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By Kevin Purdy The Geek's Guide to Rebooting Your Kitchen
To be honest, the heart of my own kitchen's recent reboot was not cheap—it was a total gut and remodel, with contractors and drywall and all that fun stuff. Putting the root-level changes aside, it was also a chance to empty out our cabinets and drawers, pack up all the dry goods and spices, and rethink where we wanted everything to go. You can do this, too: piece by piece, or, you know, you can jam it all into four hours of French-press-fueled mania on a Saturday night, as shown in the clip above. Your call. Armed with a copy of Cooking for Geeks (specifically its chapter on "Organize Your Kitchen Like a Programmer") and a bunch of advice from foodie friends and design blogs, here's how I was able to improve by moving things around, buying cheap after-market upgrades, or scribbling with a dry-erase pen. Issue One: Everything Is Just Kind of EverywhereI know what you mean. Looking back at how our original kitchen was packed, the methodology could be "It Fits Here, So It Goes Here." Most of us are so understandably anxious to move into a new kitchen, we don't take time to think about how the small inconveniences—walking over to find a pan, searching for a spice, digging through a junk drawer—add up to steal time and make your cooking space feel less comfortable.
Walking through my own week, I realized that my wife and I have a stock American view of weekday meals: protein, starch vegetable. Most of those meals are made on the stovetop or with minimal ovenware. Wilted greens or steamed vegetables, rice or baked potatoes, broiled fish or stir-fried chicken. Some weeks we eat healthier, some weeks we indulge in 14-ingredient roasts, but pans and boiling water are the mainstays. Our recipes generally use olive oil, salt, pepper, maybe some vinegar, and occasionally some fresh or dried spices, but we save the allspice and 18-year balsamic vinegar for the meals where we're impressing guests, and have lots more time to dig and reach.
Standard kitchen designs aren't always the best for efficiency and space conservation. If you can, hang your pots and pans. It not only makes it easy to grab them and always put them back in the same place, but frees up an entire cabinet. Julia Child hung her own pots and pans from a pegboard—which, if you don't believe it, you can see in the Smithsonian. Similarly, see if you can move your spices from the cabinet that's usually right near the stove into a drawer—more on this a bit further on. Cooking for Geeks suggests a simple, revolutionary idea: "Storing your everyday kitchen tools near the food items with which they are most commonly used." Combined with the basic outline I'd made above, that freed me to do great things. I put the French press pot and coffee grinder on the same shelf as the coffee beans, and gave them all an entire shelf, right next to the fridge that held the other components: water and cream. I hung a spare set of measuring spoons next to the spices, and a set of measuring cups near the bulk goods. The can opener went in the drawer closest to our cans, the oven mitts as close as possible to the oven—you get the idea. It looks simple, written out, but look at your own kitchen—is it organized by function, or groups of semi-similar stuff? Issue Two: The Spice ParadoxYou want your spices easily accessible, but also, you don't. That is, you want them convenient to find and pull out, but you also want them kept dark and cool, and so away from the stove.
While you're getting your tiny jars back onto the shelves, check their expiration dates, and be ruthless in tossing anything that's a good bit beyond its prime. Spices get notably dull with time and exposure, and dull spices create dull food. Issue Three: Lids—Awful, Awful LidsLids feel like the third wheel in my loving relationship with my pots and pans. Sure, they're occasionally useful, but they're annoying to store, being neither perfectly flat nor easily stacked.
Issue Four: Junk Drawers
Standard cutlery trays are usually cheap and plastic, and if you're renting, they might not look right in your next kitchen. But go with wood or metal, and make sure it's expandable, and a tray like this lets you compartmentalize your not-quite-essential gear—pizza wheels, pastry brushes, tongs, and the like. The expanding nature fits both narrow tools and wider items. If you still can't fit everything in and close your drawer, you'll have to decide if it's worth re-arranging everything to fit that one extra-long whisk, or if it might go up on a top shelf. Issue Five: In-Between ItemsThere's stuff you probably use once or twice a year: electric turkey carvers, gigantic salad bowls, outdoor ice buckets. Then there are the items you bring out occasionally, but not often. They want space, but you need as much close-at-hand space for the stuff you cook with.
Issue Six: Groceries Get Lost in CabinetsIt's true—when I was re-stocking my shelves, I was amazed at the three kinds of wild rice, five flavors of cocoa mix, and nigh innumerable volumes of various sugars we'd somehow socked away. No matter how much cabinet space you have, stuff always ends up behind other stuff. You might even cook that stuff, if only you could find it.
Honestly? My kitchen isn't done with a capital D. I'm still figuring out a few odds and ends, and I am entirely open to ideas. What's the big time-sucker and groan-inducer in your kitchen? What's the best piece of cheap gear, or clever fix, you've seen in a cooking space? Share the links and war stories in the comments. | February 1st, 2011 Top Stories
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