If you're thinking about remodeling your Chicago kitchen

If you're thinking about remodeling your Chicago kitchen, you may as well start focusing on some of the trends for 2014, but before we plunge in, some words of caution: trends come and go. They tend to move particularly quickly for bathrooms and kitchens, and they can get very, very spendy. If you commit to a perfectly on-trend space, it's quickly going to appear dated, and you may find yourself remodeling again in the near future. So remember: trends are great,Lawrence O. Kitchen, Steady Hand for Lockheed, Dies at 90 but at the same time, try to think timeless and classic...and consider how current trends can be integrated into classic themes and how your space can be made easily changeable to take advantage of trends as they shift without having to tear it apart every time.

One of the top predicted trends for 2014 is, unsurprisingly, going green -- not exactly a new fad! Going green is one of the few trends we can endorse whole-heartedly, because it's not just keeping you on-point with the latest style. It's also going to save you money in the long term, and it helps out the planet, so it's pretty much a win for everyone.How do you know which green gadgets are right for you? Talk to your remodeling team about the options available, their costs, and their net savings. Be wary of new products that might not be fully tested, and remember that sometimes going green is about reducing usage in the first place, rather than buying a specialty item do you really need a wine chiller. Some things to think about: high efficiency dishwashers, which are better than handwashing by far; recycled countertops; certified sustainable wood flooring; and reclaimed tile for backsplashes.

In kitchens, chef's stoves are big right now, and have been for a few years. The "gourmet kitchen" is taking over magazine spreads and it sure looks appealing when you walk into a home with a lavish kitchen. But be realistic about how much you use your kitchen and your expectations. Is a large stove designed for a restaurant right for you? Probably not. Most of the firms that make such stoves also produce models specifically intended for home use, which are a marginally better choice, but they still take more time to learn, require special cleaning, and can be more stove than you really need.

Lawrence O. Kitchen, Steady Hand for Lockheed, Dies at 90

Lawrence O. Kitchen, a former Marine who never finished college but successfully led the Lockheed Corporation, the aerospace company, through turbulent times, died on Dec. 15 in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 90.Mr. Kitchen, who was named president of Lockheed in 1975, helped rebuild the company in the aftermath of a bribery scandal involving payoffs to Japanese officials. Working with Roy A. Anderson, the chairman and chief executive, Mr. Kitchen helped stabilize the company, allowing it to prosper.He also defused criticism that the company had overcharged the government for toilet seats, billing the Navy for more than $600 for each. After realizing that the company had made an error in its calculations, Mr. Kitchen agreed to lower the price and refund the government $29,165 and absorb some of the actual costs.

Colleagues said Mr. Kitchen's persistence helped Lockheed secure a critical multibillion-dollar contract in the early 1980s from Congress to build C-5B cargo planes. "He worked nearly around the clock, talking to congressmen, staff people and others," W. Paul Frech, a Lockheed executive, recalled in 1986.As the defense industry headed into leaner times in the 1980s, Mr. Kitchen was named chairman and chief executive. He served from 1986 to 1988.  Under his leadership the company bought Sanders Associates, a military electronics company, and made strategic investments in stealth capabilities that would lead to the manufacture of aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk.

Lawrence Oscar Kitchen was born on June 8, 1923, in Fort Mill, S.C., the oldest of six children. Both of his parents worked at a cotton mill. "He was raised in Appalachian poverty," his wife said.He enlisted in the Marines during World War II. Afterward he was a typist for the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. By taking night courses and passing Civil Service exams, he became an aeronautical engineer for the Navy. He joined Lockheed in 1958, and though he lacked an engineering or a business degree, he mastered the aerospace business."He is as smart a person as I've met, with incredible raw intelligence," H. David Crowther, a Lockheed executive who knew Mr. Kitchen well, told The New York Times in 1986. "If he had an M.B.A. from Harvard," Mr. Crowther added, "he might be more relaxed — and then he wouldn't be nearly as effective."

