Fantasy kitchen item

Maybe Xzibit should have an interior-design show. I think he'd rock at kitchens. Your butcher block would have a built in, pop-up plasma TV, there'd be a chiller for beverages built into the wall, and the whole shebang would have a particular flair.

Not too long ago, some new, flexible displays were unveiled - computer monitors so thin you could bend them. I'd like to have a monitor like that outfitted with a wireless connection and some speakable-items technology so I could call up recipes without having to have an open cookbook lying around in the small amount of space in my kitchen (which while technically large is about half-used by a craft operation and is thus, once again, cramped).

I suppose this is just a matter of time. I hope so, anyway.

Best Banana Bread Recipe EVER

We have all been there...the last few bananas sit in the bowl and turn a little black while the week buzzes by. Everytime you pass them you think, "I really need to make banana bread." Then, just as quickly the moment passes. Yesterday I felt more inspired than usual. I called my brother for his recipe. He was happy to share it but wasn't where it was handy. I waited a few hours then I decided to crack open one of my many cookbooks.

This is what happened...

My house smells like bananas and butter right now...I am baking a Paula Deen banana bread.....

1/2 C butter, room temp
1 C sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3 ripe bananas

Preheat oven to 350.
Grease 9x5 pan.
In a mixing bowl, combine butter and sugar, mix well. Add the salt, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, baking powder and bananas, and mix well.
Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 50 minutes.

At this point I don't care if it tastes good, my house smells so good I can't stand it. The dogs keep coming upstairs to tell me there is something in the oven. They usually only do that when I am baking chicken.

*************

Update: It tastes even better than it smells. I can't believe I found a recipe that doesn't need any tweak to improve upon it. Simple and delicious. Sooooo good.

Rather fond of fondue!

Okay, our kitchen isn't as cramped as it used to be but I still look for easy ways to entertain without taking too much time or space. For the Autumnal Equinox we celebrated by having ten people over for fondue! The beauty of fondue is all of the side items can be prepped ahead of time and it really is conducive to mingling groups of friends.

Here's the menu:

Traditional Swiss Cheese and White Wine Fondue with French bread, onion bagels, grapes and Granny Smith apples
Beer Fondue with Swiss & Sharp Cheddar with with French bread, onion bagels, and kielbasa. Caesar salad
Pinot Grigio Sparkling cider
Dessert: Sorbet and wafer cookies

Ahead of time: Cube the French bread, cut the bagels into 1/2" thick rounds. Rinse the grapes, stick them back in the fridge in a colander with paper towels underneath. Cube the kielbasa. Shred the cheeses. Chill the wine. Make sure you have the sterno or candles needed to keep the fondue pot on the table properly heated.

Gadget tip: A large lazy susan will make it easier to serve all the components of the fondue. The lazy susan can be turned while people are dipping their goodies in the cheese.

Etiquette tip: Some people haven't fondued (surely a verb even if spell check thinks not) before so its nice to give a few pointers on the methods of dipping and twirling and also, the golden rule of fondue...if you drop your bread in the cheese, you must kiss the person sitting next to you.

Recipes

TRADITIONAL SWISS CHEESE FONDUE
1 split clove of garlic
1 c. dry white wine
1 lb. Swiss cheese, grated
2 tsp. cornstarch
3 Tbsp. vermouth
Dash nutmeg

Rub pot with garlic, add wine and vermouth and heat on stove until bubbles begin to rise. Do not boil. Toss cheese with cornstarch and add to hot wine, a handful at a time, cooking over low heat until cheese is melted and smooth, stirring constantly with wooden spoon. Add nutmeg. Light burner, set pot on unit, spear bread with fondue fork and dip away.

BEER CHEESE FONDUE

1 sm. clove garlic, halved
3/4 c. beer (Sam Adam's Octoberfest)
8 oz. Swiss cheese, grated
8 oz. grated Sharp Cheddar cheese
1 tbsp. flour

Rub inside of saucepan with garlic. Discard garlic. Add beer, heat slowly. Coat cheese with flour. Adding slowly to beer. Stir constantly until bubbly. Transfer to fondue pot. If too thick add warm beer.

