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. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →