A Glug and a Drizzle
I need to talk to you in the kitchen. Anybody who knows me IRL knows that I spend an exorbitant amount of time in my kitchen cooking and baking. From cakes and pies to sourdough boules and fresh pasta. Basically anything dough or batter related. But also beyond the carbs I like to try my hand at cuisines from different geographic regions around the world.
Food is my love language. It’s how I express my love and appreciation to my friends, family, and myself.
So as you can imagine, I’ve collected a vast supply of ingredients both foreign and domestic. Some I’ve picked up at random in my local grocery store (I’m a sucker for a well-designed label) and others I’ve hunted for in specialty shops. I generally only buy ingredients online when I’ve exhausted all local options. [Buy local when you can! Support business owners in your community!] Some pantry items I use almost everyday and some only a few times a year, but there is nary a substitute when a recipe calls for pomegranate molasses- you better have some otherwise the dish (and your tastebuds) will suffer.
With so many different kinds of oils, vinegars, sauces, and spices- how do keep them all straight? Well, in order to keep things in order, you must be honest with yourself with what kind of cook you are and how you move through your kitchen. That can really be said for any space in your home or other frequent surroundings. Humans are creatures of habit and all our individual habits differ greatly from one another, that’s why, as a pro organizer, I ask SO MANY questions about you before our session begins. I need to determine who you are and how you operate before I design organizing systems curated specially for you. But I digress…
Are you an avid recipe follower or more of an intuitive cook? And you can actually be both, to be honest. I am! I get so excited when my new issue of Milk Street magazine gets delivered or when my sister gives me her old issues of Bon Appetit. I bookmark new recipes I want to try while I drink coffee. It relaxes me. But other days I get inspiration from what’s in season or when giving a second life to something in my freezer.
I worked in restaurants for many years and have always enjoyed the energy and flow of commercial kitchens. From the stress to the swearing, the tongs to the towels- it all makes sense and all works together seamlessly. When it comes to building a restaurant kitchen, the “why” is just as important as the “what.” Everything has its place and it’s there for a reason. So in order to move through my home kitchen, like I did in the commercial ones, I kind of began exploring “stations” as a way of organizing my pantry. If you’ve ever watched a kitchen reality show, you’ll know that stations (from sauté, to salad, dessert, to grill) are used as a way to keep all the ingredients you need to make your 4 or 5 dishes in one place so you don’t have to run all over hell’s half acre during dinner service. So not exactly in the same vein as being assigned a particular station, but similar in how it might be stocked.
If you follow recipes exclusively, it makes sense to have all your oils in one bin and vinegars in another. That way you know exactly where to look when the author calls for one, but what if you want to wing it? I like to draw inspiration from flavor profiles of various regions and that can be difficult when you have Greek olive oil next to Sichuan chili oil or Za’atar next to Shichimi Togarashi. With that in mind, I created some geographic bins where my Middle Eastern, Japanese, Mexican, etc. ingredients are kept in close proximity so I can get used to working with these like-minded flavors and grow as an intuitive cook.
This is what works for me…for now. Until one day I come up with a new idea and rearrange my whole damn pantry (which happens a couple times a year, tbh.) Kitchens are dynamic places, so organizing them should be as ever changing as the ingredients that fill them.
