Rosie!!!!

{{gwi:1755138}}

i like the drawer v acuum idea! only 200.00 also. that's probably just the drawer... the vacuum part? who knows!

but a damp rag or a dust pan are a lot cheaper. and I'm cheap!

Given my rather traumatic day of baking, I am a little dismayed by the thought of a kit*chen that displays even more independence than mine already does. I find the DrawerVac, the undercounter crumb sweeper, particularly unsettling, considering it consists of a crotch-height vacuu*m cleaner. Imagine the hilarity.

marcolo-you are soooooooo bad!!!!

it might come in handy for sucking up all those little beads though.

The self-opening cupboard doors don't thrill me, either. If I try to swat a fly off my head, God knows what other terrors I might unleash. The rain of holiday platters alone would make my kit*chen look like The Omen.

marcolo-What are you drinking?!-what's in your water?!-I want some of that. Maybe it's that cake-LOL! It feels so good to laugh. Thank you so very much!!

All I can think of is a kitchen that would vaporize all dirt and bacteria so I would never have to clean it.

Definitely needs a pie weight collector. Maybe Rosie could go around with a little snow plow?

As for those cabinets, my kids would just stand in front of them opening and closing them all day long. (No, really - it's an autism thing.) Same with the vacuum - it'd be one mass playmobil/lego genocide followed by a contest to see how big a food item it can suck down before it clogged.

I shudder to think.

On the whole, I still don't know if there's anything cooler than my friend's vintage Frigidaire Flair, the "oven of the future" from way back when. Notice the way you can see in the ovens? How the doors open up out of the way? And how the burner's are spread out so that you can fit more than two pots on the stove at once? That was some forward thinking, I'm telling you. ;-)

(And yes, it was cool enough for Samantha from Bewitched ...)

Marcolo--Sounds like it would have been a good day for a Roomba, though I agree Rosie would be more fun. Thanks for the giggles--glad you didn't get hurt!

bibliomom, one of our friends once lived in a great old apartment building and she had an almost identical O'Keefe & Merritt version of that Frigidaire Flair. Although she loved to cook on gas, she admitted this electric range was one of the best she'd ever used, gas or electric. The design of the pullout drawer for burners, and the lift-up doors for ovens, I thought was soooooooo clever!

Somebody should bring this design back. It's amazing tidy, especially in a smaller kitchen!

I used to live in small a post-war LA apartment building with an O'Keefe & Merritt stove. Original, I assume.

It was a match-lit gas stove. The episode with the melted eyebrows taught me not to delay getting that door open and the match inside!

But cooked like a dream. I have never been able to duplicate my perfect pita bread in any other oven, although I have certainly tried.

"the DrawerVac, the undercounter crumb sweeper, particularly unsettling, considering it consists of a crotch-height vacuu*m cleaner."

lol! not for me. it might be cheap waist lipo suction tho!

I singed my bangs as a kid on one of those gas ovens!

I suspect that higher-income families (who aren't gourmet cooks/foodies) are the consumers who drive many kitchen trends into the mass-market. I think most of those families aspire to (a) eating healthier, less processed, more natural foods (or at least thinking they are) while at the same time (b) putting less time, skill and effort into cooking and cleaning.

To me, this suggests more ''prepared foods'' - food that still looks like the raw ingredient(s) but has been prepped and is ready to be quickly and simply cooked. I distinguish this from obviously ''processed'' foods, which have been blended, colored, formulated, extruded, molded, canned, etc, such as a chicken nugget or canned soup. Food companies like ''prepared food'' because the profit margins are higher than on raw ingredients. Consumers seem to like having the work done for them, either by the food manufacturers (examples are deli counters, rotisserie chickens, par-baked pizzas, ready-to-eat salad mixes) or by their appliances (fully automatic and pod coffee makers are the latest example).

At the same time, computing power is cheap and internet connections are rapidly becoming universal. This suggests, to me, an opportunity for appliances that can automatically and quickly perform the cooking process specific to each prepared food item, with minimal effort or knowledge from the consumer.

