Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook Everything You Need To Know About Setting Up And Cooking In The Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen In The World--your Own

1 Kitchen Purge One of the most surprising things about presiding over a functional small kitchen is discovering how few things you actually need in order to accomplish the majority of your cooking tasks--and how creatively you can improvise when you haven't got much special equipment. another equally surprising thing about your functional small kitchen is that it becomes increasingly dysfunctional as it fills up with things that are, on first appearance, quite useful--to the point that, crammed full of great stuff, it becomes almost entirely unusable. So, if you're just moving in to your new apartment, don't unpack those boxes marked "kitchen" just yet. instead, stop for a moment and consider your barren little kitchen as it now exists--pristine, empty, and full of potential. You have shelf space, drawer space, and counter space. So . . . if your boxes contain things you don't really want and hardly ever use, things that up until now you haven't had the energy, focus, or drive to throw out (in other words, stuff), consider leaving it all boxed up for a while. Now visualize cooking in a tiny kitchen of Zen-garden simplicity (do you hear the distant strains of a shakuhachi flute?)--a place that holds the absolute minimum of objects, in which you still have room enough to cook. This, too, can be yours. For those who have just arrived in a new home If you are just moving in to your new kitchen, try the following experiment. Rather than unpack your kitchen boxes, leave them as is, and instead take things out of them on an as needed basis. Once you have used something, find a place for it in your kitchen cabinets. Over the course of the next two weeks, you are going to discover how many things--plates, cups, glasses, silverware, pots, pans--youactuallyuse. At the end of that time, if you dare, consider putting all the rest of your stuff into storage. Can you rise to the challenge? If you're like most people, you can't and you won't. So . . . read on. George and His Royal Crown Derby: A Cautionary Tale Professional organizers all agree that the hardest and least glamorous part of reorganizing any kitchen is clearing it out so it can work properly--and also that the longer a person has lived in a space, the more cluttered his or her kitchen will have become. If you are not a natural-born thrower-outer (and few of us are), the hardest part of clearing out an object-filled kitchen is going to be in getting started, not only because you are basically conflicted about the need for change of any sort but also because you fear that removing even the smallest item will bring irrevocable loss. Let's for a moment consider an extreme case: a museum curator named George. George lives in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment featuring a modest galley kitchen with six cabinets. He likes to cook, and when he first moved in to his apartment ten years back, his kitchen provided him with just enough cooking and storage space for entertaining friends with the simple home-cooked foods that every homesick, space-challenged, yet relentlessly cosmopolitan city dweller craves. George's home life took a sudden turn for the worse, however, when his rich uncle Clayton died and left him a service for forty of Royal Crown Derby "Red Aves," an ornately patterned red-and-white china dating from the late 1930s featuring images of birds of paradise and oriental pheasants amid exquisitely detailed feathers and foliage. George already owned his own dishes--a perfectly nice set of Spode "Florentine" for ten (purchased both charitably and economically at the Lenox Hill Hospital Thrift Shop), plus several smaller sets of dessert plates and breakfast china picked up here and there on his assorted wanderings through Europe. But Clayton's "Red Aves" wasfamilychina. And so, with some juggling, George fouSpring, Justin is the author of 'Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook Everything You Need To Know About Setting Up And Cooking In The Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen In The World--your Own', published 2006 under ISBN 9780767920162 and ISBN 0767920163.