It starts so innocently.
“We should get one of those NutriBullet things. How cool would it be to make our own smoothies?”
But then things begin to pile on.
“If we had a food processor, we could make our own hummus! It’s a miracle!”
“Fresh ground coffee is so much better!”
“I’m sick of this plastic crap. We should have nice wooden cutting boards!”
“Look at this Panasonic infra-red oven, wow!”
“Um…where do we pile up these cast iron skillets?”
Ayin and I have been making more of our own food lately, which means we need a lot more counter space and more cold storage space. And warm storage space, too, for that matter. And gadgets. Well, do we need the gadgets? Yeah, I suppose we do.
That’s all well and good unless your kitchen is the size of a teacup.
Okay, maybe it’s bigger than a teacup, but it feels that way sometimes. It’s a first-world problem for sure, and it embarrasses me somewhat to talk about it. Kind of like Bob Geldof should have been embarrassed to complain about his ingrown toenail in a book about bringing food to starving Africans. But here we are.
We used to get by with so much less. We’ve lived in houses built in 1910 and 1920, and all the rooms, closets, kitchens – everything – were smaller. And sometimes I’ll remember Alice Kramden’s kitchen on the old Honeymooners TV show.
Look at it. A ratty cloth-under sink, an oven that may or may not use gas, an old icebox (that required actual ice), a pan, a pot a few canisters. Now that was minimalism. I don’t see an avocado slicer anywhere.
I know that’s an exaggerated film set, not a kitchen, but it is how a lot of us lived not so long ago. I strive, unsuccessfully, toward that kind of minimalism in my life.
Meanwhile, where did I put that avocado slicer?