I envision mom bringing home, let's say, a dinner of ready-to-cook chutney-glazed chicken breasts (trimmed, brined, marinated, and seasoned, with prepared glaze in the package) and sides (rosemary roast new potatoes, vinagrette asparagus tips).

She opens the chicken package, places the chicken in its disposable tray into the ''smart oven'', inserts the oven's probe, and waves the bar code on the wrapper over the oven's reader window. The oven recognizes the food item and either decodes the cooking process from the bar code or retrieves it from the internet cloud. Sensors check the position of the probe: if mom hasn't inserted it correctly, the oven's screen walks her through the correct placement. The oven uses microwaves to thaw the chicken, adds convection heat to cook it at the appropriate rising temp while injecting water vapor to maintain the desired humidity, while monitoring internal temp and moisture, then blast-broils it to brown the surface. With a ''semi-automatic'' oven, mom now heats the glaze in the microwave and pours it over the chicken - following instructions on the oven's screen - and the oven delivers a final blast of broil. With a ''fully-automatic'' oven, mom deposited the tray of frozen glaze in the oven's ''extrachef'' hopper when she placed the chicken in the oven's main cavity. The tray was drawn into the oven and the glaze was thawed and heated. When mom is ready to serve dinner, she touches the ''Finish Now'' command on the screen, the oven's internal food handling arm pours the glaze over the browned chicken and applies the finishing broil.

Meanwhile, the potatoes and asparagus are similarly prepared in the oven's secondary cavities. A high-end smart oven will be able to parallel process a four course meal. (The families who bought 48'' Wolf ranges back in the '00s will now have $20,000 48'' smart ovens that can prepare eight course meals.) It will look a little like an old-style AGA cooker (remember those?) with multiple small ovens. If you have bucks, you can buy the Smart Cooker from AGA/Samsung which will look a lot like the old cooker. They are so chic.

The meal will be healthy - the ingredients are ''organic'' (at least, so says the FDA), preservative-free (flash-freezing provides the shelf life), and the cooking process isn't much different from how Alton Brown would have done it, back when. It will be fast - 30 minutes, tops - and effortless. There will be no pots or pans to clean up, just a few disposable trays to recycle. All the food waste was composted or converted to animal feed at the factory. The process was energy-efficient and resource-friendly, since the smaller oven cavities heat quickly, there's no wasted heat from old-style gas burners, and no water is used to wash cookware.

Of course, there wasn't any actual cooking done by mom. And plenty of moms (and dads) wouldn't mind that at all.

What if mom wants to be able to serve dinner the moment she walks in the door? Well, Viking (now owned by LG) has an even higher-end, drool-worthy smart oven that does that too. Mom simply deposits the chicken, glaze, and veg in the oven in the morning. The refrigerated cavities keep the food frozen all day. At quarter to six, mom contacts her Viking TimeOven and instructs it to have dinner ready at seven (there's an iPhone app for that). The oven switches off refrigeration and begins cooking.

What does the Viking range look like? Well, there may not be one. Or maybe it has just two induction hobs, for when dad wants to go all primitive and actually cook an omelet in a pan. It is cute when he tries, but he spatters and overcooks everything anyway. No, mom explains gently, just open the omelet package, place the disposable pan of egg batter in the oven, and deposit the tray of browned mushrooms, flaked cheese, and shredded spinach in the hopper. Dad beams as he sprinkles real, fresh, pre-cut chives on the perfectly finished omelet. He's proud of his garnishing.

A world of opportunities for tie-ins and recurring revenues have opened for food companies, celebrity chefs, and appliance makers. Mom buys her coq au vin from Nestle, because the package says it works best with her GE Wolf oven. Since she's a member of Good Eats, her oven will cook it with Alton Brown's special recipe touches. She can taste the difference. Especially with the Whole Foods burgundy that her oven recommended just for this dish.

