It all started more than ten years ago, when I was living in a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with a really small kitchen – about 7 feet by 7 feet.  I loved to cook but was prone to cooking misadventures, which mostly occurred because I was trying to cook dishes that required a six burner stove, about a mile of counter space, and way more pots and pans than I actually owned.  Those cooking experiments invariably wound up with food all over the house – pots on the coffee table, colanders on the couch, literally every single cooking vessel I owned was dirty, I was exhausted, and the results weren’t even that great.

Even things that I thought would be easy turned out to be a disaster in a small kitchen.  Chicken cutlets, for example.  They’re delicious, everyone loves them, and they’re easy to make.  Take a piece of chicken, dredge it in flour, dunk it in egg, cover it with breadcrumbs, throw it in a hot pan.  The trouble is that you need a ton of counter space to hold the three separate plates – one to hold the flour, one to hold the egg, a third to hold the breadcrumbs.  I tried putting the flour, egg and breadcrumbs in three separate ziplock bags.  I do not recommend it, and I am a person who believes that a large number of problems can be solved with a ziplock bag.

Or take soup.  I love soup.  I’m a Jew.  Chicken soup with matzoh balls is, to me, one of the greatest foods on earth.  Totally easy to make, throw chicken in a pot with some onion, carrot and celery, cover it with water and simmer the hell out of it.  The trouble is you need a HUGE pot, and then you need another large pot or bowl to strain the soup into, and then you need a bunch of freezer space for all the extra soup.  And don’t even get me started on the matzoh balls, because you need another huge pot for that.  So, if you’ve got a small kitchen, homemade soup is out.

So I learned how to keep it simple, but then I had a different problem.  I would make something that tasted really good, and that my husband really liked, and then a month later he would say to me, “why don’t you do that thing that you did with the chicken a few weeks ago?” and I would have no idea what he was talking about.  And so it came to pass that when something worked out, I got into the habit of writing it down.

Fast forward to the present day.  I still love to cook, and I now have a marginally larger kitchen in Brooklyn.  But I have a full time job as a lawyer and two small children.  So what I’ve gained in space, I’ve lost in time.  And what I have found is that the key to getting dinner on the table is small footprint cooking – not getting too ambitious, not dirtying too many dishes.  Keeping it simple. 

In my house, getting dinner on the table is not always pretty, but I'll let you know when it is delicious.