My ideal kitchen is something that has occupied my mind on and off for years. I’ve worked in galleys and small kitchens and large kitchens and I’ve found myself able to cook well despite the small spaces. After a while I figured that if you do not have the space, you have to become more clever. Repurposing and multi-purposing tools you already have become paramount and blogs like LifeHacker are a great place to discover new clever ways to use what you have and make it really perform tasks that you’d never think before. Working in a very small kitchen, for example, if you need more counter space for chopping or mincing then pull out a drawer and put a cutting board across the drawer. It’s the perfect height, and adds just the right amount of space when you need it and pushes away when you don’t need it. It’s that sort of cleverness that really attracts me.

So size isn’t so much of an issue. What it really comes down to are really high-quality durable tools that make sense to use. Great refrigerators with numerous zones, whole-doors, and the freezer on top. A really excellent oven, using natural gas for fuel, a smaller oven on top of a larger one below, with interiors that are nice and clean. I’m particular about the design of the oven space itself. Ovens need good temperature controls, but that’s only part of it. Ovens, no matter what system controls the temperature inside the oven can benefit from bricks. Cheap and easy, bricks are awesome in ovens. They absorb heat and radiate heat slowly – the oven takes longer to get to temperature but the variability of the temperature cycling is smoothed out as the bricks compensate for the variability and make your baking much more reliable. The cooktop needs to be large, or as large as it can be. Lots of burners and with the right tools even the most basic of ovens with cooktops can become a great and versatile tool. For the cookware the kitchen needs to have at least a various compliment of Lodge Logic cookware. I prefer in nearly every situation to cook with cast iron. There are exceptions, proper steel pans for crepes for example, and stainless steel 18/10 sauciers. Kitchen gadgets and tools are pretty much dominated by OXO brand as far as I’m concerned. Much of what they make is superior to other options because they are designed well and cleverly, like measuring cups you can use looking down into them instead of across of them. There is another brand called “The Pampered Chef” that makes wooden spoons and they are exceptional. All of these things are good selections in the perfect kitchen, but the most essential tool in any kitchen, the ones you want to really concentrate on because you’ll use these tools the most are your knives. Every kitchen should have a host of fine knives and they have to be sharp, non-serrated, and of multiple sizes. paring, small chef, large chef, butchers blade and optionally a Santoku blade. I’m a huge fan of Victorinox brand for knives. They are inexpensive, durable, sharp and of exceptional quality. Your knives do not have to be expensive label-whore blades, but they have to be razor sharp and regularly sharpened. Nothing contributes to kitchen injuries more than struggling with a dull knife.

So my perfect kitchen can be a movable feast. I would want to bring my own knives with me if I were to go wandering – everything else is pretty much either a standard or can be worked around. Perhaps someday I’ll have a house where I can design the kitchen and that’ll be where the heart of my home will be.