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CHAPTER 1

Cooking in a Tiny House

Downsizing is a growing trend that has led numerous people to turn to smaller spaces. Many people are opting to move into tiny houses for a simpler life, but others downsize to smaller homes and compact apartments as well. Yet just because people are choosing to live smaller, it doesn’t mean they don’t still need to cook a delicious and wholesome meal.

Cooking in a Small Space

Tiny houses are often 400 square feet or smaller for singles or couples. People are making this shift to smaller living for many reasons, such as to get out of debt, to live better lives, to retire earlier, and to spend more time with family and friends. Tiny living is focused on building quality lives with the ones who matter to you.

When you consider what a home is, you find that it is a structure that provides several functions for you to live your life. One of these is having a place to prepare and sit down for a meal. Even though you have only limited space, you will need to allocate a fair bit of it to this task. When thinking about how large or small a kitchen should be in your tiny house, take the following into account:

 How often do you actually cook meals at home now?

 How much do you enjoy cooking?

 What are your favorite things to cook, and how does that help inspire what will be in your kitchen?

 What tasks can be performed by multifunction items versus those with a single purpose?

When considering these questions, be honest with yourself. How much do you actually cook? If you’re a person who loves to dine out at restaurants the majority of the time, a very basic kitchenette might be right for you. If you’re a serious home cook who loves to cook and spend time in the kitchen, you might want to dedicate a bit more space to cooking.

The best indicator of how much you’ll actually use your tiny house’s kitchen is how often you use your current kitchen. Make your kitchen just big enough to suit your current needs because past behavior is the strongest indicator of future behavior. The beauty of tiny homes is that you’re able to design and build a space that is right for you and your particular way of living.

In the end your kitchen and home need to be as unique as you are. Deciding what is right for you is critical to making your house a home—a place where you are comfortable, can enjoy your time, and can have a great meal with friends and family.

Think about Your Kitchen Plan

An important step when considering the design of your kitchen, as well as the rest of the house, is to break down exactly what you do in your own kitchen. You need a space to store shelf-stable goods, a fridge to keep things cold, a countertop to prepare food, a stove to heat things, a block to chop up food, and a sink to wash dishes.

Take a moment to sit down and think through a typical meal and how you cook it. Make a list of the things that you do in your current kitchen and how often you do them. Using this list, you can make a more informed decision on the placement and size of each item.

Another popular kitchen design principle is the kitchen work triangle, three points that are made up by the sink, the fridge, and the stove. If you imagine these three points making up a triangle, you ideally want them to be close to each other with nothing obstructing the flow between them to make your prepping, cooking, and cleaning easy. Consider the placement and flow between these three points.

Refrigeration

When it comes to fridges you should go with 4 cubic feet per person; if you’re really into cooking or someone who likes to cook from fresh every time, consider 5–6 cubic feet per person. If you are considering a mini fridge size, it’s best to have a mini fridge and a separate unit for a freezer, as the combination units tend to freeze poorly. It’s also worth considering mounting the mini fridge off the ground where you can more easily see into it without stooping.

Washing Food and Dishes

The sink is one of the key corners of the triangle and often is the focus of the start of prep and the end of a meal with cleaning dishes. Everyone has their opinions on sinks, but you should not be afraid to splurge on your sink and faucet. They can be expensive, but it’s one of the things that you’ll be using multiple times a day, so it’s good to get one you love. If you end up going with a shallower countertop, consider a single-hole faucet that you can mount to the side. That way your basin can take advantage of the full countertop depth.

Food Preparation

The French have a phrase, mise en place, which translates to “everything in its place.” It’s the notion that you should prep all your ingredients, portion them out, dice/chop, and lay out everything before you start cooking. In addition to making you a more efficient cook, it’s also a key concept to successfully cook in a tiny house. When you’re cooking on a small cooktop and have limited counter space, if you are trying to prep and cook at the same time, it can get very cumbersome. You should take the time to prep everything ahead of time and then fully clear off the countertops before you start cooking. Consider how you’ll go about cooking in your future tiny house: what the workflow will look like, and what steps you’ll take in cooking your favorite dishes.

Cooking

Realize that living in a small space may lead you to consider different ways of cooking your food. For example, you may cook whole meals on your grill outside, cook a roast in a solar oven on a hot sunny day, or use a portable butane stovetop outside on a folding table if a dish is particularly fragrant (smells can fill up a tiny house fast, and you may not want odors to be trapped in your small space).

Stovetop

Living tiny means you’ll have to adapt to cooking on a smaller cooktop. For most people a two-burner stovetop is the sweet spot and will meet the needs of nearly all of your daily cooking. You can still cook more complex and fancier dishes, but it isn’t every day that you will cook a four-course meal. You should choose your cooktop for your everyday needs, not the special occasion dishes that you may only cook a few times a year. A two-burner stove offers the perfect balance between space and functionality. For this reason, all the recipes you’ll find in this book are meant to be prepared on a two-burner stovetop. You will be amazed at the decadent and delicious meals you can prepare in this small arena.

