The Poor as Fuck Kitchen

Being poor as fuck, I am always on the lookout for ways to streamline my kitchen.  Why?  Because:

• a) Less stuff equals less work (less dishes to do, less cleaning, etc.) and 
• b) Being poor as fuck, I live in a very tiny space, so I need to save space wherever I can, and 
• c) Less stuff means it looks cleaner, even when it's messy.  

So I am always checking out every book I can at the library (because I'm poor as fuck, duh) on minimalism (though I am not a minimalist by any means) and organization.  Especially when it's related to my kitchen.  

What I've found is that most of these books are NOT written for the poor as fuck, y'all!  They are written for rich people who have too much!  Uggh.  

But want to know the cool part?  I've practice better minimalism in my kitchen than any of these authors!!  Take that richies!  HA!  

I believe that a streamlined kitchen is a happy kitchen because it means you have less work and more space, no matter the size of your kitchen.  

But before I start in on what my kitchen looks like, let's take a stroll down memory lane.

Once upon a time, I was a kid with pretty-good-sized eat-in kitchen.  It wasn't wide, but it was looong and at the one end were windows and an old ass table with old ass chairs.  And there was carpet.  Yuck!  Who carpets their kitchen?  If you have carpet in your kitchen (that sounds like sexual innuendo, does it not??), then shame on you.  Remove it and get something not carpet, asap!  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  

Are you done yet?  Yes?  Good.  Back to the story.  

In the middle of the kitchen we had a cabinet with a counter that my mother called "WW3".  She called  it that because it's where she stored her pots and pans and every time she removed something from it, it sounded like WW3.  For real, it did.  

Yes, partly it was because everything was just shoved in there willy nilly, because it was literally a gigantic black hole where pots and pans went to nap when not being used.  But it was also because she had TOO MANY POTS AND PANS.  

Was/is your mother like my mother and always cooked for an army?  She had so many pot and pans because she legit used them all.  Like a crazy person.  We had THREE people in our house: me and both my parents.  That's it!  Why she cooked like we had a family of eight, I have no idea.  We were the kingdom of leftovers.  Which was kind of nice at times.  But it also meant playing plenty of "butter dish roulette", never knowing what was in that crusty moldy butter dish in the back of the fridge.  

I then grew up and did the same exact thing.   I bought every single size of pot and pan there was available.  I had at one time six glass casserole dishes.  SIX!!!  WHY????  I have two kids and a husband!  That's it!  I also had probably around twenty dinner plates, ten saucer plates, god knows how many bowls (both plastic and ceramic), and I don't even want to tell you how many glasses.  

When the dishes didn't get done?  Holy shit, guys.  Just picture that a moment.  Good god, what was I thinking??!!

So, we decided to move in 2018.  We got the second to biggest Uhaul and guess what?  If you guessed none of that shit fit, you'd have guessed right!!  I had to leave behind everything, except a small box of necessities.  And during this move, we became homeless and broke and even lost that box.  When we came back to our town, we literally had NOTHING.  We had to move into a two-bedroom apartment with our two grown kids, us, and our four dogs and two cats.  We rented a tiny car to get back home and each only took one plastic bag with clothes, including socks and underwear and nothing else

.  

Talk about being poor as fuck.  

And our kitchen?  Yeah.  Can you say tiny?  Even if I had all my stuff, it wouldn't have fit!!  

With our recent homelessness and our horrible packing debacle fresh in our brains, we realized we had an issue with accumulating shit we didn't need.  So, we decided to start an experiment: 

How little could we get by with having with four people in our household?  

It started with us purchasing the basics either used or very cheap: 

• Four dinner plates
• Four saucer plates
• Four cups
• Four bowls
• Four forks
• Four spoons
• Four knives
• One Dutch-oven sized pot (metal with a lid)
• One medium saucepan with a lid
• One large skillet with a lid
• One medium sized skillet with a lid
• One large strainer
• One 9x13 baking pan
• One chopping knife
• One serrated knife

These were either bought at Goodwill (or the like) or at Dollar Tree (our dinner plates were from DT).  These were not all bought at once, either.  They were a slow accumulation over the last eight months of this writing.  

This all worked out pretty damn good, though it was VERY hard to get used to at first.  If you're moving from excess to a more minimal style of anything, you have to give yourself time to adjust.  And while it doesn't feel like you will, you will.  I promise. 