Speaking of Alton Brown, I heard that Viking just came out with the next generation of smart ovens, that Alton is endorsing. This one has internal stores of spices, herbs, sea salt, and freshly cracked peppers, which it applies during cooking, just the way Alton would. I've got to have that.

Hey, do you know that marcolo got the Wolf ''A La Carte'' oven? Every month, he logs on to FoodFlix and updates his menu queue. FedEx's Home Service restocks the refrigerated pantry of his Wolf, and every night, all he does is pick whatever he wants to eat from the voice screen. The oven internally unseals the packages and cooks the meals. Then, with a flourish, marcolo garnishes and serves. No-one can garnish like him, I tell you. Now, even I think that's a little over the top, but, hey, marcolo can afford it. I heard he made millions on those cubical pie weights.

Johnliu always seemed so bitter about those pie weights, I don't know why. It was so sad, when he jammed an old French copper pot on his head and broiled himself to death in his gas salamander. They said he used to be a good cook, but he just never understood garnishing.

johnliu, please, give up your day job and join forces with marcolo in the blogsphere. Surely the talents of the two of you are bigger than our little corner of gardenweb.

johnliu, I surely hope you make at least some of your living as a writer! Your prose is so smooth and easy to read, AND so creative and imaginative, and so well-paced it is just a pleasure to read. Thanks for the treat!

Of course you don't understand garnishing! That's why you're overlooking the key trend driving kitc*hen design in 2020: Kitchen_Stadium(R)_At_Home(TM).

Since the "Wolf a la Carte" oven has removed all actual effort from cooking, it will be necessary to add fake effort, the way cake mixes for decades required homemakers to add eggs only so that they could pretend they were actually baking something. In the kitchen of the future, gone will be the useless perimeter of counter cabinets, storing tools whose purpose is long since forgotten. Instead, raised theater seating will permit the audience to watch mom to prepare the "Semi-Homemade(TM)" portion of each meal. On a vast pool table-sized induction island, Mom may prepare seared salmon by dumping, um, transferring a package of WholeFoods(R) brand prepared Ready-Sear(TM) Organique(R) Salmon-flavored Filets to the induction disk, where it will pop, crackle and crust, bathed in a preprogrammed BlueStar Chromatherapy Halo for maximum visual pleasure. Picking up her Mario Batali(TM) brand fish spatula from where it sits on the Rachel Ray(R) Garbage Bowl-io(TM) brand bowl, she'll flip the fish once, when the timer goes off, then plate it according to the handy diagram projected on each dish, with all easy-to-follow garnishing instructions downloaded from LooksIllustrated(R), the glossy, advertising-laden website that replaced the late, lamented magazine of a similar name.

The kitchen will remain The Heart of the Home(R) brand room, now integrating all the activities that really matter to a modern family, including the Flickr(R) Wall, the Bank of America, N.A Debt Payment Office, a Twitter(TM) brand Holoband console for the totally immersive social media experience, Two-Way HGTV, which brings a different designer every week to criticize your decor, and, in the corner, the small Unemployment Office Terminal where dad still doggedly looks for work ten years later. Ahem, anyway, it will be just like gramma's kitchen, except more like TV.

I'm literally ROFLMAO! Marco, I'm sure you get tired of hearing this, but you're a riot!

OK, Marcolo, in view of the vacuum's location, who would EVER get OUT of the kitchen?

Marcolo and John, ditch the day jobs. Your plans are nothing short of miraculously creative and inventive, and despite the humorous intent, I seriously love them. Why shouldn't Americans beat the Chinese at designing the future?

I, for one,(and probably one of very few) would love that kitchen. I find nothing noble about chopping vegetables, unwrapping salmon, washing and patting chicken dry. Big Deal, not. Watching it sear? Ok, slightly better. Flipping it at the perfect moment, ok, better. Worth 45 minutes of cleanup?

And that Frigidaire cooking center is a lot closer to the ideally planned farm kitchen of the '40's(remember the video?) than our over-hyped kitchens of the 21st century.

This may be the best thread ever on kitchens gw. Quintessential Best of John---Marcolo's Best Ever.