For a change of pace, how about an article about food?
Even restaurants can have eensy little kitchens!
I get inordinately tired of people who bitch and whine that they can’t cook anything because they have small or imperfect kitchens. Bull****. Got a stove burner? Got a pan? You can cook. I’ve made and canned jam on a pullman unit in my family’s one-room tumble-down lake cabin. I once assisted in making a full Thanksgiving dinner using a grand total of 2 mini-microwaves, a rotisserie, and a toaster oven. (Now that was an experience.)
I haven’t gotten a copy yet, but I was so excited to see a book and blog addressing exactly this style of cookery, Gourmet Meals in Crappy Little Kitchens.
What’s that old saw? “A poor worker blames the tools.”
I guess, by comparison, my small and not very overly crappy kitchen is better than what a lot of people have to work with. It is still a challenge, and when we’ve put on our underground restaurant dinners this Summer, it has been pressed to the limit.
Prepping in advance is one method; you do what you can the night(s) before, and save the “must be last minute fresh to maintain the quality of why you are getting it direct from the garden” work for those last moments.
Clouds Downtown in Santa Cruz has a galley style kitchen; I worked there in ’94/’95. Ironically, the chef who built it around himself is a big (6’4″) Norse guy who used to cook in the Merchant Marines. His kitchens are pretty nearly like that in the article you reference, although it has four of those areas instead of one. So it’s not totally extreme. And if you are 6’4″, you can reach across such a kitchen easily, in both directions, at the same time.
As for what I’ve done and seen done in small home kitchens, I agree about no mercy for whiners. Considering that the wok is designed to cook a meal for a family over a handful of coals …
This is my next kitchen item to construct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_box
By: Karsten Wade on July 6, 2009
at 4:35 pm