A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place is a mantra that most home makers are familiar with and if you are not, you should be! It is the key to organisation!This is helpful whether you are looking at organising your Living Room or your Kitchen. In our home, my kitchen is actually the tidiest place in the entire home and this is entirely due to the lack of space in there! That’s right – we have a tiny kitchen for a family of 8.
In order to cook and prepare food efficiently, I am forced to put away everything that I do not use and to streamline everything possible. And this is reviewed periodically since our needs are always changing and we sometimes acquire new tools to help me.
I also have a cupboard shelf and a drawer that I set aside to allow my toddlers to go through when I cook. This allows me to do food preparation in peace while they play near me. But they are only allowed to that shelf and drawer. And they need to pack everything up when we leave the kitchen.
In order to work fast – key word when you have many young children in the house! – is to make sure that what I need regularly is all within reach at my work “station”, near the sink. This means not putting my regularly used pots and pans up in the top shelf of the cabinets. It also means keeping soya sauce, salt, corn flour near my work “station”. And it means putting away my little used crockpot* away in the cabinet.
Things that are used together are placed in the same shelf or cabinet. Example – all baking ware and equipment belong in the same cabinet, not hidden away in various shelves. Likewise, all coffee, tea, hot chocolate, sugar belong in the same shelf.
To further organise my Kitchen, every child has his/her own cup. At the moment, all have their assigned cutlery and crockery. This will soon change as the older ones will soon need bigger plates! These cutlery and crockery are not put aside after each meal. After they are washed, I just leave them in the dish rack holder till the next meal. We do not use a dishwasher so all everything is dripped dry on the dish rack after they are washed.
And please, please throw out those containers you have been meaning to reuse or recyle! If haven’t used it in the last 6 months, it is highly unlikely you will use it. And those that have missing covers, they do not belong in the kitchen either! I understand Tupperware will replace your covers for free since they have a lifetime guarantee. If you can’t bear to throw them out, then do what I do – give them to the children to add on to their doll house toy collection.
If you want to spend as little time in the Kitchen as possible, being organised – not just in meal planning but also in space organisation , is necessary.
* I do not use our crockpot as regularly now. Dh says the meat cooked in the crockpot tends to be dry. So we have switched to using a Thermal Cooker or Cooking Pot .