What does The Modest Kitchen look like?
It's in a tiny basement studio apartment. This kitchen counter is my main work space, and it's right next to my bed. Occasionally bits of food will jump overboard and I'll find myself picking cookie dough off my blanket. One morning, I was making my bed and a piece of broken Ramen noodle fell onto the floor.
What appliances do I have? The microwave is key. It always stays on the counter, mainly because it has serving utensils, salt, pepper, sugar, creamer, paper towels, and miscellaneous other things stacked on top, and I don't want to move all of that. I'm learning to use the microwave for all sorts of routine cooking. Recently, that's included corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, and homemade pudding.
I have three other main appliances. My stove:
My oven:
My crockpot:
These three all occupy the same bit of counter real estate. This leads to me saying things like, "Now let's put away the stove and get out the oven." My hall storage shelves have a space that can hold the oven or the crockpot, and the stove gets stored on my bookshelf. (This means that there's no way to preheat the oven while cooking something on the stove. However, the crockpot and stove can fit on the counter together.)
Probably the biggest challenge is my fridge:
It's a dorm-sized fridge, with a tiny freezer. I have to defrost it from time to time--just another thing I've learned how to do in The Modest Kitchen. The landlord allows me to use some space in the chest freezer in the garage, but that's mainly for long-term storage. My tiny freezer doesn't do a good job at really freezing things, so I don't rely very heavily on frozen foods.
Someday I'll have a kitchen with real appliances, a full-size fridge, and a dishwasher. I can't wait to have a dishwasher! Until then, though, The Modest Kitchen suits me just fine, and I have so much fun being creative in my cooking.
