Kitchen Size Doesn’t Matter
This has got to be the tiniest kitchen I’ve ever laid cyber-eyes on. It’s a 4-by-10-foot space in a rented apartment in San Francisco, where space comes at a price. But it hasn’t deterred Julie Queen from entertaining and churning out gourmet meals, for 30, even 100 people.
She doesn’t have a microwave, a dishwasher, or an island (the horror!). But she did manage to fit the following in her kitchen:
The kitchen boasted top-of-the-line crockery, cooking utensils and specialty appliances, including a Champion juicer, a Dualit four-slot toaster, a Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker, a DeLonghi deep-fryer, a Braun Minipimer for pureeing soups, a BergHOFF induction cooker, a KitchenAid epicurian six-quart mixer, a Vita-Mix blender, a toaster oven, citrus juicers, a yogurt maker, an ice-cream maker, two waffle irons, a pasta maker, a blowtorch, an old-fashioned scales, a high-tech tea cozy, a Tuscan grill, more than a hundred cookbooks organized by nationality, two dozen pots and pans, a salad spinner, a dozen serving platters, a massive fish steamer, service for 20, 75 spices, copper pans for confections, a collection of porcelain tureens, two mandolins for fancy cutting, a ricer, a marble rolling pin, a cherry pitter, an apple peeler, popsicle molds, 16 nesting glass bowls from 2 inches to 16 inches, a giant Thai mortar and pestle, a set of Japanese teacups, espresso cups, egg cups, coddled-eggs cups, Vietnamese coffee-making cups and chocolate accessories, to name but a few items, along with an assortment of glasses, dishes, pots, pans and stuff like the rest of us have in our kitchens.
I don’t have half the stuff she has, yet I feel that I don’t have enough space in my considerably bigger kitchen. And she has hosted live-crab parties (each guest cooks his own dish). Ah, I’m ashamed.
Somehow, somewhere, the idea that good home cooks need huge kitchens has been instilled in our minds.
The modernization of the kitchen transformed even the “furniture,” which evolved from freestanding “Hoosier cabinets” (pre-cabinetry baking centers) to the smooth uniform countertops and cabinetry we now take for granted as the defining elements of the modern kitchen. The kitchen was reinvented as a laboratory for the modern housewife for her forays into “domestic science.” From there the principle of supersizing infected American life and today’s dream kitchen was born: a place of shining surfaces, great electronic power and standardization. The culinary equivalent of an SUV.
I love that we can look at the kitchen as a “domestic science laboratory” (it’s the scientist in me). :) But it’s good to remember that we don’t need granite counter tops in order to be good cooks. We can still live up to our culinary potential even though we don’t have the latest oven to help us along. Queen proves it, with her apartment stove and refrigerator, in her tiny hole-in-the-wall kitchen.
So, how did she do it? By maximizing space and being inventive (check out her spice rack). If she can do it, so can we. Bring on the live crabs! :)
[Source: SF Gate]
Tags: small kitchens, kitchen organization
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POSTED IN: Cooking, Organizing and Clutter Control
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