Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common house kitchen stuff

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

RoseWind Cohousing, long built, Port Townsend WA

What you can get away with depends a lot on how much you are in the  
public eye. In a small town like ours (8000), no way could we claim  
our kitchen was just for "re-warming": the health inspector is a  
friend and sometimes a dinner guest! We are in a fish bowl and have  
kept entirely within codes on everything. The fact that you are not  
selling food, just serving it to your own members vs the public, is a  
factor to be sure to bring up.

We thought we might someday want to be certified as a commercial  
kitchen (like for baking things to sell), and also figured a lot of  
that was for good health reasons, so we designed various items with  
that in mind. We have since undone several:

a) The Grease Trap was super gross. Slimy crud would accumulate in it  
until the dreaded day that it had to be opened up and cleaned -- but  
where to PUT the gross sludge? It was way too wet to seem right to put  
in the trash, too gross to compost, and obviously stuff that wasn't  
supposed to go down the drain! We did away with it and have had zero  
drain problems. We don't do much meat, for one thing, so that keeps  
grease down. We wash dishes with very hot water, so it presumably  
moves on pretty well. I keep thinking we should at least put some sort  
of enzyme stuff down the drains now and then, but in 9 years we've  
never gotten around to it, nor had any clogs. Good drain screens --  
fine mesh baskets vs the steel standard thingies -- help a lot.

b) The Open Drains were also kind of icky. Under the sinks there were  
these little mini-sink-like receptacles, with the drain pipe splashing  
into them. They got bits of garbage in them and got slimy and cruddy.  
The one in the under sink cabinet seemed like a mold hazard, with the  
open wetness. Crawling around at floor level de-sliming them was not  
an attractive job.

Haven't missed either one, and we were all relieved to see them gone.

Lynn Nadeau