From House To Home

Q: Dear Christopher: I moved from a home with a large eat-in kitchen to a home with a very small kitchen as a way to downsize. While the new home has other features that my husband and I love, I feel cramped in the new kitchen and am trying to find a place for everything. I love to entertain so I have a lot of things in multiples of 10 and 12. Help! Helen in Kansas City, MO

A: Dear Helen: I feel your pain. A long, long time ago I was head of display for the Williams Sonoma store in Beverly Hills. My job was to revamp the store to be more appealing to amateur cooks versus only professional chefs. Since the store was just starting out, I agreed to take gourmet merchandise as part of my fee. Being a real foodie, this was a like a dream come true. Over the course of the following two years I amassed more gourmet paraphernalia than you could imagine. Pasta machines, ice cream makers, fish poachers and copper everything...enough to almost open my own store. For years, I lugged this stuff from home to home whether I ever used it or not. Finally I realized that I was rummaging through stuff I never used (or used only for big parties) to get to the things I actually needed to use every day.

Recently, I too moved from a home with a huge eat-in gourmet kitchen to a home with a space-challenged kitchen. In the process of moving, I had to strip down my kitchen to only those essential things I needed to use on a daily basis. I thought of it as my gourmet survival kit, which I’d have to rely on for a month. To my surprise, I realized how little a good home cook needed to turn out great meals. When I finally moved into the new home, my gourmet survival kit boxes where the first I unpacked--only to find out that they actually filled the entire kitchen--while another thirty boxes of cooking gadgets remained packed in the basement. I freaked. What am I going to do? Overwhelmed by the situation, I began to think about all the cooking I’d done with what I thought were the bare-bone basics for the transitional month I’d spent in the old house. I decided to leave the rest of the kitchen stuff packed and really take an entire month of nightly meal prep and a few intimate dinner parties to see if indeed, I found myself in the basement tearing open a box searching for something critical. It never happened. I finally took the time to accurately assess exactly what I needed to cook in the style I’ve perfected over the years.

I found out that much of the stuff I still owned was from one of my many various food phases that had come in a passion then gone out of boredom. Having taken the time to really understand how my menu had evolved, how my lifestyle had changed and how my confidence in a tightly culled range of fool-proof recipes were staples I returned to over and over again, I realized that I’d mastered the dilemma.

When I finally did unpack the boxes I got rid of everything I’d not used in the last year. I then bought fifteen, assemble-yourself, stainless steal shelving units and lined a basement wall with them. It was there that I placed all my big event stuff: the oversized serving platters, the dinner plates for twenty-four people and the few items that I simply couldn’t part with. When I’m planning a very occasional big event, I simply go shopping in my own subterranean gourmet store. My kitchen is now impeccably organized. Best yet, I discovered that a smaller, well-organized kitchen is easier to cook in than a huge one crammed with stuff I don’t need. Who knew?

Check out Ask Christopher next week for ALL NEW questions and answers. Next time: Art for Bare Walls?