CHAPTER 11 - The Meatless Kitchen - Buying Food and Planning Menus
Ever visit the kitchen of an avid cook? It’s organized, clean, well-stocked and ready for whatever creative menus strike their fancy. Eating well isn’t just about the food you eat – it’s also about having the tools you need to make great meals. Organization, planning and cleanliness will make cooking in your kitchen a pleasure rather than a chore.
Managing your workspace
Whether you enjoy spending hours in the kitchen chopping, stirring and mixing or just want to get in, get out quickly, it pays to make your kitchen somewhere that you enjoy spending time. That means that it’s clean, organized and has the equipment you need to do the job.
Step one to organizing your kitchen is to go through your cupboards and get rid of all the accumulated stuff that you don’t have any use for. That means broken appliances (and the ones you got as Christmas gifts that you’ve never used), old paper plates from kids’ birthday parties, half-full bottles of hot sauce that you’ve had for six years and those empty jars that are gathering dust on the top shelf. If you’re not going to use it, toss it out, give it away or sell it online – just get it out of your workspace.
Take your kitchen, one section at a time, and clean off the shelves. Wipe them down with cleanser, maybe lay down some fresh shelf paper. Do the same with your drawers. You don’t have to do it all in one night – take it a little at a time with the goal of getting all your shelves and drawers sparkling clean. Scrub down the stove and clean your refrigerator – inside and outside. Throw away food that’s gone bad or have just been sitting there for ages because you’ll never eat it. Toss out the foods in your cupboards that are going to waste, too.
Right now, there’s probably a haphazard plan, at best, to the way your kitchen is organized. Your pots and pans are a jumble in one cupboard, your wooden spoons, spatulas and knives all tossed in the same drawer, and your cookie sheets are leaning against the wall. The dry goods on your shelves – cereal, pasta, and the like – are probably stuck on the shelves with no regard for organization. It takes time to find things when you want to use them, and there’s an attitude of disrespect when you treat your food and your tools this way – your new lifestyle is about healthy habits, right? So develop good organizational habits, too!
Start by organizing things by type. Put all of your fats, oils, salad dressings and condiments together. Pasta, rice and other uncooked grains should be together, too. Think of how they’re stocked when you go to the grocery store – there’s an intuitive design behind the methods that grocers stock their goods. The same rules make sense in your kitchen, too. Organize your spices, as well. You don’t have to be quite so anal retentive as alphabetize them, but you can find an organizational system that works for you, like putting the things you use the most in the front, or separating the herbs and the spices.
Handling the hardware
There are tools that you’ll need to cook with, but not as many you might think – and possibly not even as many as you already own. If your countertop is cluttered with a coffeemaker, a mixer, a blender, a toaster oven and microwave, be honest about how often you use these items. Do they need to be there all the time? If you rarely bake, store the mixer under a counter until you need it. Ditto the blender. If you only make a pot of coffee on the weekend, think about store it out of sight during the week. This will give you more space to work and make your kitchen look less cluttered.
If you don’t cook much, you may find yourself lacking some basic kitchen essentials. Most can be purchased inexpensively at stores like Target or Wal-Mart, but you can find a lot of them for almost nothing at thrift stores. The basics for any home kitchen include:
Measuring cups and spoons
Bowls in various sizes for mixing and serving
Wooden spoons
Rubber spatulas
Whisks
Baking pans and cookie sheets
Pots and pans in assorted sizes
Good, sharp knives – a paring knife, a chef’s knife and a serrated bread knife
Bigger items that you’ll probably want:
A mixer, either countertop style or handheld
Heavy duty blender
Food processor
Slow cooker (usually called a crock pot)
Rice cooker
