The Conundrum of Cook or Get Off the Pot

Dear Tamar,

I've recently been given the opportunity to create my “dream kitchen.” The existing one in the home my husband and I bought needs to be taken down to the studs. We won't have much cash for it, and the space is small, but still, it's a luxury, right?

My problem is that I dislike choice. I’ve always had a passion for small menus. I'm haunted by the white whale of some ideal version of things. I naturally shut down when presented with all of the options.

Cabinets. Ranges. Silverware. Shelving. How do I wrangle it all into a manageable cohesive choice? How do I decide what I want, when my blossoming as a cook has been in an old kitchen with scraps of leftovers?

-Cook or Get Off the Pot

Dear Cook or Get Off the Pot,

If theres’s anything I write about in as elegiac a tone as I do leftovers, it is constraints—the former being an edible form of the latter. I love constraints in (almost) every form. I love deadlines. I love seasons. I love a door frame too narrow to fit the desk through. I love running out of butter. The only constraint I resist is a budget—a form I want to embrace but instead rebuff.

Generally, I’m consistent. My favorite restaurant for its decade of existence was Oakland’s Camino, whose menu featured three main courses—which changed often and comprised a vegetarian dish, a meat, and a fish. The opening menu offered a choice of an egg, goat, or sardines. An empty page terrifies me, while a page covered in mediocre ideas and stilted syntax is energizing. This preference for fashioning a solution from existing materials is so constant across disciplines that I wonder whether there exists a genetic difference between those of us who like to mend/make do and those of us who like to make.

It causes panic in me, too, to imagine a blank slate. But why panic? Why not ask ourselves to reconceive of the feeling as difficulty? If there is any truth to the idea that some people prefer a blank slate, yet must also persevere when constraints arise, shouldn’t our type work to reshape our panic into something more manageable that we can, through effort, overcome?

I think so, and I believe there are several ways to do it. I did a bit of reading about kitchen remodeling in preparation for my reply to you. I do not do such reading normally—again, I experience pure anxiety whenever an article about home renovation finds me. For you, though, I waded in.

My constraint-oriented soul was drawn to the approach one couple took: buying an impractical stone sink on Craigslist and designing a kitchen around it. My friend, Kari, used to have a kitchen I loved. It had come into being in a similar manner: She’d bought an industrial Viking stove in an online auction late one night. She and her husband lugged the behemoth into the room and then, lacking funds and inspiration, installed a work table and some plywood. I found that kitchen perfect—though I wanted a bigger work table and, if they’d kept the house, would have lobbied for one. I remember loving Laila Gohar’s almost impossibly practical studio kitchen—or the one in her old studio, anyway. I looked it up. I found that her approach had been entirely opposite, and that appealed, too. The kitchen was designed and built by one company, with an eye toward complete functionality.

I think back through my own kitchens, every one of which has been borrowed or inherited. Some have been photographed. Each time one of my kitchens is, I intuit a subtext I wish I could erase: If you surround yourself with these things, you will be happy in the kitchen. One of the kitchens belonged to a college friend, one to a landlord, one to us—though it had been designed and built by someone else. I selected none of the things, other than the banged up utensils. In each instance, the happy cooking life captured on film blew into the kitchen with me, like dandelion spores on the wind, and, in my persistent cooking and hosting, found fertile earth, and took root. The subtext I infer has everything backwards.

There is one constant among the borrowed and inherited kitchens. Each is in motion. Something is afoot—rice is being cooked and tasted, tomatoes are canned, bikes lean precariously, a collection of wooden spoons and big cutting boards suggest heavy use. If I made any physical change when I moved into each of those kitchens, it was to clear away any small plastic utensils, replacing them with my own heavy duty metal and wooden ones. And then I immediately began gathering: scraps which turned into stock, glass jars for storage, perishable ingredients, people and more people and more people.

Dear cook, it is hard for our make-do type to cook up a dream kitchen. We must try, and otherwise rely on our ease cooking up the dream kitchen ambience—full of heat, movement, ingredients, laughter, messes, fixes, and people and more people and more people. Buy a big stone sink, or buy a massive Viking stove, or set up a large pegboard with hooks to hang your well-worn pots, and cook on an induction hot plate. Buy old silverware at a yard sale. Buy new silverware in a town you visit for the first time. Eat with chopsticks until silverware grows from your neighbor’s apple tree. Whichever you choose, immediately and without delay, add the elements that matter: cooking and gathering. Then, a predictable perfection will take root—the perfection of a place well used and loved. Other details will work themselves out.