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Welcome to this week’s edition of A Well-Stocked Kitchen, the series in which I’m sharing the tools that have helped me produce lots of deliciousness in the kitchen. This week, I’ll share with you the contents of my “stuff” drawer. This is my go-to small-tool stashing spot. It’s not very well organized, but it’s one of the highest traffic areas of my kitchen.

Anything I missed? What’s your favorite little kitchen tool?

Measuring cups x2. My biggest piece of kitchen-gadget-related advice is to keep 2 sets of measuring cups and 2 sets of measuring spoons on hand if you cook a lot. It makes cooking and baking a whole lot easier (and fun!), since you won’t be constantly rinsing and looking around for the measure you need.

Measuring spoons x2

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Welcome to another edition of A Well-Stocked Kitchen, where I’m sharing with you the tools and gadgets that have helped me become a better cook and baker. This week, I’m talking about small appliances, the ones that are relatively portable and can sit on your counter or be stored away when you’re not using them. These are listed in order of the frequency I use them, with most frequent first.

Which small appliance can’t you live without?

Food Processor: My #1 most used small appliance. Before I had one, I didn’t know I needed one, but now that I do, I use it constantly for cooking and baking.

Rice Cooker: Rice is my all-time favorite food (weird, I know), so this was a worthwhile investment. If you don’t eat rice too often, it’s definitely not necessary, but I make it at least twice a week. Mine is cute, little, and yellow, but it takes forever to cook the rice (over an hour for 2 cups), so there are definite pros and cons to this model.

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Welcome to another edition of A Well-Stocked Kitchen! This is my humble attempt to share with you, dear readers, the tools that have helped me become a better cook and baker. Today, we’re talking baking supplies. Another time, I’ll write about the ingredients I keep on hand at all times, but for now, this is the equipment that produces yumminess on an almost-daily basis.

What baking tool can’t you live without?

Silpat: This non-stick silicone baking mat/cookie sheet liner is one of those things that I never thought I needed before I had it, but now use constantly.

Muffin Pans x2: Most of my bakeware is the Calphalon Classic brand. I’ve been very pleased with the quality and durability of their products. Having 2 muffin tins has made making muffins and cupcakes infinitely easier. Many recipes make 24, and it’s quite the pain to have to bake a batch, cool, and start over with the same pan when you could be baking both at once. I recommend the investment in an extra one if you’re planning on doing a lot of baking.

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I’m so excited to introduce a new series I’m starting here at EADL: A Well-Stocked Kitchen.  Over the last year or so, I’ve managed to reach the perfect balance of just enough stuff: I use everything I have (nothing’s gathering dust or wasting space), and 99% of the time I find I have the right equipment for any recipe I want to try.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share the contents of my kitchen drawers, counters, and cabinets, with the hope of providing a jumping-off point if you want to learn to cook or bake. Keep in mind that everyone’s needs are different, this is just what makes life easy for me, and it might for you too.  I spend about half my time in the kitchen cooking and half baking, so the items I share will be a good mix of tools for each.

The first installment in the series is the utensil crock! This sits next to my stove, and I use its contents constantly.  Believe it or not, it’s big enough to fit ALL the stuff I’ve listed below. You can also buy one of these babies prefilled if you’re into that kind of thing.

(source)

Whisk

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Chances are you know someone like this: a hoarder, someone who keeps every single piece of crap stored away ‘just in case’ and has difficulty purging the old junk from their lives. As you can probably tell by my tone I am NOT a hoarder. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I get a serious thrill out of cleaning out my closet regularly and donating a bunch of ill-fitting and outdated clothing to Goodwill. LOVE it. Even better? Going through our little storage closet every now and then and paring down our junk to the ‘must have’ items. It’s just so freeing and liberating and cleansing. Plus, when you live in a place that is less than 1000 square feet, something has to give. I like to think that donating items we do not use makes us thoughtful people but in reality, it does a whole lot for my sanity, too. I cannot stand clutter, you guys. If you don’t use it give it to someone who will, right?

