I've just wound up a season of holiday cooking and a new year stretches ahead. As I reflect on culinary adventures past and plan for 2011 (which will be a bit more lovely than all years before), I've reached a conclusion: All cooking is easier if you use lots of bowls and towels.
If you've been in a professional kitchen you know this. Bowls and towels galore! But in the home kitchen, it's easy to succumb to fear of cluttering the small space and creating a giant clean-up job. Don't do it. Using these tools liberally will declutter your kitchen and speed your progress enough to make it worth washing a few more bowls. (If this is obvious to you, stop reading. Somehow it's been non-obvious to me for years.)
Picture this: You've got a couple of bunches of greens -- let's say chard. You know greens are good for you, but a serious pain in the neck to prepare. All that swishing in water, then cutting the leaves off the stems, then shoving around mountains of leaves as you struggle to chop them, because greens cook waaay down and you have to start with quarts to feed four people, and who has a cutting board that big? You plop the mess of freshly washed greens onto the cutting board, the countertop becomes an instant swamp floating bits of onion and garlic skin from your previous task, and you have no room left to work. Fail!
How about this instead: You start with your grunge towel (see below) and a stack of prep bowls at hand. You put your cleaned greens in your biggest bowl and bring the bowl to your cutting board. Look, no swamp! One handful at a time, strip the leaves from the stems, dropping the leaves in another bowl as you go. Start a new bowl when the first one fills up, which it will unless you've got another really big bowl. As your work surface gets swampy you mop up with your grunge towel, unconcerned with the scraps and detritus. (Give the towel a shake over the sink as needed.) When you're done de-stemming, give the cutting board and the big empty bowl a swipe with the towel. Now chop or chiffonade a handful of leaves at a time, putting the results in the big bowl you emptied in the previous step. When you're done, another mop to the counter. You're ready to cook, the kitchen is clean, you wasted no time moving stuff out of your way, and all your bowls need is a rinse.
Grunge towels are your old dishtowels you don't mind getting dirty -- not the beautiful new ones picturing bright futuristic beets from Anthropologie or Crate & Barrel, but the stack of worn, stained stalwarts in the cupboard. For each cooking project, you want a dedicated grunge towel to wipe dirty hands, get spills, clean and dry the cutting board and counter between tasks, and otherwise get messy stuff done. At the end of the day, the grunge towel goes in the dirty laundry, no questions asked. The bright beet towel still hangs on its hook, ready to dry your clean dishes and hands during less intense times. Please don't confuse your housemates by hanging the grunge towel where the regular towel goes. No one wants to dry their hands on the towel you cleaned the garlic press with.
Prep bowls should be lightweight and in various sizes. I like stainless steel for the bigger ones and glass custard cups for small jobs. Take out a stack of prep bowls before you start cooking. It helps you overcome your puritanical reluctance to reach for one.
Oh, and if you don't have any beautiful kitchen towels? You should get some. They cheer up a space like crazy.
