Evicting the Food Giants from your life: a step-by-step guide: 5

Make your kitchen helpful ... and a pox on kitchen cupboards

Hello, and welcome to the latest instalment of My Bumper Book of Food-Giant-Slaying. This week, as well as a look at some of the things that make a kitchen more helpful – and what doesn’t – there’s a delicious strawberry, radicchio, and ricotta salad.

Battles get won by whoever has the best weapons – or equipment as it likes to be called in the kitchen – and the Food Giants have everything money can buy. To fight them, making food needs to be easy as well as delicious, and having the right kit in the right place, can make the difference between getting supper on the table and begging Deliveroo to hurry. This week I want to take a good look at what makes something the right place, and what wastes your time and adds to your stress.

*** Warning: this post contains gratuitous bossiness ***

A helpful kitchen doesn’t need to be state of the art – my current kitchen in London is state-of-the-cobbled-together – but it has to have the right kit and it needs to be easily accessible. And modern design is very good at streamlined-ness but it isn’t necessarily more practical than what was state of the art in the 19th century.

When I visited the Brighton Pavilion – the Prince Regent’s (later George IV) extravagant entertaining pad – I was very underwhelmed by the interior – overdone and gloomy – but the kitchen was a thing of wonder: an entire wall of shelves with size-graded copper pans with their lids on,* a huge central table as a worktop, and a steam oven (a terrific innovation at the beginning of the 19th century), a mechanical spit (ditto), and another entire wall of wood or coal-fired hobs.

**And one hopes there’s a cupboard somewhere to hang by their toes anyone who stores the lid of one saucepan inside another saucepan and then puts a lid on it. Reader, it happens and it’s only my humanitarian nature that recommends such leniency.

Storing Lids

Storing lids on the pans they belong to is very helpful: they are always ready to use, and no time gets wasted hunting for the right one.

The main cause of lids not being stored on top of its own pan is stacking – a heinous, time-wasting habit practiced by persons in possession of too many pans. If you are one of these persons, sort through to find the ones you use regularly, and store the rest elsewhere – the garage roof, a nearby bus stop, under your bed; it doesn’t matter where: if you only use it occasionally, fishing it out of the utility room or garden shed is not much of an inconvenience.

Storing Pans

Storing pans on a shelf is by far the most ergonomic place – you can see immediately which one you need and just reach up to grab it. Hanging them from a rack is the next best option – so long as the lids are stored in an easily accessible place. Pan drawers – one of the few genuinely helpful innovations of modern kitchen design – are also good for storing pans (astonishing but true), so long as they are not crammed full of things stacked on top of each other. See above.

You don’t actually need the drawers to be the latest kitchen design – in my kitchen, I use a rather nice 19th century chest of drawers which slide open and shut with almost the same ease* as a 21st century bespoke kitchen drawers. Although the state-of-the-art modern ones that glide open when you whistle a merry tune do make my heart beat faster.

However, the most convenient place of all is on the hob, so if there are pans that you use every day, that’s the best place to keep them. For me, that’s my prospector pan and griddle.

*I have another chest of drawers where the drawers do not open without considerable heaving, and I store things in it that I hardly ever use and should have chucked out if I was good at that sort of thing.

The least helpful place is a floor-level cupboard, which are specifically designed for scrabbling around and not finding things in the maximum amount of time – only outdone by corner cupboards, with or without a carousel, which are fit only for storing the things you never use. I do not have enough words to describe just how much I dislike scrabbling in the back of cupboards to find cooking equipment, especially when I’m short of time.

To minimise the misery of cupboards:

• Take everything out of the cupboards and put on one side all the things you never or rarely use.

• If you are talented at getting rid of things, get rid of them.

• Otherwise find somewhere else to keep them – see above – where they won’t be in the way, and stop you finding the things you do use.

• Store the things you use the most at the front of the cupboard.

• Don’t stack unless you absolutely have to: if you do need to stack, there might be a better place to keep one of the items.

• If you can retro-fit slide-out baskets, your life will improve beyond rubies.

My ideal under-worktop storage are open shelves: you can see everything that’s there and reach it really easily. The occasional bit of dusting needed is a very reasonable exchange for the hours of scrabbling.

The Drawer of Doom: otherwise known as the place you keep your Tupperware

For reasons not entirely clear, humans have decided that they need at least 475,000 plastic boxes of subtly different sizes in their kitchen – and must separate them from their lids when not in use.

Having to take a week off work to match the container with exactly the right lid is not helpful, and if they’re stored in a cupboard rather than a drawer, despair is the only option.

There are only so many plastic containers you are ever going to need, so store them with their lids on, so all you need to do is reach into the drawer and fish one out.

