If you’re gearing up for holiday cooking, baking, and feasting, taking an hour to rethink your kitchen organization beforehand is a very a wise idea. Kitchens by their very nature are places of mayhem. Ingredients flying about and pots bubbling over with a circus sideshow of hot pan juggling out of the oven. Simplify and organize that space and you’ll do yourself a favour. Perhaps even prevent a culinary disaster.
Really put some thought into how you move about your work space. Three extra steps might sound silly at first but multiply that out by the bazillion times you have take them usually right when something is in a hot pan on the stove and those seconds matter. Plan out landing zones for both hot plates and dirty leftovers. Get your cutting boards an easy scrape above your trash bins. Put the tea kettle near the taps. Get your heaviest pots and pans on shelves easiest to reach. Make your most used pantry items sit at eye level. Put the shopping list next to the pencils. I realized after the fact that my organization was really just a haphazard result of shoving things where they fit when I first moved in and a total rethink really changed flow for the better.
I was adventuring through my local Megamart the other day and as usual was watching the other customers. I consider it my own little amateur anthropology expedition. When I found a woman agonizing over the limited and overpriced selection of ‘kitchen caddies’ I had to mention a little tip which made her light up with realization. I might be labelling them with the wrong terminology but I’m talking about the insanely useful canister/pot/tube-looking-thingy you park next to your stove to hold all your randomly-handled utensils like a multi-headed hydra of kitchenware. Wooden spoons, spatulas, whisks, potato mashers, ladles, etc.
She was trying to pick the lesser of four evils – fairly hideous versions that started at twenty bucks (some twice that price) that could barely hold much more than three spoons and a pastry brush. The solution? I walked her over a few aisles to the gardening department and pointed out the vast array of flower pots decorated in any fashion she could have desired. Starting at $2 for a simple clay example no less. Not only are they cheaper than ‘designer gourmet’ sorts but most garden pots flare out at the top giving you more room which perfectly spreads your utensils just that little extra bit for ease of access. I got mine that you see above for $3 at a car boot sale sometime in the mid-1980s and have been lugging it along in my kitchen as a trusted friend ever since.
Another other cheap organizational tip is nails. Or screws. Or particularly pointy dowels. Long ones. Anything that can hold weight and be drilled into a wall or cabinet. The message here, particularly for cramped kitchens, is to think in the “up” dimension. Oftentimes people try to sardine-tin the odd shapes of racks, lids, and other kitchen paraphernalia into drawers barely able to contain them. Take advantage of unused wall space or the ends of cabinets by driving in a particularly long and sturdy screw as a hanger. Most every bit of kit in your kitchen will already have a suitable hole or hook. You didn’t really need those picture frames on your walls after all.
My last little geek tip is super magnets. Called ‘neodymium’ magnets from countless merchants on Amazon and eBay they can be had for pennies a piece in most any shape, size, or thickness. And when they say ‘super’, they really mean it. In fact they’re strong enough to dangerously pinch and even shatter if allowed to snap together in the wild. While they might not support your pots and pans, they do a good job on everything else made of conductive metal like lids, utensils, and various gizmos or attachments – my handy thermometer you see above for one particularly useful example. Some people even make homemade knife ‘bars’ with them but I’m not that brave, especially with cats in the house. They’re strong enough to attract through many materials including tape, cloth, and hot glue gun output so get your clever crafting cap on and put them to good use. A few well placed on the side of the fridge and above the cook top vent means my universal pan cover, timers, and thermometer stick there effortlessly right where I need them at a moment’s notice. Kitchen gargoyles seem to appreciate them too.
Brew a cup of tea and sit in the middle of your kitchen for half an hour to rethink the whole arrangement but best do it before holiday guests arrive.