Broken dishwasher discourages holiday cooking

A central achievement in Mr. Kitchen's rise was his turnaround of Lockheed's Georgia subsidiary, which made cargo aircraft. The Georgia plant's sales had fallen sharply, and the company's chief executive considered closing the operation. In 1971, Mr. Kitchen was named president and credited with reversing the decline in part through layoffs and winning new business.Mr. Kitchen eschewed many of the trappings of corporate status. At the Georgia plant, his wife said, he would eat lunch with the mechanics. He refused to build an executive dining room when the company moved its headquarters to a suburb of Los Angeles. Mr. Kitchen lived in Westlake Village, Calif. In addition to his wife of 35 years, he is survived by a son, Alan; two daughters, Janet Long and Brenda Burgar; two sisters, Shirley Blanton and Joyce Ratliff; six grandchildren;Toowoomba Robin's Kitchen staff face anxious wait and two great-grandsons. 

The Busy Kitchen is a Monday column written by two area chefs - Tiffany Poe and Valarie Carter - who also happen to be mothers of young children. They explore nutrition, cooking for kids and more.My Busy Kitchen hasn't been as busy as usual. Actually, it's still been quite busy just not with as much cooking as washing dishes by hand. You see, my dishwasher is on the blink.Note that there will be no homemade foodie holiday gifts coming from this kitchen until it is repaired. My mother pointed out that all of our fun and productive cooking in the kitchen gets toned down a bit without our handy wash-o-matics. Nevertheless, the show must go on. There's Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Christmas night and the dreaded-by-some day after Christmas followed by New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

And all the days in between. Frankly, the lack of this all too essential machine has left me with a bit of food writer's block. Even though I usually try to provide simple recipes for the Busy Kitchen, I don't usually give much thought to how many dishes I use. Maybe those "one pot meal" fans are on to something.Though one of my Christmas wishes is that my dishwasher is repaired long before New Year's Day, it's not too early to start planning for the first meal of 2014. Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is a tradition in the southeastern United States, but the custom may date back to A.D. 500 and is actually of Jewish origin. Black-eyed peas were eaten on Rosh Hashana to bring prosperity to the new year.

Toowoomba Robin's Kitchen staff face anxious wait

When all of the culinary action is complete, keep the kitchen looking its best and your appliances and cookware functioning at their best with the EnviroMate Pronto P7 portable steam cleaner. With the power of steam, 15 attachments, and a heat-up time of just two minutes, the handheld Pronto is a quick, eco-friendly and uber-effective alternative to cleaning the kitchen. Only requiring water, this powerful cleaning machine can help you tackle the sink, countertops, backsplashes, stovetop, microwave and refrigerator with ease. Not damaging to stainless steel, the steam from this machine can kill common bacteria and germs found in the kitchen. It is a great solution for sanitizing sealed surfaces, such as wood cutting boards.

It can eliminate food splatters, remove stubborn stains, and clean discolored tile grout. Its compact size means that can be stored easily under the kitchen sink for easy access.This offer is only valid from 26th December to 31st January, exclusively at our High Street store. Other offers do not apply, but you can still use any gift vouchers.Visit us today and quote 'New Year offers' for your special offer. Why not bring a friend and they can benefit too. We have been in business for over 20 years and cater for all your needs. We pride ourselves in the offers we can give you everyday.Why not pop down to our High Street store and speak to one of our friendly advisors. We are always happy to help.

Robin's Kitchen's 55 stores nation-wide could close their doors and place up to 300 employees out of work as soon as Christmas eve as administrators assess the future of the business.Customers with lay-bys and vouchers will also be affected by the liquidation, as they are now considered unsecured creditors, according to an FAQ sheet posted on the Robin's Kitchen website.A 70% liquidation sale had customers swarming the Robin's Kitchen Toowoomba store with one shopper disappointed one of her favourite stores could be closing."I have always shopped at Robins here at Clifford Gardens and the staff has always been incredibly helpful and generally really nice people," Harlaxton's Helen Melville said."It is terrible these people could be losing their job only days before Christmas.

The kitchen empress' new prose

Save for all those Emmy awards, best-selling cookbooks and million-dollar paycheck, Rachael Ray and I could be twins.We both sing the praises of extra-virgin olive oil, are fans of Primanti's cap-and-egg sandwiches and love preparing simple comfort foods for our families. In fact, we both think cooking is the best way to relax and unwind after a long day at the office.Huh? America's favorite sweetheart chef actually spends time in front of the stove for fun?"When I cook at work, it's about storytelling and getting others excited in the kitchen GE's Ingenious Idea for Simplifying Every Gadget in Your Kitchen-- it's not about the joy of cooking," the celebrity chef explained on a recent phone call from Austin, Texas, where she was preparing to speak at the 14th annual Texas Conference for Women. Her voice was raspy from exhaustion. "But when I do it at home, it's an emotional thing for me. It's very calming and makes me feel centered. ...

