Food52 Your Do-Anything Kitchen: The Trusty Guide to a Smarter, Tidier, Happier Space

by Food52

Overview

The ultimate guide to the kitchen from Food52—the award-winning kitchen and home destination—filled with ideas for creating, organizing, and enjoying everyone's favorite room in the house.

The first step to better, happier cooking? Setting up a tip-top kitchen. We're talking one that's stocked with essential tools and ingredients, organized so everything you need is close at hand, and sparkling-clean from floor to ceiling. Food52 is here to make it happen. Your Do-Anything Kitchen gathers the smartest ideas and savviest tricks from the Food52 community and test kitchen to help you transform your space into its very best self.

If you're ready for a top-to-bottom kitchen revamp, this handbook's got you covered—but it's packed with small-but-mighty upgrades, too. Stick with us, and you'll get to know which cooking tools are must-haves, discover new pantry staples for on-a-whim meals, and learn tons of tips to make your fridge (freezer, too!) work even harder for you. You'll find strategies for tidying storage-container clutter and arranging all your cooking gadgets—and while you're at it, maximizing precious drawer and counter space. Once you've gotten your kitchen in order, you can start cooking with a new spring in your step, thanks to a handy how-to on knife skills and a mini-guide to mise en place. A chapter chock-full of cleaning advice will keep your kitchen at its spiffiest.

Throughout, you'll get tours of real-life, super-functional home kitchens from cookbook authors, chefs, bakers, and more. Armed with a choose-your-own-adventure meal-prep planner, helpful charts on the art of speedy, streamlined dinners, and a game-changing cleaning checklist, you'll whiz through your routine like the efficiency expert you now are. So whether you're putting together your very first kitchen or looking to spruce up a well-loved space, Your Do-Anything Kitchen will turn it into the greatest-possible place to cook—and spend time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399581564
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	Food52 Works
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

FOOD52 was founded by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs—two authors and opinionated home cooks who formerly worked for the New York Times—to celebrate food as the center of a well-lived life with recipes, books, home goods, and more.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction


If you’ve ever cooked while camping—with nothing more than a heavy skillet over the campfire grates and a jug of water leaning against the nearest tree—you know that it’s possible to make a homey, functional kitchen just about anywhere.

You can make a kitchen in a college dorm room, with a triple stack of storage bins for a pantry and some thrift-store mixing bowls and spoons. You can make one in a shoebox apartment with a single burner and mini fridge, in a big farmhouse with what feels like an acre of counter space, and anywhere in between. It doesn’t need to be shaped a certain way or have a certain look; you don’t have to install special cabinets or plot out renovations. With a hunger for good food, a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude, and a few key tools, a great kitchen emerges.

We’re here to help you make your own great kitchen, plain and simple—whether you’re starting from scratch or hoping to shake up your well-loved space. We want your kitchen to be somewhere you’ll do a lot of cooking and just as much living. After all, isn’t it the first place we hit in the morning, and the last place we turn out the lights before heading to bed? Not to mention all the time we spend there making toast and tea; putting the finishing touches on a birthday cake; or standing in front of the refrigerator, door open, looking for a late-night snack.

To guide you to that kitchen where you can do all that (and then some), we’ve created this mighty little handbook. It’s packed with tips, tools, and strategies of all kinds, backed up by ten years of smarts from the Food52 test kitchen and our community of trusted home cooks. And since cooking is always more fun with friends, we’ve brought in some longtime favorite voices in food—cookbook authors, chefs, bakers, and more—who are, above all, devoted home cooks. We’ll take a moment to peek into their kitchens, stand at their elbows, and learn just what makes their cheerful, delicious spaces their own.

This is a book for old hands and newbies alike, for the executive and sous chefs among us, for bakers and cooks, for big kitchens and little ones. We hope you’ll turn to it when it’s time to buy your first pan or upgrade your standby; when you’re looking to stock your new home’s kitchen or reignite your love for cooking. We hope this book sends you racing to fling open your cabinets with new determination. Most of all, we hope it helps make your kitchen feel like home.

—Amanda Hesser & Merrill Stubbs, cofounders of Food52