The basement of the Wilson home in Axton is decorated with Coca-Cola memorabilia and family portraits.
Dennis Wilson prepares some of the tomatoes he's grown for cooking in the Coca-Cola kitchen his wife painted. Summer is a busy time in that kitchen, as the couple spend several weeks in a row preserving summer's bounty for the seasons ahead.
Every detail of the Wilson kitchen follows the Coca-Cola decorating theme.
Items from Linda Wilson's Coca-Cola collection fill her house.
Linda Wilson decorated this shelving unit with Coca-Cola bottle lids.
Tomatoes are right at home in the Wilson kitchen in Axton: Their vibrant, bright red fits in perfectly with the unique decor.
Linda and Dennis Wilson have a red-and-white Coca-Cola kitchen, hand-painted by Linda. It’s just part of what is turning into being a Coca-Cola house.
Linda Wilson’s collection started about 40 years ago, when one of her husband’s friends gave her a Coca-Cola clock that he said he just thought she would like.
“What’s neat is Coca-Cola never goes out of style,” Wilson said. “Whereas my friends have done apples and bears and other things in their kitchen and they have to change it out” as those fads go out of style, her Coca-Cola décor remains stylish.
Her hundreds of items come from gifts and her own searches, including at the flea market in Hillsville. Her husband helps in the hunt, she said.
Items she has with the Coca-Cola design include a purse, an airplane, Tic Tac candies, “tons of trays,” a book bag, an ice chest she uses as a television stand in the kitchen and “a lot of Coca-Cola glasses, plates and silverware.
“There’s so much it started going into the spare bedroom, with Coca-Cola curtains, table cloths, lamps and blankets,” she said.
Her husband mostly has been a good sport about the Coke stuff everywhere, but it did take quite a while to convince him on the red countertop in the kitchen. He said it would make the house harder to sell, and she pointed out that they planned on living there for a long, long time.
About 15 years ago, she painted the kitchen cabinets with Coca-Cola logos, bottles, a checkerboard pattern and more. It took about a month, she said. With the kitchen of commission for that long, the couple ate a whole lot of sandwiches.
She “just kind of winged it” as she drew all the designs by hand, some onto paper first, and some directly onto the cabinet doors.
She also added special touches, such as trimming a cabinet with bottle caps, special-ordering Coca-Cola faucet handles and decorating curtain hangers with bottle caps.
Meanwhile, when asked if she drinks the soda, Wilson laughed.
“I did drink Coca-Cola years ago,” she said. “Now I just drink water. You get older,” and tastes change.
A busy kitchen
The Wilson kitchen gets a lot of action this time of year. Linda Wilson spends about four or five weeks straight cooking and preserving tomatoes in various recipes.
Her husband has about 10 to 15 Better Boy tomato plants and four jalapeño plants, she said.
He's got a few tricks up his sleeve for great tomatoes: He buries two calcium-fortified Tums tablets in the ground to protect the tomatoes from blossom-end rot, and he waters them every day it doesn't rain.
The couple use about 200 pounds of tomatoes to can salsa, spaghetti sauce, tomato juice, ketchup and canned tomatoes for soups, she said.
Here, she shares their recipes – and a surprising tip on how to take the burn off your hands after chopping jalapeños: “The best thing to get that hot off your hands is to run your hands through your hair. The natural oils in your hair calms the burning on your skin.”
Preparing tomatoes
Her basic method of preparing tomatoes for sauce, salsa and ketchup is: Drop tomatoes into boiling water. When the skin starts to crack, remove them and put them in a bowl of ice water. That helps them peel easily. Discard the peelings, and squeeze out the core and seeds, keeping just the flesh to use.
Holly Kozelsky is a writer for the Martinsville Bulletin; contact her at 276-638-8801 ext. 243.
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August 17, 2020 at 01:17AM
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Axton family's home is all about the 'the real thing' -- and tomatoes - Martinsville Bulletin
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