I don't have to be talking and can just be quiet and enjoy cooking."While she'll go out after a lengthy day of filming her TV show if she has to for an event, she'd much rather be in her socks and pajamas, listening to music and sipping a glass of wine while she rustles up some dinner for her husband. Even on those days when she makes 10 meals for multiple episodes in front of the camera."Then I go home and make number 11," she said.Then again, she's Rachael Ray -- the woman who taught America how to make tasty home-cooked meals in 30 minutes or less. What about the rest of us non-professionals?Her latest cookbook aims to take the stress out of answering the perennial question, "What's for dinner?"

"Week in a Day" culls more than 200 of her favorite recipes from her popular cooking show of the same name. But as the title suggests, she takes a different tack in ordering them.You can cook any or all of the many soups, stews, casseroles and pasta sauces any day of the week, of course. But what she suggests in 43 chapters is taking a day or afternoon she mega-cooks on Sundays and preparing enough food for as many as five nights and storing it in the freezer or fridge.As she writes in the intro, "When the day is especially long or you're feeling extra exhausted, imagine how comforting it is to know that dinner -- your own homemade delicious food -- is waiting for you as soon as you walk in."

GE's Ingenious Idea for Simplifying Every Gadget in Your Kitchen

Use your broom as a barbell. While your broom isn't as heavy as a barbell, it can help your form. Rest the broom across your shoulders and grasp the ends at a comfortable distance away from your shoulders while you do squats or walking lunges. The broom will help keep you from dropping your chest during these exercises, a common form mistake, and will also help stretch those notoriously tight pectoral muscles.Use kitchen towels for a good stretch. Towels are great aides to help with your post-workout stretching. Wrap a towel around your feet and pull backward lightly when stretching your hamstrings. Get a good chest stretch by sitting with your legs straight in front of you with good posture. Place a hand towel in both hands and raise your arms above your head, keeping your elbows by your ears.

Slowly and gently, move the towel from directly overhead backward so your elbows move slightly behind your ears, until you feel a stretch across the front of your chest.Use what you have before buying new, expensive equipment you don't actually need.Don't be afraid to get creative — if you can get a full workout using only objects from your kitchen, imagine what a gold mine you have in the rest of your house.We can all save a fair amount of energy by changing our lightbulbs, and making sure our appliances aren't sucking power when they're turned off. But what could we do if we fundamentally remade how our kitchen gadgets work? GE turned to Frog to figure it out. "We could have done anything from trying to design a better lightbulb to imagining a nuclear-powered consumer product," says Jonas Damon, creative director at Frog.

Ultimately, Frog bypassed the opportunity to design a countertop Chernobyl in favor a kitchen gadget called EcoSwitch that combines the functionality of a tea kettle, slow cooker, hot plate, and blender into a single, energy-efficient package.An all-in-one kitchen gadget might sound more like a tacky SkyMall tchotchke than an eco-innovation, but unlike other solutions that bodge together half a dozen different devices, EcoSwitch is all about streamlining. Damon's team noticed that blenders, hot pots, and coffee makers each had their own plastic housings and power supplies, but at their core they either heated a vessel or rotated it.

Queens Galley starts shutting down Uptown kitchen

The 31-year-old city resident is using the kitchen during the week of Christmas to make 30 dozen cookies."It would take me days to bake all those at my house, but I'll be out of the kitchen in four hours," Ensminger said.She's planning to make six different recipes and give out the final product to family and friends."It's about speed and efficiency. When I go to the kitchen, I got all the pans there and everything I need. It's such a great asset to the city," Ensminger said.Laura Guthery's experience with a kitchen remodeler last summer was so "nightmarish" that she felt it went beyond a contract dispute. So she reported it to both the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry and the Bloomington Police Department.

Now the botched kitchen project in Guthery's home has turned into a criminal charge against the remodeler, Mark M. Kotek. The department told Bloomington police that a little-known and rarely used Minnesota statute makes it a crime for someone to do contracting work without a license.In a summons filed Nov. 21 and made public Monday, Kotek, 37, of Minneapolis, was charged with a misdemeanor after an investigation by Bloomington police detective Cory Cardenas."I've been a detective for 10 years and I had never heard of this," Cardenas said. "A lot of these people don't think they're going to fall into the criminal realm."

