De-cluttering the kitchen

Posted on June 3, 2010 by GuestPost
Categories: Clutter,Organization

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This is a guest post by Trish Smith, Owner of Simple Meal Plan. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

We all enjoy having a well-organized kitchen – it makes cooking a pleasure, rather than a chore. But if your kitchen is overcrowded and messy, what can you do? Well, it might be time for you to clear out those gadgets, tools, and appliances you don’t use. But where do you start?

Start by thinking about how you actually cook. Not about how you’d like to cook, or about how you’d cook if you had the time (this is my biggest weak spot), but how you actually cook. Your goal is to keep only those items that you use on a regular basis, or that you use for “special projects” often enough to make them worth keeping (my 20 quart stockpot, food mill, and cookie cutters all fall in this category).

Now go through the kitchen and start tossing! First, get rid of duplicates. You don’t need three garlic presses, two mixers (I’m talking to you, Mom), or four zesters. And speaking of that garlic press, you can reclaim a lot of your kitchen real estate by eliminating single-use tools. Garlic can easily be chopped by hand (or even simply smashed with the side of a knife blade), and no one needs a strawberry slicer, a cherry pitter, or an apple corer. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Keep a tool, gadget, or appliance if:

• The task it performs is one you do a LOT of, and which would take you considerable time if you had to do it yourself (or is a skill you simply can’t seem to master). For example, if you make several gallons of lemonade each month in the summer (like I do), it might be worth having a professional juice presser (like I do). But if you only juice a few lemons a year, think about getting rid of it and replacing it with a simple hand juicer.
• It allows you to cook or bake an item you’d never have time to make any other way. For example, if you have a breadmaker, I’d recommend getting rid of it and learning to bake bread by hand. Making bread by hand is an experience that is, in my opinion, superior to doing it by machine. But if there simply isn’t any time for you to make bread any other way, then I’d tell you to keep your machine and keep baking homemade bread, because the quality is so much better than store-bought.

This applies to pots and plates as well as gadgets and kitchen appliances. A family of four does not, generally speaking, need 30 plates. If you need extras for holiday entertaining, remove those from the kitchen and store them in the dining room or your attic with the rest of your holiday items. Of course, if storage is a premium, you might have to keep them in your kitchen. But if that’s the case, designate one cabinet or area for holiday supplies, and keep your cake plate, holiday serving pieces, special tablecloths, etc. in that area. That keeps them out of the “everyday” areas of your kitchen, and makes day-to-day cooking easier.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you’ll be amazed at how much more room you have – and how much easier it is to cook and bake now that you don’t need to wade through things you don’t use.

Have you tried de-cluttering your kitchen? How did it go? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Trish Smith brings you information each week that can help you make better food choices – from how to find locally-produced food, to how to prepare that food in a way that’s easy, simple, tasty, and healthy.

Photo by army.arch

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