Getting Control of the Kitchen Cabinets
February 27, 2011, By Kurt Simonsen 0 comments
Not to sound like a giant stereotype or as if I were some kind of throwback to the Cleaver household, but my wife did all the cooking. I worked during the day while she was home with the kids. Our natural pattern was for her to handle the household stuff and I brought home an income.
Because of this pattern, I often found myself searching through kitchen cabinets and drawers looking for that one thing...a pizza slicer, a meat thermometer for the grill, the paprika. I would search the same cabinets, almost in the same way, all the time, and never did it really sink in that there was a system involved. It all felt like everything was just randomly thrown around, but it wasn't. Hey, she knew the layout in there and it all seemed to work.
But a funny thing happened along the way that forced me to immerse myself in the kitchen: I got divorced.
Since that day, I have had to learn what the kitchen triangle was and just exactly how to make the perfect red sauce. I still wouldn't know a roux if it bit me on the nose, and timing it so that the meat, the veggies, and the rice are all done at the same time...well, maybe at some point it'll happen.
Yet I've done well. In fact, I'd consider myself rather good in the kitchen now, and I can attribute my success to one decision I made when I sold our old house and moved into one of my own: get organized.
Thus my battle with the cabinets began. I had to devise a system that made it easy for me to function and concentrate on cooking rather than searching for items while everything on the stove burst into flames. I needed to know everything's place, and it had to be safe; no massive glass bowls could come flipping out of an upper cabinet and onto my daughters' heads.
That being said, here are a few of the ideas I came up with:
