Around the Kitchen Table - Kitchen Tables! Plus 4-Book #Giveaway

MADDIE DAY here. It's my turn to host our monthly chat around the kitchen table. What better topic than kitchen tables, themselves? MLKers, let's discuss kitchen tables we have known and loved, and how they help us prepare and enjoy food. Photos of kitchen tables a bonus!

In my childhood home, we six ate all regular meals at the kitchen table. The table had a formica top and never saw a tablecloth or even placemats. In the middle was always a cut-glass box with a lid that held six kinds of vitamins. We used the table to roll out cookies and pie crusts. My mother sometimes screwed the meat grinder onto the edge and turned chunks of cooked meat into ground beef. We ate Christmas and Thanksgiving meals in the dining room at a lovely mid-century modern table, but mostly the dining table was used for homework projects.

These days I don't even have a dining room. Our locally made oak kitchen table extends to a dining table for Easter and Thanksgiving feasts. 

It's also where Hugh and I eat, play cribbage, and read the paper. I try to keep fresh flowers on it along with delicious foods. I've had great conversations with friends around the kitchen table and have read through printed manuscripts on it, too.

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LUCY BURDETTE: I can't even remember what our kitchen table looked like, though it must have been wood. Like Edith, we all six ate there every night (like it or not, which we didn't always as teenagers!) But there were a lot of conversations at that table--so important for a family--and dogs lurking underneath looking for a stray crumb. We have a small glass-topped table in the kitchen now, but we always eat there together, read the paper, talk about our lives and the world!

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PEG COCHRAN/MARGARET LOUDON

Like Lucy, I don't remember our kitchen table growing up.  We also always ate together--it wasn't even a question!  In my first apartment, I had a glass and chrome dining table (there wasn't room in the galley kitchen) and one day I decided to iron a shirt on it. I put a towel on the table, ironed the shirt and walked away. Several minutes later I heard a loud bang--the glass on the table had cracked in half!

My first real kitchen table was butcher block and our Bearded Collie puppy nearly chewed the leg off it! Later, a friend cut the legs down to make a large coffee table for the family room where the kids did messy art projects using glue or paint.

Our current table is glass and was given to us by the previous owners of our condo. It wasn't the table I liked so much but the fact that one of the chairs had been replaced with a bench! We are still eating at that table (and I haven't tried to iron on it!) 

 

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VICKI DELANY: The good old kitchen table. As a child, I'm pretty sure we had the standard Formica table, like everyone else had.  When I got my own house, for many years we had a round pine table with matching chairs.  Also pretty standard.  Now, I don't have a table at all.  I have a peninsula, which seats two, three at a stretch, but any more than that, we have to go into the dining room.  My dining room table was a huge expense when I bought it - a genuine handcrafted Mennonite hardwood table with six chairs and two extensions that fit right into the table itself when not in use. 

Like most peoples' tables, kitchen or dining room, it serves other purposes. Here I am playing Jenga on it. 

In the summertime, we move outdoors much of the time and this serves as my kitchen table. It's also my office in the pleasant weather. Everything in my house is multi-purpose

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LESLIE KARST: We had a separate breakfast room and dining room growing up, but the only time we used the dining room was for holiday meals, or when my parents hosted dinner parties (to which we kids weren’t generally invited). But I always loved the breakfast room table the most, as it was smaller and more intimate, and I remember with great fondness the conversations we’d have as a family around that table—what happened at school that day, my mom’s pottery classes and friends, gossip from the UCLA law school where my dad taught....

We have a “formal” dining room here in Hilo, too, but I much prefer to eat—and do the crossword—at the cozy rustic wood table in our kitchen.

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LESLIE BUDEWITZ: My childhood home had a Formica-topped peninsula that divided the kitchen from the living room, and that's where my mother, brother, and I ate during the week. My dad was a traveling sales rep, typically only home on the weekends, and then we ate at a beautiful round cherry dining table in an Early American style -- he sold furniture. It was a small touch of elegance, order, and peacefulness that I think, with the perspective of an adult, both my parents craved. And I love that they created that for us.

These days, Mr. Right and I also have a small peninsula dividing kitchen and dining room, which opens to the living room, and we love it. But we particularly love our dining table, which we helped design. We went to the lumber yard with the local woodworker to choose the blued pine and jointly envisioned "the river" that runs through it. And I got to be in the metalworker's shop when he forged the base. It's a piece of art we adore. And like Peg, I tucked a bench along one side, a homey touch that brings a smile to guests' faces and even after all these years, to mine.     

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MAYA CORRIGAN: Your table is indeed a work of art, Leslie! Like many of us, I sat around the formica kitchen table every night when I was growing up. The table was the perfect size for the five of us. But for holiday dinners, we moved to a much larger table in the dining room, where we could fit the whole family. We never had a separate kids' table. I continued the tradition of seating everyone at the table, regardless of age, when I the made holiday dinners, which I did for 31 years straight. Our dining room table has two leaves and enough room for 14 people, though we've occasionally had to add a smaller table at one end. 

A few times we swapped our dining room furniture and our living room furniture so that the room would be large enough for 18 at dinner. 

