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. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →

Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello

We moved last weekend. Actually, the process has been ongoing in earnest for a few months now, but Saturday morning the actual movers came with the truck. We’d hired them to move the big stuff—furniture, mainly. That meant we were moving everything else, carload by exhausting carload.

Friday night we made two runs, then packed the car again to drive it full when we led the movers to the new place. We ended up getting to bed at 3 o’clock Saturday morning and got up at 7:30 to finish getting ready for the movers arriving at 9.

I don’t recommend moving on four and a half hours’ sleep.

We’d heard and read all kinds of horror stories about movers showing up late or not at all, but our crew arrived about 15 minutes early. Which was the cue for our 17-year-old cat Cosmo to add to the drama of the day by disappearing. He’s been an indoor only cat for the last ten years, but springtime always awakens the prowling gene in him, and he starts hanging out around windows and doors, sniffing the air and looking hopeful. We were afraid he’d already managed to slip out somehow—or would do so once the movers were going in and out. Finally, though, he nonchalantly sauntered out of a room we had each searched top to bottom, twice. How the hell do they do that? We promptly confined him in the room he’d just exited, and the move got under way.

The movers were amazingly efficient; when they finished unloading on the other end, it was only noon. And Marion and I were only getting started. We made another run to the old place, picking up another load, this one including Cosmo. Once he was safely installed in the new place, we unpacked boxes for a few hours, then made a run to what I’ve dubbed the holy trinity: Target, Home Depot and Petsmart [otherwise known as the cat food store in our household]. By the time we’d hit all three, it was eight o’clock and no dinner plans had been made, other than we needed to eat some. Fast. Continue reading “Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello” →

A non-Wednesday bonus post: Art and food

My friend Carolyn in St. Louis [she would correct me and say, “Eureka!”] found this great story on the NPR website about two grocery store chains hiring artists. It was so good, I had to share it.

Marshall McLuhan once said, “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.” Some people probably thought he was calling advertising people [of which I’m one] Neanderthals. But I understood his point. Those wonderful cave paintings, mostly of herds of running animals, weren’t the prehistoric equivalent of sofa-sized paintings to decorate the home. They served a very practical purpose: To ensure the success of the hunt. The otherwise well-preserved paintings are pockmarked, probably by attacks with spears and other weapons as part of some kind of good luck ritual. And the artists stenciled handprints onto the animals’ necks and other control points, probably intended to give them control over their prey.

I frequently shop at Trader Joe’s and, on occasion, at Whole Foods. I’ve always noticed the fun and often funny hand-drawn signage in the stores—kind of cave art for the twenty-first century, designed to ensure the enjoyment of our hunt. And I’ve wondered about its creation. I’m delighted to learn that these two smart chains find it worth their while to hire artists for each store.

The photo is by the artist, Katie Lanciano, and is from NPR’s site. I trust neither will mind me using it to publicize their story.

The kitchen boombox moves to the living room

This was supposed to be a photograph of a quick, delicious salmon dish. But Sunday Marion and I started painting the living room. We’re moving this spring and had to return the living room to a more landlord-friendly off-white [see the wall behind the boombox] from its lovely deep coral [see the wall behind the brandy bottle from an earlier post]. So instead of salmon, today I’m going to serve up some music as the main course, with a side of painting antics.

Let’s start with the antics. Sunday is normally the day I cook and photograph the week’s upcoming post. Instead, we spent the morning moving a couch and a loveseat, three side tables, an old flea market find kitchen table that is our computer desk, various lamps, three paintings [one of them 6′ x 8′ and another 5′ x 7′], a rug and a mountain of family photos, tschotskes and vintage cameras. Oh, and about a bazillion little jingly cat toys discovered under the couch and loveseat. Oh, and a beautiful but monstrously heavy piece of decorative terra cotta from some long ago demolished St. Louis building.

Sunday afternoon, Marion took on the umpteen other things that needed accomplishing around the apartment and out in the world, and I started painting. With the first few brush strokes, I could see this was going to be a two-coat job. Two coats in our 12′ x 19′ living room. With two built-in shelving nooks. And five windows, one door and miles of baseboard to tape around. And a radiator to work around. Yep, this was going to be fun. Continue reading “The kitchen boombox moves to the living room” →