Minimalist Cooking - Kick The Marketer Out Of The Kitchen

Minimalist cooking is about simplicity. It is about reducing everything from ingredient lists, shopping trips, anxiety, social fears and more.It is about not letting these tyrannies and the greatest overarching tyrant of all, the marketer, from sucking the lifeblood out of something that should be life affirming, a source of great fulfillment and above all else fun. Remember that it is the marketer who tells you that you have to be the provider of perfection at the dinner table otherwise you are a bad parent, a failure, someone who should be shunned by strangers and disowned by your children. Haven't got that expensive spice in the rack? Well, you'll just have to lose a couple of hours driving to the store, guzzling gas, polluting the planet, raising your blood pressure and exhausting yourself to the point where you will enjoy neither the cooking, the eating or the socializing that should all be the highlights of a day. Alright, that was a little over the top but the point is important. We really do need to get out from under the Marketer, he is not our friend.

Banishing the marketer leaves room for all sorts of other stuff, exciting stuff like your own thoughts and decisions. The marketer would have told you that you had to have a rice cooker because that is the only way to cook rice and, more importantly, that your social group would have regarded you as an abject failure if you didn't have one. Now you can make a decision firmly based in logic. Marketers hate logic. Are you going to be cooking rice more than once a week? If so a rice cooker would be a good purchase, once a year and it would be best to muddle through with a saucepan. It is not complicated. Incidentally, if some in your social group does regard you as an abject failure for sticking with the saucepan it is probably time to subject them to the process described.

Now, try this process with the stuff that currently takes up shelf and cabinet space in your kitchen. Do you really use that pasta strainer often enough to justify the space it takes up? Do you need fifteen saucepans and five frying pans? or a tool for every single kitchen related task that you may or may not do in your lifetime? Throw the excess out. On second thoughts don't throw it out, give the rice cooker to your friend who does cook rice everyday and take the rest to the local thrift store.

Now, extend this process to your cooking ingredients and you are well on the way to having a minimalist kitchen. Kick out the marketer and the rest will follow. Space will appear in your kitchen as if by magic but perhaps more importantly a space will be created inside your head for you to fill as you please.

By: Steve A Wolfe

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To find out much more about minimalist cooking check out my wife's blog Minimalist Cook and for all other aspects of minimalism, Minimalist Woman. I have been interested in minimalism for many years especially as it pertains to photography and art. Most of the images on Meg's blogs were taken or created by me.