These days we eat at our glass kitchen table, which also has an extra glass leaf under it. 

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LIBBY KLEIN: I had a kitchen table made of pecan wood when my kids were growing up. It sat all six of us and we had dinner together every night. With four kids, if dinner was good, it went very quickly. Usually with a great deal of watchfulness over each other's plates to see who might be finishing faster than you to get dibs on seconds. It was a beautiful table, but the wood was so soft. I was always so frustrated that every mark was left on the surface. I could see the outline of math problems and essays from my kids' homework assignments. Now I miss that and wish I could have it back. 

But times change and I updated my decor like we like to do. I bought a table that sits eight with chairs that fit about six. Spatial awareness is not my thing. It's the parents and not the children with me these days. We still eat dinner together just about every night, and occasionally I'll throw a fancy tea party or host a game night. The square table is perfect for cards as long as someone has long arms.

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MOLLY MacRAE: I have such fond memories of our kitchen table when I was growing up. The older girls were off at college by the time I was four, but that made room at the table for my three brothers and me for breakfast each morning before school—two on each side. There were drawers in the table with all the little bits of junk families collect. Mom listened to WLS radio while she cooked breakfast. (And if it included toast, it invariably burned because we didn't have a toaster and we'd forget it under the broiler. Then mom swore a bit, scraped off the burned parts, and we ate it anyway.) On snowy days we listened eagerly to the radio for school closings. We heard the news of Winston Churchill’s death over breakfast at that table. Mom cried and at least some of us did, too. We made and decorated Christmas cookies there, played with homemade play dough, played board games, learned to roll pie crust and to knead bread. 

For supper and holiday meals, we ate in the dining room at a table Dad made from a door. It was a great table, although a bit wobbly, and it sat all eight of us easily (if precariously when it wobbled). 

In 1979, my husband and I bought a small, round Formica-topped table and four chairs. If we ever needed room for more than four people to sit, we’d set up a card table and folding chairs. Only once have we lived in a house with a dining room. We lived there almost ten years but never got around to getting a bigger table. Just as well, we’re in a small house again, the round table is perfect, and we still have the old card table, too.    

Spring lilacs on our good old round table.

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VM BURNS: Growing up, we had a small kitchen table, but there were only four of us so it wasn't a problem. We had a formal dining room table that we only used when we had company. Now, I have a formal dining room table that I only use for company (wonder where that came from). 

I moved in 2021 and I have a great breakfast nook, which will be perfect for casual meals, writing, and conversations with friends. After MONTHS of waiting for my banquet to arrive, the manufacturer lost it. However, after many emails, calls, a great deal of persistent nudging, and some expert sleuthing skills (if I do say so myself), I tracked it down. Of course now the table I wanted is on backorder. It's been on backorder for almost two years. Someday, the poodles and I will cuddle up in this nook and actually enjoy a meal. 

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TINA KASHIAN: I like this topic of kitchen tables! I found this picture of my family table from years ago. We were celebrating my dad’s birthday. I was the youngest of three girls (my oldest sister was sick that day and not in the picture). We had a family restaurant and our kitchen table at home was a special order from the Restaurant Depot in Philadelphia. It was a round maple “eight top” table, meaning it could seat eight. My mom was a fabulous cook and we had a separate dining room for entertaining. But our kitchen table was the center of the home. We always had a relative or family friend from overseas living with us at one time or another, and all the important conversations and juicy gossip took place at this table. My dad installed the kitchen orange paneling from the 60’s. Both my parents passed away and recalling the family kitchen table is a great memory.

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CLEO COYLE: When I was a little girl, growing up in Western Pennsylvania, my family's kitchen was always a busy, chaotic place. Our kitchen table was one of those great (now vintage!) Formica and chrome tables and doubled as our cooking work table, an extension of our counter space. At meal time we'd eat around that table or a card table (with a tablecloth thrown over it) on our back porch.

All these years later, I live in a Queens (NYC) rowhouse, but not much has changed where the chaos is concerned! My kitchen is just as busy and messy as my mom's was, and my kitchen table once again does double duty as an extension of my kitchen counter.

My husband Marc and I usually eat at a cozy, round dining table situated at the picture-window end of our rectacular living room, but it does double duty, too. Triple duty actually! It's a dining table, a work table, and a brainstorming table. It's also such an embarrassing mess right now that I'm punting a photo in favor of the animated graphic (above) that attempts to illustrate the idea of, well...our idea table! ~ Cleo

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MADDIE: I included Murder in a Cape Cottage in the giveaway for a reason. Mac's family sits around her parents' kitchen table a lot, including in that story.

Readers: Share your kitchen table with us! And include your email if you'd like to be entered in the four-book giveaway.

GIVEAWAY!

To be entered in this week's drawing

for the 4 terrific mysteries below,

join us in the comments.

Include your email address,

so we can contact the winner!

> MURDER IN A CAPE COTTAGE by Maddie Day

> A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS (ARC)
by Lucy Burdette

> S'MORE MURDERS by Maya Corrigan

> BREWED AWAKENING by Cleo Coyle

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Wednesday, April 5

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