Setting Up Your Kitchen
This week we are going to tackle one of the hardest, and most rewarding, aspects of changing your relationship to your food – changing your relationship to your kitchen. Let’s face it; if you are afraid to cook for yourself, you don’t have a very healthy relationship with food, do you? So, let’s whip the kitchen into shape and see if we can take the mystery and anxiety out of cooking at home.
The first step? Clean. Clean like tomorrow morning your mother, Martha Stewart and a Marine Drill Sergeant are going to determine the fate of your mortal soul based on the cleanliness of your kitchen.
- Remove everything from your kitchen. Everything! Food, utensils, pots, pans, plates, mugs, trash, furniture, knick-knacks, everything!
- Take your stove apart and clean it from the inside out.
- Move your refrigerator away from the wall and clean behind and beneath it.
- Scrub the tops of your cabinets, where all the dust and grease lands.
- Bleach everything: floors, walls, sinks, countertops, inside of cabinets, inside your trashcan.
If you see something in your kitchen that I haven’t mentioned yet, you should take it apart, clean it within an inch of it’s life, put it back together and bleach it.
Optional Bonus: Paint your kitchen a nice, light color. Dark colors make you lazy and irritable, while light colors cheer you up. The best choices for a kitchen are bright white, pale blue, pale yellow or pale green. Paint your cabinets in some nicely contrasting (light) color.
Now that your kitchen is clean, and perhaps freshly painted, it’s time to stock it. I am not going to go into exhaustive detail about this, as what tools are needed in a kitchen are highly individual. There are some basic tools that you should have. This is the time to make sure you have most, if not all of them, and to put them back in your freshly cleaned kitchen in an orderly, logical way.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy your newly cleaned and organized kitchen. Next week, we will tackle what to do in the kitchen, instead of to it.
Next Week: Thinking Like A Chef
Read the rest of this series:
- Part 1 – Scheduling
- Part 2 – Variety
- Part 3 – Moderation
- Part 4 – Being Picky
- Part 5 – Can The Canned Goods
- Part 6 – Get Your Kitchen In Order
- Part 7 – Think Like A Chef
- Part 8 – Technique
- Part 9 – Mise en Place
Table of contents for Change Your Relationship To Your Food
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Introduction
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 1
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 2
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 3
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 4
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 5
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 6
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 7
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 8
- Change Your Relationship To Your Food – Step 9
This is a fun series of posts. My own kitchen is painted a pale coral color with white counter tops, oak counters and terra-cotta tile. I love it.
Thanks! I’m pretty darn impressed by your food blog. Nice photography!