Small kitchens, big solutions

Chicken and Rice in a Pot, a quick one-pot dish adapted from the Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Recipe below.

Update: See Other Notes below for a timely food blog find.

In at least one previous post, I’ve mentioned New Yorkers’ collective penchant for ordering delivery instead of cooking, and my Brooklyn buddy Ronnie has backed me up on this. One huge reason is the tiny kitchens in most New York apartments. Real estate is expensive in New York. Really expensive. And usually, kitchen space is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of square footage.

For New Yorkers determined to cook at home—or for space-challenged cooks anywhere—there are solutions. Smaller sized appliances, for instance, that pack all the features of their bigger brethren, just in a smaller footprint. Forget hot plates and dorm fridges—these are high-end appliances made by the likes of Jenn-Air and Viking. It’s possible to drop a grand or two [or more] on an undercounter fridge, as an example. But for creative cooks, solutions to small kitchens come in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Which brings me to Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen’s Smallest Coolest Kitchen Contest. Last year, parent site Apartment Therapy held its first annual Smallest Coolest Apartment contest and showcased some wonderful apartments whose residents packed maximum living and versatility into minimal square footage. This year, they’ve rolled it out across all their sites: The Apartment, The Kitchen, Home Tech [home office or audio visual] and The Nursery. Site co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and his wife Sara Kate live with their baby, born in November 2006, in a 265-square foot apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, so they know whereof they speak.

When you live in an apartment, smart use of space is an ongoing challenge, no matter how big or small your place is. So checking out last year’s entries and their solutions that ranged from brilliant to creative to sometimes a little bizarre became a daily obsession. Besides, let’s be honest—seeing other people’s apartments is just plain voyeuristic fun. Now that there’s a kitchen-focused category, I may need a 12-step program once it’s over.

There’s still time to enter, by the way. The deadline is April 16. So if you’ve got a small kitchen, apartment, nursery or home office you’d like to show off, go to the site for details.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on organizing and working in a small kitchen, it’s Justin Spring. For more than a dozen years now, he has cooked in a kitchen that is just 45 square feet. And he grew up cooking weekends, vacations and summers on the 36-foot family sailboat, where the kitchen consisted of a camp stove, ice chest and bucket. Spring has written an appropriately diminutive book on small kitchens with a ridiculously oversized title: The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World—Your Own.

Unlike most kitchen books whose ideas are guaranteed to make your wallet bleed, Itty Bitty is refreshingly all about editing and purging, making pots and utensils do double duty and making space work efficiently. Besides lots of solid advice on equipping, organizing, cleaning, cooking in and entertaining from a small kitchen, you’ll find plenty of encouragement and inspiration, all in a friendly, fun, quick read.

You’ll also find recipes. A hundred of them, to be exact, all of which can be accomplished with no more than two burners and a toaster oven, if necessary. And while you won’t find haute cuisine, you’ll find some decent, doable eats. The recipes all feature what Spring calls “the combined imperatives of (1) being breathtakingly simple and (2) being interesting enough to merit the trouble of cooking.” The quick one-pot dish above is my adaptation of one from Spring’s teeny kitchen. The recipe follows.

Chicken and Rice in a Pot
Serves 2

4 skinless, boneless chicken thighs [about 1 pound]
2 heaping tablespoons flour
salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
generous pinch of saffron [see Kitchen Notes]
1/4 cup dry white wine
2+ tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup long-grain or basmati rice
1/2 cup chopped roasted red bell peppers, from a jar
2+ cups stock [see Kitchen Notes]
2 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley

Cut chicken thighs into bite-sized chunks. Season with salt and pepper, then toss with flour in a closed plastic bag to coat. Stir saffron in wine in a small bowl.

Heat a medium nonstick pot or deep skillet over medium high flame, about 90 seconds or until rim is hot to a quick, gingerly touch. Add 2 tablespoons of oil and sauté chicken until browned, cooking in two batches, if necessary. Transfer chicken to bowl and reduce heat to medium.

Sauté onion in same pan until translucent, adding more oil to pan, if needed. Add garlic, stir until fragrant—30 seconds or so—then add rice. Cook, stirring, until rice glistens and smells toasty.

Stir in chopped peppers and saffron and wine mixture. Return chicken to pan. Stir in broth, cover pan and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to avoid sticking. If needed, add more broth or water by 1/4 cups.

Serve chicken and rice in bowls. Sprinkle chopped parsley over top.

Kitchen Notes

Saffron. If you don’t have saffron on hand, Spring’s original recipe also suggests using turmeric as an option.

Stock. The original recipe suggested using low-sodium chicken stock. For me, this can make any dish taste like chicken soup, so I used a mushroom stock made from Superior Touch’s Better Than Bouillon Mushroom Base. You can also use vegetable broth or, for that matter, chicken stock. It is, after all, a chicken dish.

Other Notes

Talk about fortuitous finds and perfect timing. Nosing around in various blogrolls, I happened on Not Eating Out In New York, a blog that flies in the face of many New Yorkers’ culinary habits. At first glance, it’s a thoughtful, well-written blog that I look forward to exploring further. And I’m pleased to report that the author, a Brooklynite named Cathy, does drink out in New York.

Also this week in Blue Kitchen

Wake-up call. Need a little sleepy time music to help you doze off? This dark, inventive avant garde jazz album by the Vandermark 5 ain’t it. Also, an NPR interview with writer Daniel Levetin explores how our brains respond to music. Give both a listen at What’s on the kitchen boombox?