A Working Kitchen

After a full day of chores, grocery shopping, and a lovely walk with my dog, I headed back into the kitchen to start dinner. Before leaving on the walk, I'd taken a few minutes to tidy up so I rounded the corner ready to take in the calm and soothing tableau of my still-new simply-styled open shelves.

What I actually found was this. 

^ Now, I know this isn't exactly a mess. But the level of clutter here is far more than my eyes care to see, and to be honest, as I surveyed this busy scene, I felt deflated. 

There are a lot of things sitting around that don't belong here.

^ Next to the sink, I see four cans of cherries and a bottle of bourbon, ingredients for my husband's birthday dessert, a bourbon cherry crisp from Sally's Baking Addiction. 

For most of my birthday-baking life, I've baked birthday treats on the day of the actual birthday, but finally it dawned on me that with our typically busy birthday schedules, I'm creating extra stress and pressure for myself on these special days. My goal now is to proactively prepare birthday desserts on the day before, and since I'm planning to whip up the crisp before dinner, I'm pretty proud of myself for staying properly on task

The garlic bulbs will be roasted for tonight's pizza toppings. I peep off all the outer papery layers, use a serrated knife to trim off the top of the bulb so each clove is exposed, the drizzle about a teaspoon of olive oil inside. I wrap the whole mess in foil and pop it into the over around 400 degrees for a half hour. Don't be like me - let the garlic cool before handling it. But with a simple squeeze from the bottom of each clove, a perfectly roasted bit of garlic will pop out the top. Put it on pizza for a taste of pure heaven. 

^ Over here by the cook top, we have mushrooms and arugula for the pizzas, as well as three Boboli shells. We usually make our crusts from scratch, but my third-born who has been denied the joy of a good Boboli pizza during her many years in Asia, made a special request.

The raspberries, rinsed and sorted, will accompany the pizza for dinner tonight. Fresh and simple.

And the oats are another ingredient in my husband's cherry crisp.

^ Up on the shelf, I spy four apples for Gracie, and hiding beneath the checkered napkin, a tiny wedge of coconut cake left over from Easter. The apples normally sit on the marble stand, and our cakes usually live on a different cake stand that sits above on the top shelf. But this cake is a three-layer cake, too tall to fit under the glass top of the other stand. And so it lives here, and the apples must find a new temporary home. 

^ I turn around and come across evidence of my mid-afternoon menu-planning session. Several cookbooks sprawl across the bit of counter space; Instinctively, I flip the books shut and stack them  before taking the picture. 

* * * * *

As I survey this busy scene, I still feel my original sense of dismay. I prefer to start cooking in a perfectly tidy kitchen, I tell myself. I think of the immaculate, not-a-single-thing-out-of-place kitchens I see in shiny magazines, TV shows, and online photos, and I can't help but feel like I am falling short of the design world's standards for pretty kitchens.

And then.

I realize how completely silly that is. 

My kitchen is not an ornamental space.

It is not meant to be an object of art, nor a place of purely aesthetic appeal.

This is a working kitchen. And while I definitely want a room that pleases my eye, I can't feed my family if I'm cooking in an art gallery. I want a workspace, a place where projects are always in process, where I can allow myself to make a good and proper mess. 

And take joy in the process.

Because there will always be time to clean my working kitchen up when I'm done. 

And my faithful dog, Gracie, will stay with me until I'm done.