11 Tips for Cooking in a Tiny Kitchen

Ingredients

Instructions

1. Stay On Top of Your Inventory: Always staying aware of what you have on hand and using those ingredients first helps keep your “inventory” low and reduces the need for storage space. Take regular inventory of your ingredients, cook from what you have on hand as much as possible, and buy only what you need and when you need it.
2. Cook One-Pot, Sheet Pan, or Skillet Meals: These simple all-in-one style recipes will cut down on the number of dishes you have to clean and the amount of activity you have going on in the kitchen while you cook. Keeping it simple is key in a small space.
3. Make A Game Plan for Cooking: Before you begin cooking, run through the directions for your recipe(s) in your head to make sure you won’t need your limited workspace for two things at one time. If you have a sheet pan coming out of the oven, you need a place to put it as it cools. If you’re draining pasta in a colander in the sink, make sure you’ll have space in the sink available. You don’t want to be dancing around your kitchen with a hot pot in hand and no where to set it down!
4. Limit Your Tools, Equipment, and Appliances: Keep it simple in the kitchen, using only very basic kitchen tools, and focusing on multipurpose kitchen equipment. Stay away from single-use tools and go for the tried and true classic kitchen tools.
5. Mise en Place (Prep First): Do all your chopping, measuring, and prepping before you actually begin cooking. This way you can go as slow as needed and use your one work space for one task at a time, instead of frantically trying to multitask while the heat is on.
6. Clean as You Go: Take every spare minute you have to clean a dish or utensil, or put away an ingredient. Instead of watching the pot as you wait for it to boil, clear away a few items. Have something baking in the oven? Put away everything that has already been used.
7. Invest in Nesting Bowls, Pots and Pans, and Containers: Invest in nesting items so components don’t get lost, you save cabinet space, and your kitchen appears clean and decluttered.
8. Think Outside the Kitchen: If you have a dining room, dinette, or some other small table and chair set near the kitchen, make use of it! Have yourself a seat and chop away. Have a closet in another room that isn’t being used to its fullest? Take advantage and make it do double duty for extra pantry items. Just pretend your whole apartment is a giant kitchen (that also happens to have a sofa and bed).
9. Transform your Sink or Stove Top into a Prep Surface: Place a large cutting board over your burners or straddling your sink and use it as a prep surface. Just be extra careful that the board is sitting even and is stable.
10. Try a Mobile Kitchen Cart: You can wheel that mobile prep surface in and out of the kitchen as needed and most have lower shelves for extra storage, or even hooks on the side for hanging utensils.
11. Utilize Wall Sapce: Line up removable hooks on your walls to hang lightweight objects like cooking utensils, measuring cups and spoons, kitchen towels, etc. If you’re handy, install stronger hooks with drywall anchors to hang heavy items like pots and pans.