Don’t Let a Messy, Inefficient Kitchen Hurt Your Cooking Skills: 15 Kitchen Tips

I was watching a Food Network show and one contestant had to prepare a gourmet type of dish on a camp stove with a variety of other challenges ahead of her.  Despite all of the challenges, she still managed to serve her required dish in a specified time.  I guess it’s just a sign that when you’re a really good cook (or chef), you can overcome a lot of obstacles and still come out on the other end with a beautiful meal.

Now, when you’re not such a great cook to start off with though, obstacles can really throw you for a loop.  The last thing you need is to be searching for an ingredient while your pot boils over or to be chopping vegetables at your kitchen table because your counter is so full of other things.

Here are 15 tips to help you keep your kitchen more neat and efficient:

Cleaning

1. Keep dishes out of your sink as much as possible.  Wash dishes or put them in the dishwasher as soon as possible.  Leaving dishes in your sink will just encourage more dishes to join them.

2. Try to tame the areas that habitually get messy.

3.  If you really, really need a “junk” drawer in the kitchen, that’s fine.  But, it’s not as fine to have multiple junk drawers.  It’s like after Jack sneezes for the fourth time and I stop saying “bless you,” and instead say, “Pull yourself together, man.”

4.  Have some kitchen cleaners handy to make messes easy to clean up quickly.

5. Consider trying to work on cleaning up while you’re cooking.  It only takes a little time, but it makes a huge time difference in the clean up time afterward.

Efficiency

1. Stock your kitchen with the essential kitchen tools.

2. Get rid of kitchen tools and small appliances that serve only one purpose unless you use it often.

3. Store things in ways that make sense.  You will cut down on your efficiency if you’re always needing to get out a step stool to grab a frequently used item off a high shelf, for instance, or worse yet – searching for things because you can’t remember where they are.

4. Gather all of your ingredients before starting to prepare a recipe.  Not only will you move through your recipe faster, but you also won’t run into a situation where you are in the middle of cooking and find out that you didn’t remember to get everything at the store that you needed.

5. Don’t use a jumble of containers for leftovers.  I love using things like these color coded Pyrex containers or Mason jars.  They are safe, reusable, and I don’t have to spend time searching around for a lid (since it’s obvious what goes with what and I keep them all together).

Organization

1. Figure out a storage solution for frequently used ingredients (such as baking supplies).

2.  Only keep small appliances and other items on your counter top that you use often.

3. Consider thinking outside the box for organization solutions, such as our storage solution for the pantry.

4. It can be easy to start gathering a collection of kitchen utensils.  If you have a drawer jammed full of them, go through them realistically and only keep what you really need and use.  Donate the rest.

5. Use a binder or notebook to get all of your loose recipes together in an easy to find place.

10 Days of Hope for the Kitchen Hopeless is part of the Autumn 2013 Hopscotch from iHomeschool Network, which features 10 day series from a variety of blogs on topics including household management, parenting, homeschooling, family life, and more.