How to decorate a kitchen that you'll love working in.

If you display dishes and trays that you actually use and love, your kitchen feels alive.

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I love working in a kitchen with beautiful things, but I hate anything that's purely decorative. If you display dishes and trays that you actually use and love, your kitchen just feels alive. There is an antique dealer in Belgium (Axel Vervoordt) whose library is exquisite, not just because his bookshelves are gorgeous but also because he's read all the books. When you walk in, you just know it's a library that someone loves.

If you're setting up your own kitchen shelves, you can just move things around until you find the most pleasing arrangement! Here are a few of my guidelines:

• Mix old and new — antique silver platters, handmade dinner plates, and new china bowls.

• Choose a small color palette and stick to it, such as white china and silver.

• Choose different shapes — round, flat, plus different heights — to sit next to each other. A shelf of all round bowls or all flat plates can be a little boring.

• A beautiful plate or platter leaning against the back wall of the shelves can give height to your arrangement.

• Mix it up with books that you love or even a small lamp on a shelf to provide light in a dark corner.
  

Every day when I arrive at the barn, I think, “I can’t believe I get to work here.” I hope your beautiful displays will help you feel the same way about your kitchen!

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Ask Ina:

“How do you create great flavor? What makes things taste great?”

One of the words I’ll use to describe a dish is “chic.” I see chic food like a couture dress. If the quality of the fabric is wonderful, you don’t need to do much to make it gorgeous. Good quality ingredients with very simple lines. Food is the same way!

Sometimes flavor is about simplicity — the French Apple Tart in Back to Basics is just pastry, Granny Smith Apples, sugar, butter, a little apricot jelly. It’s thin and crisp and delicious, and it’s the essence of apples.

Sometimes it’s about pairing things, like adding a little crème de cassis to a Plum Crunch. You don’t know it’s there, but it makes the plums taste great.

But you can’t always get good quality ingredients, so it can also be about how you cook something. How do you coax the flavor out of supermarket plum tomatoes when they have absolutely no taste? You roast them at a high temperature with a little olive oil and good balsamic vinegar. The sugars caramelize, and the tomatoes become incredibly delicious. It’s about how to get the most flavor out of simple ingredients.

I serve these Roasted Tomatoes with roast chicken, turkey meatloaf (The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook), or grilled steaks.

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This Week’s Favorites:

• Jeffrey and I watched the new HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. I love how he says he doesn’t think of himself as “Billy Joel!”

• I started playing around with a recipe for “Sticky Chicken” that I originally got from Nora Ephron. Her recipe notes are as witty and charming as she was.