

Amateur foodies take note: If you want an apartment with an awesome kitchen, you'll pretty much have to live in a city. That's what Apartment Guide found when it looked at listing data to find the areas with the best kitchen amenities. Chicago topped the list, with San Antonio coming in at a surprising second place. New York City, which we assumed would claim the number one spot judging solely by the number of food bloggers we know, was in the middle of the pack in fifth place. Guess most NYC dwellers are fine with takeout.Check out the infographic below for the rest of the top 10, then let us know if you agree or disagree with the findings. One of my mother's favorite Yiddish proverbs was, "You can't sit on two horses with one behind." A fine observation, but growing up in Brooklyn, sitting on even one was unlikely.

My own steed was the lid of a sewing machine, a rounded wooden case shaped like a covered bridge with curved corners. Heigh-ho, Singer.As for places to sit, I mostly perched on the kitchen chairs in our two-family home on 58th Street. The landlords, my grandparents, lived upstairs and never raised the rent. The deal was that my mother would be nearby and available as her parents grew older.There were four sturdy chairs in our kitchen, and four slightly different ones in my grandparents' kitchen. On one of those chairs, my grandmother bent over that Singer, narrowing the legs of my dungarees and sewing aprons to be presented to my teachers as Christmas gifts, or practicing her signature on torn-off scraps of paper grocery bags.She could neither read nor write.This was the '50s.

Families making the upwardly mobile leap from Brooklyn to Long Island were furnishing the kitchens in their split-levels with Formica and chrome, shiny mid-century splendor.We stayed put and stuck with wood. "You couldn't buy chairs like that today," adults in my family said, at exactly the time when other people were throwing chairs like that away.I was in elementary school when my mother brought up the notion of refurbishing the kitchen furniture. The response was certainly cool. My grandfather said that whatever was to be replaced was "good enough," his typical rejoinder to any such proposal.But my mother, the executive in charge of 58th Street home improvements, had clout.