Test Kitchen Approved Shortcuts

As the mother of an eleven-month old, I have learned to compromise and that shortcuts are the only way dinner will get on the table...sometimes.

So here is my short list of short cuts:

Trader Joe's pizza dough from the fridge section (you let it rise, you roll it out, it looks homemade)
Stuffed Pork Chops from the butcher
Trader Joe's Pre-cooked Brown Rice from the freezer section, three packets to a box (nuke it in three minutes and viola)
Angel Food cake from the deli + frozen berries (thawed) + Vanilla Cool Whip (cut cake in half - diagonally, scoop out a trough around the bottom with a soup spoon, place berries in the track, replace top of cake, "frost" with Cool Whip stick in the fridge...

Know when to cheat

OK, so I don't think this really counts as cheating, but I like to make everything from scratch, so it feels that way, at least a little bit: I bought the ready-to-bake brownies, the kind that come in their own pan. They're really quite good.

I think the bottom line is this: Sometimes, in any kitchen, a shortcut is OK. This is especially true on occasions when you have far too much to do, or need two ovens, or just wish you could watch a movie instead of baking.

Compromise

I like crepes. Who doesn't, really?

I also like cornbread, scrambled eggs, sausages... all of which could conceivably have their own pot, pan or double-boiler.

What I have instead is one well-seasoned, 10-inch cast-iron frying pan. Is it the best tool for any given job? Maybe not. But it is the Swiss Army knife of pans: pretty darn good for just about anything.

Also, it cost less than $10, new (I think it was part of a three-piece, $15 set).

Go fish

I love fish and chips, but I am not a big fan of deep fat frying, at least not when it is me doing the frying. I usually cook for two, so a big vat of oil just doesn't make sense, and reusing french fry oil is a pretty poor idea, health- and taste-wise.

So I've been opting for hashbrowns and oven-fried fish:

Oven-fried fish for two
8-12 ounces true cod, cut into pieces of your choosing (i.e. the size you like your fried fish pieces, skipper)
Three slices of bread (I am talking about bread about the size of Wonder bread)
About 1/4 cup cream
Butter (I use about 1/4 of a pat per piece of fish during cooking)

Break the bread into small crumbs and heat on a cookie sheet in a 200-degree oven until dry and crispy.
Dip the fish pieces in cream, then dredge in the crumbs. In principle, you're supposed to somehow place the dredged fish pieces on a rack until "dry" but I didn't have a lot of luck with that.
Place the fish pieces in a casserole, top with a little bit of butter and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.
As I hinted a moment ago, this dredge-in-crumbs bit is a little sketchy, so you could also lay down a layer of crumbs in the casserole, lay the cream-dipped fish in on top and top the fish pieces with crumbs, then butter, then bake. The result is just as tasty.

Hashbrowns
Three medium Yukon gold potatoes, diced
One *small* yellow onion, finely chopped
Worcestershire sauce or other seasonings, to taste
Two to three tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup cream

Heat the oil over medium heat until hot, then dump in the onions and potatoes. Season with your favorites (I like W-sauce, but they're good with pepper, salt and paprika, too)
Um, cook the hash until brown, flipping at least once (to prevent burning, if nothing else). When they're done, drizzle the cream over the top and cook for a couple minutes more, then serve.
These can also be amended with some cottage cheese...

Unnecessary but fun

Being a homeowner, I find myself in what must be a traditional trap of saving jars and other containers. Until a recent sweep of my storage area, I had a mountain of yogurt containers, peanut-butter jars, jelly jars, olive jars (martinis - yum!), you name it. Luckily, my city started taking a lot more plastics than it used to at curbside, so I recycled plenty about a month ago. I couldn't part with the PB & J containers, though.

The jelly jars (Bonne Maman, my favorite for raspberry preserves) turn out to be super everyday drinking glasses, and the peanut butter jars are handy storage containers for all kinds of things in my pantry (my pantry is probably just like yours: aka cupboard).

