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.