- Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
This is my kitchen.
Come on in (laughing).
The beautiful thing about this kitchen
is that it is made of reclaimed wood
from this very house.
And the cabinets are built
inside and out,
out of the wood that used to
be the kids' room upstairs.
So each cabinet is different.
Each one is very unique.
Sometimes I do get splinters
but that's okay.
The open shelving,
which is a feature
of a lot of rustic kind
of farmhouse kitchens
is also reclaimed wood from this house
when it was under construction.
And that's really special.
The counters are poured concrete
and the entire kitchen was made
by one man who I dated for a long time.
Who's a very, very fine
finished carpenter.
He did this entire kitchen
by himself inside and out,
including the poured concrete counters.
The ceiling is a really fun feature
of this kitchen.
It is a tin ceiling
that was also pieced together
by (laughing) the ex boyfriend carpenter
one by one.
And the lights are actually
vintage chicken bird feeders
that when inverted used to hold seeds,
that chickens would get to peck through.
So that is the kitchen and there's cobwebs
which is something that's
always in the kitchens.
(laughing) okay.
One of my favorite
things about this kitchen
is a large farmhouse sink.
It is copper.
It is very difficult to clean.
I'm not going to lie.
But this contraption
is one of those things
that I decided to spend extra money on
hoping that it would be worth it
in terms of how much I used it.
And it is super-duper worth it
(tap water running)
because it's a really, really
awesome feature of my kitchen.
And it does make cleaning
and cooking very easy.
It confuses just about everyone
who tries to turn it on,
but we love it.
We love it.
I come from a long line of cooks.
My grandmother was Hungarian
and cooking and baking
was a very important part of her life,
which she passed on to my mother.
My mother passed on to me.
I do love antique things
that are usable in my kitchen.
And I collect them from
a variety of places.
This platter was actually my grandmother's
that was brought from Poland.
So that's exciting.
My grandmother, on the other side.
This is a vintage nut meat chopper.
I liked decorative things in my kitchen
but most everything here
is used and is also functional.
I have a very large
collection of cookbooks
as many cooks and bakers do.
I also have a special
selection of cookbooks
that are just for Jewish holidays.
I keep those tucked away.
But the cookbooks that
I choose to have out
are all of the vegan cookbooks
that I love and use.
So here we have Alicia
Silverstone's, "Kind Diet".
I have the Campbell, "Cafe Cookbook",
"Real Food Daily", "The Blossom Cookbook",
the vegan restaurant in
New York called "Blossom".
And also Chloe, "The Chloe Cookbook".
On this side of the kitchen, true story.
We have "Mayim's Vegan Table",
which is my cookbook.
Which I decorated.
And it is very, very well used.
It is a well-used cookbook.
We actually use cookbook a lot.
Let's see what's in the fridge.
(chuckles)
This is the end of a long stretch
that I had with my boys
which is why it's not the fullest fridge,
but some of the things
that I pretty much always have
in the fridge are berries.
So I have strawberries,
blueberries and raspberries.
It's been very difficult to get
a lot of the vegan things
that are staples of our
diet during the quarantine.
But we actually have a homes-school co-op
that has relationship with a farmer
who brings his produce to town.
And so that's how I've been
getting my fresh produce.
This is fava bean dip
that I made from fresh favas.
I have some staples of a vegan fridge.
I have rice dream.
I have vegan margarine.
These are not real eggs.
They're fake eggs
just for fun, they're fake.
I also have...
This is a jam that my ex husband made.
A lemon jam from the lemons in his yard
and very special tree.
We have some artichokes.
And we steam them and
I make garlic butter.
Three things you will always find
in my pantry
are raw cashews
because I use cashews
to make vegan ricotta
and all sorts of vegan cheese things.
You will always find oats.
Cause I do like oats.
I use them for baking
but also just for eating.
And you will always find cans of beans.
As a vegan, beans are a very
important part of our diet.
And there's always beans,
usually Pinto beans and often white beans.
Cannellini I think they're called.
Three things that you will
never find in my kitchen
besides animal products i guess,
are cookies.
We do not have a sweet tooth
in this house.
There's some dark chocolate
but really never cookies
except once a year.
There's one Girl Scout
cookie that's vegan.
And those are the Thin Mints
but otherwise no cookies in our house.
You will never find (laughing),
you will never find Fun Cereal.
This sounds like the list
my children are making
about things that are
wrong with mama's kitchen.
We don't eat sugar cereal
in this house.
We really don't eat cereal at all.
I have like a organic
rice crispy kind of thing
but never sugary cereal.
You won't find that either.
I sound like a boring mom.
Sometimes you'll find
honey roasted peanuts,
honey roasted peanuts.
But usually when they're in the house,
I eat them all.
So I stopped buying them.
So you won't find them here.
If I could change one
thing about my kitchen,
I think I would like it
to be a little bigger.
There actually used to be a hallway
attached to this kitchen
where this pantry now is.
It was a very awkward space though.
So we closed it off
and turned it into a
little bathroom (chuckles)
on the other side of this kitchen.
But I do miss having that space.
It's also very, very beautiful
and I'm very grateful for it
but I could use a little more wiggle room.
Cause when it's me
and two boys and three cats,
it gets a little crowded.
There's been more than one
significant disaster in this kitchen.
I used to have a beautiful set
of like tea towels
that my friend Chanel made
and they were personalized.
They had my name on one
and each of my boys' names on another.
And what those clothes
were perfect for is when
I would have a bread
that was rising.
I make challah for Shabbat.
And I would put that towel over the bowl
to let the bread rise.
You're supposed to do
that in a warm place.
And sometimes when it's cold,
I'll heat up the oven just a little bit
so that I have a warm space
to let the dough rise.
What happens is if you
forget to turn the oven off
and you put the dough in with a tea towel,
it ignites.
I no longer have those tea towels
cause they've all burned
on separate occasions.
(laughing)
Thank you for coming to my kitchen.
I hope you enjoyed the
tour and have a good day.
(guitar music)