I don't think my cupboard contains too many items in their original packaging: Black beans, lentils, popcorn and chickpeas all hang around in PB jars, which is probably unnecessary, but makes me happy. I think that's important - having fun - especially if your pantry is as lavish as mine.

Chase's Cobbler v2.1

It's been a few years since I posted my original cobbler recipe. So, taking inspiration from a recipe I found in this month's Country Home magazine...here are a few more delicious combos to try:

Cherries with Chinese Five Spice
Blackberries with Pears and cloves
Apples with Cheddar (add 1/4 cup sharp shredded cheddar to the "dough") and Nutmeg

Space-saver?

The second thought that passed through my mind while admiring the clever Nuscup (by Dalla Piazza, a Swissmar company):

Who keeps spices in jars big enough to fit this scoop?

The first thought was, "hey, that's neat!"



You can get these measures in larger sizes, so maybe a big one would be useful. But a bigger one would be no better (and more expensive, and harder to clean, and with moving parts) than one of the Oxo angled measures, which you will be shocked to learn I use in my kitchen. I still have a set of dry measures, too, mostly because they are pretty and my wife gave them to me! Sometimes even a cramped cook has to be given a special pass.

Always paring down

I think this is probably true of any part of your living space, but the premium on space in a cramped kitchen necessitates an occasional spring cleaning (even if it isn't spring).

For me, this usually just means rooting out a few old sets of napkins and haggling with myself over whether to keep all the coffee cups or get rid of a couple. And trying to part - once and for all - with the little-used Dutch oven. Maybe I'll turn it into a garden ornament.

Even if you haven't bought or received anything new and are sure the exercise will yield nothing to offload, I think it is still worth it. Maybe you'll realize you have some unused ingredients you want to make a dent in (I found a bunch of chickpea flour last night, for example), or maybe you'll realize that by reorganizing your spices you can save some valuable cupboard space, too.

I try to make a pass through the kitchen every two or three months. I also do so whenever I think I might be putting on my traveling shoes: It is always nicer to move with less, not more, stuff.

There's always room for ants!

Some problems don't care if you have a big kitchen or a small one.

Ants have made their annual foray into our kitchen, maybe trying to beat the heat (it was about 110 the day they started showing up in force.

I suppose they are a good reminder to keep all your ant-tempting goodies in well-sealed containers. I recall a Belizean innkeeper saying that ants could be a big help, but his ants were army ants, and they ate everything - crumbs, snakes, small animals, people (OK, they only tried for people) when they swept through his hotel's compound.

I would like those ants to show up at our house for a day, but with advanced warning.

Channeling Rachel Ray

Apparently, Rachel Ray is doing a segment on small kitchens, and covered knives and pots. Freaky, I was just conjuring a post on knives, too. How cool that is...

So, my big observation on knives is this: You don't need as many as the retailers want you to buy. Big surprise, huh?

My smaller observation is this: You should buy the best knives you can afford, especially for whatever you decide your standby is going to be. You use them all the time, and a good knife should last for at least your lifetime. One of mine is on its third generation of user. I prefer a chef's knife, but that's me. You might prefer a santoku or a cleaver of some sort.

I have a whopping five knives, plus a honing rod and a sharpener.

• Henckels Pro 'S' 6-inch chef's knife
• Henckels Pro 'S' 8-inch chef's knife
• Henckels Pro 'S' bread knife
• Henckels Four Star 4-inch paring/utility knife
• An unkown brand of carving knife, for the roast and the turkey (that's the hand-me-down).

As with pots and pans, I have more than I need, but getting rid of a Pro 'S' seems like a shame. I would be happy with just the larger chef's knife, but the other cook in my household has much smaller hands and likes the 6-incher.

I have made some compromises in my cooking life: I have no filet knife, no boning knife, no meat cleaver, no vegetable cleaver. Oh, and no "peeling" knife, no "sandwich" knife, etc.

I also have not yet run into a need for a knife I do not own, so I strongly suspect I have plenty. I do keep my knives in a butcher block tha thas two or three empty slots, though, so if I find the perfect (small, too, my slots are all lower-level) knife, I guess I could buy another without using more room.