Baking

While none of the recipes in this book requires an oven or toaster oven, baking in these appliances is certainly worth discussing. Many compact options for baking often fall short of most people’s needs to bake a good loaf of bread or properly roast meats and vegetables. If you just want to bake a batch of brownies or cookies, you’ll most likely be fine, but make sure you spend some time doing your research on the oven that you choose. Many tiny house owners opt to forgo a traditional oven and buy a quality countertop toaster oven. You could also supplement your baking outside the home by building a wood-fired pizza oven (perhaps on a patio), which allows you to get higher temperatures and a more even heat for better baking or roasting.

Other Kitchen Concerns

In addition to the three points of your kitchen triangle there are a few other kitchen options you’ll need to consider, such as where to store your food, how to pare down your appliances, and what to to with your food waste and trash.

Countertop Appliances and Utensils

In the kitchen there are a million appliances, gadgets, and utensils that you can buy to make things just a little bit easier. In a tiny house you should focus on the absolute basics. Most great cooks rely on a very basic set of tools to do most of their work. Here is a general list to get you started:

 Skillet (with lid if possible)

 Saucepan

 Stockpot (or large pot for soups/stews)

 2 sets silverware

 2 bowls/plates

 2 coffee mugs

 Can opener

 Whisk

 Mixing/salad bowl

 Colander

 1–2 good knives

 Spatula

 Grater

 2 cutting boards (1 for meat, 1 for everything else)

 Coffee pot/French press/tea pot

 1 multipurpose measuring cup

 Some type of reusable leftover containers

It can be easy to have a tool for everything, but you should start to pare down your kitchen now, before you even move into a tiny house. You don’t have to get rid of everything, but consider minimizing down to a more basic set and then putting everything else in a box in the closet.

With this approach you can find your own ideal set of implements for what you really need while eliminating the clutter. From there you can design your kitchen to hold exactly what you need and nothing more.

Pantry

Part of any kitchen is a place to store your dry goods and shelf-stable items. It can be hard to figure out where to tuck these items, but you should look at what you store now and design cabinets around that. You’ll find it’s more convenient to standardize containers for dry goods to maximize your space; for example, after shopping place things like flour, pasta, oatmeal, rice, and cereal into containers that all stack well. This eliminates the awkwardness of varied packaging sizes and shapes. You can also design your shelves around the standardized containers so that everything fits and you maximize the space. Having similar containers also looks more presentable and reduces the feeling of clutter when everything is neatly uniform on the shelf or in a cabinet.

Handling Trash and Recycling

A commonly forgotten item when planning a small kitchen is where you are going to keep your various bins for kitchen waste. Food packaging is often the number one source of trash in a tiny home. When at all possible you’ll want to consider sourcing food items without packaging (bulk food stores); where you can’t avoid it, you can opt for packaging that can be composted or recycled.

Trash

Dealing with trash is an unavoidable component of modern life, no matter the size of your house, but you can take some very simple steps to reduce how much trash you create. It’s easy to fall into the mental trap of thinking that if you recycle most things then you are doing okay, but in reality it starts before that. It all starts at the source: where you buy things.

Your first impulse should be to actively refuse to create trash to begin with. You can do this by:

 Considering where you do your shopping. For example, go to the farmers’ market, where they don’t overpackage food, instead of a big chain grocery store that packages everything in layers of foam and plastic.

 Asking for or bringing a reusable mug to the coffee shop.

 Shopping at bulk food stores, where you can bring your own storage bags.

Taking the time to think critically about the simple things you can do during your daily purchases can have a big impact and make living in a smaller space easier. The less you bring into your home to begin with, the less you have to store, process, or occupy your trash bin.

In terms of your tiny house, it is important that you don’t forget to designate a place, or build in a space, to house your trash and recycling bins. People often forget this when planning out small kitchens, and then the trash bin seems like an afterthought, just dropped in a random place. If possible, build a pullout trash drawer into your kitchen so you can hide it out of sight.

Composting

It’s inevitable that you will accumulate some trash even when trying to avoid it; you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself when this happens. When you aren’t able to avoid waste and it can’t be reused or upcycled, it is better to keep the impact of it localized.

Composting is a great way to process some of the waste that is biodegradable. In most cases paper, cardboard, vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, and more can all be easily composted on-site. Not only will you produce great soil for your garden, but you also will remove mass from the waste stream and mitigate the resources used in the transport and processing of that trash.

For those who live where large compost piles might not be practical, the best composting setup is a simple plastic bin outside filled with red wiggler worms—vermicomposting. Essentially, it’s composting that utilizes lots of worms to speed up the process of breaking down the material. Vermicomposting is forgiving to beginners and has the ability to process large amounts of food waste very quickly. In the end, you’ll have some of the best potting soil you could ever hope for and you won’t be adding to the waste stream.

Recycling

One of the ways you should shift your thinking when it comes to recycling is to view it as subsidiary to trash prevention. If you are recycling, it means you weren’t able to prevent the trash or deal with it yourself in a proper manner. Every city or town has different capabilities for recycling, so check with your local municipality about what can and cannot be recycled.

Also, getting a recycling bin that is bigger than your trash bin reinforces your priority to recycle over just trashing something. Having a smaller trash bin can serve as an active reminder that if you have to keep emptying it again and again, you need to do a better job at preventing trash.