I’ve got some inspiration I’d like to share with all of you, to help make your kitchen a lovely place to be.  It’s so easy to feel that we don’t have enough time to cook at home, and I have found (both in my home kitchen and our bakery kitchen) that organizing your space can have a big impact.  Having to look for your tools each time you try to make something adds up to a lot of wasted time, and a lot of frustration!  I’m going to talk more about organizing areas of your kitchen soon, but today, let’s start really basic, with your tools.

First off, I really really recommend taking about 15 minutes to look through all your kitchen tools.  Plan to give away (or throw away if they’re broken) half of what you’ve got.  That’s right – half of them.  Chances are you’re holding on to gifts you never use, tools that are partly broken (you’ve been saying you would fix it for how long?  Time to let it go.), and tools that seemed like they would be so useful, but are not.

Tools everyone needs: Good quality knives, and a steel for keeping them sharp.  Wooden spoons.  A good spatula, and a good thermometer (if you cook meats). A whisk, and probably a beater.

Beyond that, you may have your own tools you really use every week, or even a few times a year.  If you don’t use it, give it to the thrift store, so that someone else will.

Okay, now that you’re a few pounds lighter, organize.  In our kitchen, we have a jar by the stove that holds the tools we use every day.  In our house, wooden spoons, metal serving spoons, spatula, and whisk live here.  If you’re not reaching for this tool at least once a day, it needs a different home.  (My spatula, which I adore, is missing from the photo above, probably because I was using it!  It’s the Chef’s Slotted Turner from Lamson & Goodnow – an American cutlery company.)

The next level is tools that don’t get used every day, but we use at least weekly.  The drawer closest to the stove (this will depend on your kitchen’s layout of course) holds: oven mitts (we use these daily, but prefer them hidden), thermometer, tongs, hand beaters, salad serving spoon/fork, peeler, ladle, and fine grater.

Lastly, the everything else drawer.  Here is where you put those final tools that you do use (because you threw all those others out, right?), but not weekly.  Our canning funnel, pastry brush, grill spatula, can opener, extra salad spoon/fork, etc.  We use a lot of mason jars, so those lids are in their own drawer, but in your kitchen, they might live in this drawer in a little box.

The truly organized would have more tiny compartments for all these tools, but I’m somewhere in between.  I hope this is useful for you – it can seem like we don’t have time to invest in organizing, but we truly lose so much more time trying to find things.  Give yourself the gift of a tidy kitchen, and make sure everyone in your home understands how it works.  Labels or drawings can be very helpful, at least while everyone gets used to the new system.

Some books I love on this subject are:

Confessions of an Organized Homemaker by Deniece Schofield

Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck (This is mostly a book about how to clean, but includes a great organizing chapter)

See you tomorrow for Gratitude Friday!