I happen to have room for the butcher block, but if you can't find a spot for one, you could buy a magnetic bar and find a handy (i.e. near your prep area) place to hang your knives. Or you could get one of those fancy racks that sits in a drawer, but who has spare drawers? In a pinch, I guess you could buy a knife bag that rolls up, which would certainly save space and certainly be inconvenient.

How's a gearhead to get by?

When you're working in cramped quarters, it can be tempting to find collapsible and otherwise compact versions of everything in sight.

I've been scoping out collapsible colanders - of which there are several choices - but I haven't been able to pull the trigger. Cost isn't a big issue here, but I like my old-school colander, which is a pretty blue enameled job. Nothing too special, but nice anyway.


I think you have to pick your battles: If you don't care for your current non-collapsible colander, and you have a few bucks (or more) to burn, you could save a little bit of room in the kitchen with one of these.

But I think that's largely unnecessary. If you can't figure out a good place to store your colander and it is pretty (like mine!), just tap a nail in under a cabinet and hang it up in plain view, or use it for a second purpose, like as a place to keep oranges...

Some of the "compact" items I've seen seem like more trouble than they're worth. I found a really neat measuring cup, for example, that uses an adjustable bottom to hold more or less material. But the scoop itself is too big to fit in a spice jar, so you'd need to use a spoon to put the spices in the measure. It might work in a big container, but who has room for those?

Macaroni and cheese for one

The stuff in the box is never as good as from-scratch baked macaroni and cheese, but from-scratch M&C is also a big time and dish hog and gives you a ton of leftovers. If you like toasty bread crumbs on top of your dish, the leftovers are also a letdown. Here's my take on single-shot mac and cheese:

Cook a generous handful of macaroni noodles in about three cups of boiling water. Just cook them until they are al dente.

Drain the noodles and dump them into your smallest baking dish. You might have a more suitable dish than you thought, just hanging around. For example, I have a pair of little springforms that would do.

Into the noodles, mix 1/4 cup milk and 1/4 to 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese. You may heat the milk, but if not, be sure to put the cheese in first to encourage more uniform melting. You will notice that this way of making "sauce" will not give you that super-thick result you'd get from real sauce, but this is a quick-and-easy way to go.

Grate a generous amount of black pepper and nutmeg over the dish, then top with bread crumbs. You could tear up one heel of an old loaf of white bread, for example, into little bits.

Bake the dish at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, or until the dish is bubbly and the crumbs are crispy.

Allow to cool for a few minutes, then dig in.

Pots and pans

When I moved into my cramped kitchen in 1999, I'd been living in much more spacious quarters, so I had a big collection of pots and pans.

• Soup pots? Small and large.
• Frying pans? Four or five - three sizes of cast iron, plus a Revereware pan and a medium Calphalon pan.
• A small saucepan
• A large saucepan
  
• A stovetop-mac-and-cheese size pot
• A Dutch oven
• An absurd plug-in electric frying pan
  

It took me a couple of years to whittle the collection down to the essentials, mostly because I was reluctant to Goodwill so many nice pans.

Now I have:

• One cast-iron frying pan (about 10 inches)
• One small saucepan (stovetop mac and cheese size)
• One large saucepan (mac and cheese for 10)
• Two large soup pots (about 10 quarts).
• That Dutch oven, be it ever so infrequently used.

The soup pots are identical and both contain large and small steaming baskets. I probably only *need* one, but if you're feeding 20-30 every so often, the flexibility is a big plus. As for the Dutch oven, well, they're expensive, so I'm loath to ditch it. I keep thinking I'll do a bean-hole supper some fall, too, in which case it will be wicked useful.

Welcome to My Cramped Kitchen

The Foodie Fashionista, The Chatty Chef and the Gadget Guru are joining forces to bring you menu ideas, product reviews and general tips on getting the most out of your tiny kitchen.

Meet Dana, Chase and Alax as they take your micro kitchen and give you maximum cuisine.

My Cramped Kitchen