My husband, dear readers, has a serious case of Stuff-itis. It’s a serious condition in which his closet is exploding with items he hasn’t worn in years. His shoe collection may look impressive and yet over half of them are collecting dust. I really don’t think it bothers him in the slightest, either, which of course I cannot understand.

His newest great idea stemmed from one amazing hotel breakfast buffet. We made our own fabulous Belgian waffles and all of a sudden, BAM: “Baby, don’t you think we should get a Belgian waffle maker?” Seriously. I guarantee that would be another large, clunky kitchen applicance that we use one time and then let it collect dust. I think a waffle maker would be right up there with a sandwhich maker: seems like a great idea at the time and then it loses it’s luster forever.

So I ask you, do you own a waffle maker? And if so, do you use it?

Also, does anyone else live with someone suffering from Stuff-itis? Don’t you worry that you’ll wake up one day 30 years from now and be that couple who can’t walk out of their front door because of all the hideous knick-knacks clogging the hallways? And the attic will surely fall onto our heads and kill us all, right?

Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I’m working on embracing my husband’s Stuff-itis. So help me God…

Oh my word. I had such high hopes of remaining normal after having a baby. I committed to keeping all baby-related items in the nursery and my house that I’ve worked so hard on would remain an “adult house” and there would be no sign of baby outside of the nursery. Psha!

We’ve got the swing and the gym in the living room, the pack ‘n play in our bedroom (for when I’m getting ready in the mornings), bottles and the bottle warmer always on the kitchen counter, and a bouncy seat that seems to travel from room to room. I almost forgot to mention that our stroller is so heavy that I have trouble putting it back in its place on my own, so it often just sits in the living room floor. Our family room is not large, so these large baby items take up a lot of space. I feel claustrophobic and like these things have taken over my house.

We live in a 2400 square foot bungalow. The attic was transformed into the master suite, so about 700 of those 2400 square feet are the master suite– the bedroom, sitting area, bathroom, closet, and laundry area. The baby and I rarely travel to the second floor and the last thing I want to do is lose my master bedroom to baby gear. We love our house and have no plans to move anytime soon, but I do find myself designing my dream room for all of this stuff. If I had it my way, I’d have a kitchenette and a bonus room where the baby and I would spend the day. All of his gear would be in there and the rest of our house would not have to be overrun with my entire baby registry!

These are some of my dream room ideas for all of this stuff. (My real dream room is a giant craft room with slate floors, but I’ll touch on that later)

photos from Pottery Barn Kids

Ideally, this room would be very, very large. Large enough to accommodate two sofas and a rocking chair. We’d have a large television and plenty of space for the huge baby swing that we have and all of the other baby gear. This room would also double as a media room for watching football games or the Academy Awards. We’d have one chalkboard paint wall that the baby could do whatever he wanted to when he gets older. Storage in this room is the most important thing.

Do you have a problem room? Do you have a dream room? What is it? What would it look like?

EADW contributor Juel is stopping by EADL today to share her DIY chalkboard calendar, inspired by (who else) Martha!

{ image from Martha }

Anyone else get Martha’s daily emails? Well, I stored this one in my “collection” a while back and I’ve been excited to do it ever since. We were in serious need of a calendar for our new house and so I decided to give it a shot!

It was rather time consuming but the most difficult part was making the checkerboard. If I had just done a solid color it would have taken me like half an hour, most of which would be waiting for the paint to dry.

So…here’s my final product:

Now, I didn’t do it exactly the way Martha said to do it. Instead, there were some comments to her original directions that I followed instead. What I used:

For each paint color:
4 tsp acrylic paint
1/2 tsp unsanded tile grout

Other than that, I followed what Martha said and taped off the calendar, and put on several coats of each color. After the whole thing was done, I sanded it lightly, rubbed the whole thing with chalk, and then wiped it down with a damp cloth.

I love it! The best part is that you can use any color you’d like so there are lots of possibilities!

Have you tried to make your own chalkboard paint? How did it turn out?