Except when you realize there really isn't enough to go around.  So we ended up adding (after several weeks): 

• Four more forks, knives, and spoons
• Four steak knives (because who can cut steak with a freaking butter knife?)
• Two rice paddles (that you get with rice cookers and the such, plastic)
• A wooden spoon
• A ladle
• A plastic slotted spoon
• A metal spatula 
• A plastic spatula
• A metal strainer from Dollar tree (the medium sized one--I use this mostly for rinsing rice)
• A whisk
• A basting brush (from DT--the tiny ones!)
• Four pottery bowls from Old Time Pottery (on sale of course) for our bowl meals
• Four plastic plates (to use instead of paper plates for sandwiches and the such)
• Large pizza pan (it's HUGE)
• Large bamboo cutting board

I keep all my kitchen utensils in a crock (from Old Time Pottery, on sale of course) on my three-tiered shelf I got from the Goodwill.  I also store my blender on this, my instant pot (it's a instant cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, etc. all in one!  From Aldi for around $25!!!), and my cheap-ass broken toaster from Family Dollar (I really need a new one--UPDATE: I have a new one).  Those three appliances, other than getting the occasional bread maker from Goodwill (which all break immediately...arrgggh), are the only kitchen appliances I own.  Back at my old house?  I had an electric skillet, a toaster oven, another small blender. two mandolin slicers, and a whole slew of other bullshit I didn't need.  My cupboards were stuffed!

My metal strainer goes in my little crock, along with my other cooking utensils.  My rice paddles go in my silverware drawer, with the little basting brush.  My two pots, large strainer, and my double boiler insert all nest together in my cabinet. The lids sit behind them in a "lid holder" (which is horrible, btw, but I keep it because otherwise they'd be all over the place).  My two skillets, baking sheet, and pizza pan all are on the right of all of these, also nested together.  

You may be asking "But what about mixing bowls?"  If something is small enough, I either use a ceramic bowl or a food storage container thingy (for leftovers).  But if it's big, like yesterday's Swedish Pancake Party, I bought four mixing bowls from Dollar Tree, which double as our "Huge Salad" bowls, which we sometimes have for dinner.  Those are stored in my "overstock" area above my stove.  Also above my stove (other than baking supplies) are overstocked bowls (which are these tiny bowls my mother gave me that work for cat food and other stuff), a loaf pan for the occasional loaf, and a few extra saucer plates (our set from Goodwill had seven, so the overstock went above the stove).  Nobody looks up there but me most days, so nobody uses the stuff in there.  These are overstock items in case something breaks or if we need something extra once in awhile.  

We also have an overstock area in our pantry for extra pottery from Old Time Pottery (last winter, they had a sale and everything was around $1 or less, so I bought Christmas presents for everyone, including some for us to use for holidays and the such), an extra Dutch oven sized pot, and huge pot I use for dying clothes (I have a tshirt store).

What Has Worked For Us

 One large pot and a medium pot, and the same for my skillets.  I never knew how easy it was to cook (awesome) food with such little kitchen stuff!!  So easy, and hardly any cleanup!  Instead of two hours to do dishes, it takes maybe twenty minutes if everything is dirty (which is easy to do when you don't have much LOL).  Also, only having enough dinner plates for each person is sooooo much better than having double or more!  Also, cutting down on our cups (though more than one per person)?  Yeah.  Life is so much easier like this.  I never knew!

What Didn't Work For Us

Only having enough silverware for each person just did not work.  If you dirty your fork?  Too bad!  Wash it.  Yeah, no LOL!  Same goes for cups.  We needed more than one cup for each person in our house.  But not as many as we had before.  

Miscellaneous Stuff 

I try to keep the misc stuff to a minimum.  Being poor, we are always on the scout for good deals.  So when we see something, we think "OMG I NEED THIS!"  Because the price is oh-so-right.  But when it comes to the space of our kitchens, even if we have LOADS of space, it's oh-so-wrong.  Keep this mantra in mind when thinking about the space in your kitchen and whether or not you should buy this great deal: 

Don't stuff it!  Let it breathe.

Ask yourself these questions before buying:  Is the item actually useful?  Will I actually use it?  Or will it just stuff my kitchen for the sake of a good deal?

Think about stuffing a turkey: would you buy anything you could find on sale to put in that bird?  Like M&Ms, noodles, liverwurst, and dog treats?  I mean, they're on sale, right??  Why not?  No?  Yeah, I thought so.  

So, the same goes for your kitchen: just because there's a lot of space (or any space) doesn't mean you can fill it up with nonsense.  Let there be space to breathe.  Only put things in it that will a) get used regularly and b) don't stuff it so much it's bursting at the seams.  You wouldn't want your turkey to explode, right?  Don't let your kitchen explode with chaos either.  Overstuffing is us poor folk overcompensating for not having much (or, for some of us, not having much as children).  You don't need to overcompensate anymore.  You can live with less.  Starting with your kitchen.      

One tip I learned that works amazingly well is from the book "The Joy of Less" by Francine Jay, is that in order to really downsize, you need to empty first.  And I mean completely empty.  Then refill with only what you need and use.  This works for tables, as well as entire rooms such as your kitchen.  I did just that, but the hard way (by losing everything we owned).  

But once you do downsize, just think: if you have to move? You won't run out of room in the Uhaul!

Are you a kitchen minimalist?  If so, what does yours look like?  Let me know below!