It is unlikely that you will need more than can fit into a pan drawer or cupboard, but if you do, you can always use a bowl and cover it. But if you can’t face life with less, store the surplus somewhere else – anywhere within a reasonable distance of your kitchen will do. See above.

Machinery and where it should live.

The Food Giants do not store their heavy machinery in a cupboard, to be lifted out whenever it’s needed. I’ll get onto equipment in another post but where you store your heavy gadgets is crucial if you cook from scratch every day.

My food processor – a Magimix – is one of my favourite and most-used Food-Giant-slaying gadgets. I could go further and say that there are days when if I had to choose between it and my laptop, my laptop would be in the bin. Please don’t tell, or it might start misspelling everything or deleting important files.

It’s fantastic for chopping, slicing, and grating vegetables, and making soups, gremolata, hummus, sauces and patés, pastry – and can do it all in seconds. Unlike a laptop, which takes years to write one little novel – and insists that I do all the work. But it is a heavy thing, and unless you feel your life would be enhanced by a hernia or a slipped disc, keep it on the counter – along with any other heavy equipment that you use. If you are about to say, ‘but there’s no room’, examine what’s there already: unless it’s something heavy and used every day, put it somewhere else.

And bear in mind that you don’t need much actual space to chop things up or roll out pastry, so having acres of empty worktop and your food-processor at the back of an under-counter floor-cupboard is not at all helpful to either cooking or defeating the Food Giants.

The Diva thinks I should come clean about my messy, clutter-hoarding habits; that all off the above implies that I’m some kind of Marie Kondo with a rolling pin, when I’m nothing of the sort.

I shall do no such thing. You’ve got quite enough to do without reading about my alleged and unsubstantiated shortcomings.

About my cobbled-together kitchen

When I moved into my flat, the kitchen consisted of a sink, a cooker and a stainless steel shelf, and I had neither money nor inclination to create a modern fitted kitchen because the room was so wonderful. About £300.00 later (for the steel worktop) – plus a fridge and dishwasher – I had everything I needed. I could do with a bit more workspace – I occasionally contemplate a moveable island – but the end of my kitchen table has served well enough for the last five years.

The reason my ultra-low-tech kitchen works for me is that I never have to scrabble around in the back of cupboards to find anything (no cupboards), everything is to hand on a shelf above the worktop, or on some old brewery shelves to the side. Things stored below worktop level are on open shelves, making it easy to see what’s where, and equally easy to get at them.

Life is not too short to cook, but it is definitely too short to hunt around for the right-sized saucepan lid.

And now I’m off down to the Sansepolcro Co-op because it turns out that I don’t have enough Tupperware – or rather the rather nice glass version they sell there, Frigoverre. I did have plenty, but then mice made themselves at home in my larder: I share the house with much wildlife, and usually we rub along quite sociably – but mice take liberties, so now everything is in a box.

Radicchio with Strawberry, Black Olives, and Ricotta

As we head for peak strawberries, this salad is absolutely wonderful. I have an absolute passion for ricotta – its creamy softness, and flavour so delicate it’s hardly there – and it combines fabulously with the sweetness of the strawberries and bitterness of the radicchio.
Radicchio makes for excellent salads – gorgeous colour, robust enough that it doesn’t collapse into a wimpy heap if you add heavier ingredients, and just enough bitterness to be interesting without making your eyes water. There are many salads to make with it, but I love this one.

Serves 4

• 1 head of radicchio

• 40g ricotta

• 10 black olives

• A large handful of strawberries

• Small salad onion,

• Lemon zest

• 2 teaspoons of olive oil

• Balsamic vinegar

• Teaspoon of honey – optional

• Salt and pepper

‍

1. Roughly chop or break up the radicchio – so you have a good, but not unwieldy expanse of leaf.

2. Very finely slice the onion.

3. Hull and quarter the strawberries – unless they are very large, in which case chop them smaller.

4. Roughly slice the black olives into rings.

5. Put it all in a bowl and grate the lemon zest over it.

6. Add the olive oil, honey, balsamic vinegar, and salt and mix really well.

7. Scatter small pieces of ricotta over it.

‍

Diva notes.

Strawberries

Strawberries must be sweet or there is absolutely no point in eating them. Very often the ones for sale are not. There are plenty of sweet and delicious varieties, so could somebody please explain why these are not mandatory? And why governments all over the world sit back and do nothing?

Black Olives

I either use the mild ones you get in tins – which I slice into chunky rounds – or the bitter squidgy ones, which I leave whole.

Leftover Radicchio

Radicchio looks terrible the next day – as if it’s had far too much to drink and has a massive hangover – but it’s actually really delicious. So don’t throw away any left over; eat it for lunch the next day.

Ricotta’s low-calorie-dense credentials

As it is fairly low fat, and contains a lot of moisture, you can eat 40g for the same calories as 15g of Parmesan.