Much like fellow EAD Living contributor Erin, Evs and I currently reside in a home built nearly a century ago.  Our little cottage, constructed in the 1920s, is our dream first-home - one story, hardwood floors throughout, with modern updates but still maintaining that “vintage home” feel. As of now we rent, but are hoping to convince our landlord to sell in the next year or two so this gem will really be ours!

A home tour post is definitely in order (after we put the finishing decor touches on the cottage) because I freakin’ love this house!  But this post is about the one downside of our home - storage.

Thank goodness I am lucky enough to have married a man who willingly donated 3 of the 4 closets in the house to my vast clothing collection (don’t worry - my shoes and I thank Evs daily for his sacrifice!).  But (shockingly!) there are other items that require space besides J. Crew’s fall and spring lines - and that’s where the challenge presents itself.

We were lucky enough to have landlords who actually lived in and remodeled our adorable cottage themselves - thus providing solutions for many of the tight squeeze conundrums that face dwellers of older homes.  But, for you DIYers out there, any of these brilliant little space-makers can be recreated with the help of retailers such as Restoration Hardware, Ikea, Pottery Barn, Container Store, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Kitchen / Laundry Room

While we do have some great cabinets for the area provided, our kitchen space is not expansive.  These 3 shelves allow us to store (and display!) some of our prettier entertaining pieces, as well as a photo and a few decorative pieces.

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When you get married you gain a partner, a husband, a best friend, a new family… and lots of stuff.

We closed on our house and moved out of our bachelor and bachelorette pads about five months before our wedding in May 2008. We had each been out of grad school and law school for three years so we each had lots of furniture and plenty of stuff to fill our own houses. We moved into a precious bungalow that was built in the 1930s and had recently been updated. The attic was turned into a giant master suite and we have tons of space in our bedroom. The only down side is that we don’t have an attic– or any storage. The closets are still the same old 1930s closets and all of my craft supplies fill up an entire closet. It was clear that we needed to get rid of some unnecessary objects.

My sweet husband is a bit of a pack rat. He doesn’t hold onto things because they’re important to him. He holds onto things because he doesn’t want to take the time to go through everything to decide what should be purged. I throw things away all the time. If there’s a mess I’d like to just pick it all up and dump it in the trash rather than hoard more stuff– which often leads to throwing away important things.

The item that I was forced to give up in the move was my massive collection of wedding magazines. I had every issue of Martha Stewart Weddings dating back to 1999. I would spend entire Saturdays pulling out the magazines and flipping through each one looking for inspiring images that I may not have seen the other 20 times I looked at the magazine. We can call it my secret single behavior, but I loved it. When we got engaged I started tearing things out of all of the magazines and filing them by category into a huge binder. So I was a little bit sad to give up so many beautiful issues of the magazine, but I made sure to go through and tear out any gorgeous pages before tossing them all in the dumpster.

Because I had to give up all of my magazines, I thought it was only fair that we not try to store (in our house with limited storage) hundreds of issues of Sports Illustrated– dating back to 1989! Yes, I’m serious. My sweet husband agreed to get rid of them as he had never gone back to look at any old issues.

We both were a little bit sad to get rid of such big collections, but felt better once they were gone. Interestingly, getting rid of those magazines was a much bigger deal than choosing whose sofa to keep and whose sofa to sell. We also had to get rid of one TV, one bed, and one breakfast table. We had two of everything, but those magazines left the biggest hole in our lives.

Did anyone else have to decide how to merge your stuff? Were there any major or significant compromises?

A few years ago, I started keeping a fine-point sharpie in my kitchen. Whenever I make something from a cookbook, I use the sharpie to write the date next to the recipe, and to note any changes I made or comments I have (and, in several cases, “DO NOT MAKE AGAIN”). Now I’ll always know that I made this cheesecake (quite an adventure, but that’s a story for another time…) on my husband’s birthday last year.

It’s a simple gesture that’s become a nice kitchen tradition for me.  Do you have any fledgling kitchen traditions?