In August, the Department of Labor and Industry issued a cease-and-desist order to Kotek, fined him $10,000 and his company, Kotek Construction, $20,000,Prepare simple holiday gifts in your kitchen penalties that remained unpaid as of Monday. But the department's director of contractor licensing and enforcement, Charlie Durenberger, welcomes the criminal case and hopes other cities will take similar action."Our experience has been, historically, cities are not interested in charging contractors, and it's long been a frustration for us and homeowners," Durenberger said.In the past five years, the department has issued 596 cease-and-desist orders to unlicensed residential building contractors, but only a very small percentage have faced criminal charges, Durenberger said.

Prepare simple holiday gifts in your kitchen

Mechel McKinley, manager of Main Street Macon, said the store is another sign of the health of downtown.Robinson Home brings a different type of retail to downtown and will "draw a number of different people to the area," McKinley said in an email. "The plans for the store are exciting and I look forward to seeing the Robinsons grow their business."The Robinsons expect to offer cooking classes in early 2014, and plans are underway for a teaching kitchen in the back of the store, he said."Right now I have one or two instructors lined up, and I'm putting together some class lists," he said.The owners plan to bring in local and regional chefs for cooking demonstrations to help inspire everyone from experienced bakers and grillers to everyday cooks.

"It fits in well with our overall goal of not only providing Macon with more product but providing them with a service of a learning experience -- growing the foodie scene in Macon, if you will," he said.The store will be open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday."Careful planning is the key to starting a new business and the Robinsons have done that," McKinley said. "I am proud to welcome them to downtown.The Robinsons recently renovated a historic downtown home."We eat down here, we play down here, we go to church down here, we do everything," he said.Cooking and wrapping gifts at home sans the shopping-mall purgatory?

For decades my humble attempt at making edible presents has included everything from mason jars of creamy caramel sauce to decorative boxes filled with herds of gingerbread, moose-shaped cookies.Rosemary jelly, coconut granola, hot chocolate mix and watermelon pickles? Yep, my friends and family have received them as "gifts of love," too.While I lived in Jacksonville, we had a pecan tree loaded with nuts so what the busy little squirrels didn't get, I captured for spiced pecans to give away.And when my friend Larry Brooks confided months ago that while traveling he had sampled an irresistible dipping sauce of chocolate and reduced balsamic vinegar, I rubbed my hands together with gifting glee.The sauce sounded interesting and uniquely giftable.

Durenberger said he was "gratified but surprised"

Durenberger said he was "gratified but surprised" that Bloomington decided to press charges."The whole issue of unlicensed activity is a real sore spot in the industry," Durenberger said. "We'll support anything that discouraged unlicensed activity, especially against those that are taking money or harming consumers in other ways."Like everyone, I like a good kitchen gadget that works, though I've never been suckered in by any of those sold by informercials on TV, when, "if you call now, you get two extra thigamajigs and a whole set of steak knives for just $29.95 in three easy payments, plus shipping!"I'll never be convinced of the importance of owning a can opener shaped like a toucan or a wheat grass juicer, and the microwave oven someone gave me years ago has never come out of its box.

So when I come across three items that really impress me for their utility and as-promised dependability, I want to tell all my friends who spend any serious time in the kitchen.About 15 years ago, the great French master chef Alain Ducasse proudly showed off his ridiculously expensive new induction range installed in his New York restaurant. He put a pot of water on the circle, turned it on and within 30 seconds the water was boiling furiously. He then told me to touch the cooking surface with the palm of my hand. Hesitating but dutiful, I did so and found it cool as glass. Now, this was a really amazing piece of machinery, but wholly out of the question --A with Firefly Tapas Kitchen & Bar co-owner John Simmons at thousands of dollars -- for a home kitchen.

Then, this summer, I was sent a demo model of the Waring Pro Double? Induction Cooktop, which looks more or less like a simple hot plate but is actually every bit as impressive as what I saw in Ducasse's kitchen. Weighing only seven pounds, it's easy enough to put on your kitchen counter, and its various settings allow you to instantly modify the cooking temperature, has a 150-minute timer and shuts off automatically 30 seconds after a pot is removed. And it uses 70 percent less energy than conventional cooktops.