Make the Kitchen Yours

I have never had my own kitchen. I have lived with my parents, lived in a dormitory with a group kitchen, and lived in a series of group homes with anywhere from one to five other people. I’ve found that some negotiation is necessary, but nonetheless, if I am going to come home and cook on a regular basis, I need the make the kitchen mine.

What do I mean by this? I don’t mean surreptitiously trashing all of your roommate’s kitchen gear in the middle of the night, as tempting as it might be when they smuggle avocado mashers and plastic cheese graters shaped like mice into the house. What I mean is that working in the kitchen is similar to any other kind of work. If there are pain points, if there isn’t a smooth flow, if you don’t have tools you like and feel comfortable with, it isn’t nearly as likely to happen. If your non-stick pan has lost all of its coating, if you try to get by with nothing but spatulas instead of tongs, or if all your knives are dull — a bona fide safety hazard, I should add — the joy is sucked out of the work, the end results suffer, and you’re less likely to do it.

These items do not have to be expensive. My favorite pan is a $20 Lodge cast iron, or maybe my $30 wok. My favorite knife is a $20-30 Victorinox. A lot of my other equipment is from thrift or discount stores, But I tested it, and liked it, and it made life easier for me, so I bought it. (I will admit to owning my fair share of fancy gadgets, but this is also sort of my thing, so it makes sense I’d drop $80 on an instant read thermometer.)

Here are three things that I think about most when it comes to making the kitchen mine.

Counter Space

My current house was chosen by my partner, Megan, and my friend Alex, who was coming to live with us. It’s large, has lots of light, hardwood floors downstairs, gas fireplaces, and is convenient to multiple bus and Metro lines. It also has an absolutely infuriating kitchen, with almost no counters. Luckily, we have a cart and a butcher block that fit it perfectly, and make it tolerable as long they remain clean. Lots of room to prep and move around makes cooking much more relaxing.

Multitaskers, Not Unitaskers

Unitaskers is one Alton Brown’s most famous concepts. The host of Good Eats on the Food Network, Brown is equal parts chef and culinary MacGyver; one of his setups I’m eager to try is using a giant cardboard box as a smoker, and he has an entire book on kitchen gear. Though he’s relaxed a bit over the years, Brown was dogmatic early in his career that you should avoid unitaskers at all costs, those shiny gadgets and doodads that are expressly built for one purpose, at best (one that have in my personal collection is the egg cuber, which is more of a nontasker since I don’t know why I’d ever need to cube an egg). If you get items that can be used in multiple ways or in multiple types of dishes, you’ll save money and storage space.

Storage

Speaking of storage space, nothing drives me away from the kitchen like a messy, junked up kitchen. Opening a cabinet and having everything spill out, or having to dig through drawers to find what I need, is enough to ruin my mood before I’ve even gotten down to work. The Container Store is absurdly expensive, but luckily, finding containers isn’t too hard. My house has a Costco membership, and has powered through multiple big plastic tubs of Party Mix and peanut-butter filled pretzels and held onto the containers afterward. We never throw out decent-sized glass jars, and we’re always on the lookout for squeeze bottles, cardboard boxes in useful shapes, and free boxes on the sidewalk with vases or wire racks. It can take some time to build up storage this way, but it transforms the cooking experience.