Credit for today’s blog post title goes to my good friend Matt… he was responding to my telling him that 24 hours previous to our conversation, my kitchen had been spotless, but at the moment it looked like my cabinets and thrown up.

So what’s the moral?  I’m a messy cook.  Pots, pans, bowls, utensils all strewn across counter tops, stove tops, in the sink and occasionally onto the floor where I squeal in fright as usually my feet are somewhere at the end-point of what is usually a utensil-in-knife-form hurtling downward.  I still have all of my toes – so far so good.

There is another issue that comes into play when I’m creating in the kitchen – space is a premium.  I don’t have a lot of counter space (more than a lot of people though), so the dishes I have used are stacked artfully (DH would say “precariously”) wherever they will fit.  Working in the kitchen often involves picking up one artfully stacked pile of dishes and moving it temporarily out of the way so I can grab a needed “something”, put that needed something where I’m working and then have to once again move the artfully stacked pile to another location so I can grab another “something”.

If I’m using spices and herbs (often), my stash (of spices and herbs) is in a corner cabinet… and finding just the right jar involves me pulling most of the cabinets contents out onto the counter as I climb head-first into the bowels of the corner.  Inevitably, the cabinet gremlins have taken the exact jar I need and put it into the far back corner or they’ve relabeled it and put it in the front to fool me into removing it.  When that happens, I have emptied out the entire catalog of herbs and spices, scratched my head in wonderment and confusion, absolutely positive that I had a jar of such-and-such and start placing everything back on the shelf only to find that what I was looking for was the first thing I took out of the cabinet and the label now clearly states that the French Thyme was there all along.  Damn gremlins.

Then there is the side issue – I often end up splattered and dusted with whatever ingredients I’m using (I really should wear my apron).  This is not a horrible thing (vanilla smells good…. the taste of it straight up?  not so much), and I end up looking like the woman in the rice crispy treat commercial who tosses some flour on her face so her family thinks she slaved over the crispy treats.  DH, however, does not fall for this ploy – as he often comes into the kitchen to bug me check how things are going when he’s home.

I come up with some good creations, currently my kitchen has two experiments in sourdough.  Pictures to follow in a different post, but the first sourdough creation has been used four times now and I just started whole wheat beer sourdough starter.  This is going to be fun!

Till then… my kitchen will continue to get messy… get cleaned… get messy…. and get cleaned again.