Welcome To My Tiny Kitchen

I’ve been toying around with the idea of posting some (vegetarian and vegan) recipes and food posts, and last week I asked y’all to vote in a poll, and let me know whether you’d like that or not. I did a few food posts years ago, when I first started this blog, but haven’t in a long time. I’ve been hesitant to start again for a couple of reasons. Right now, I mostly blog about personal style, hair and makeup, and general life stuff, and I didn’t know whether food was too big of a leap. Also, my kitchen is tiny! I’ve seen a lot of food blogs that claim that their kitchen is tiny, but my kitchen is seriously… tiny. Observe.

Welcome to my little kitchen(ette), in all its glory! This approximately 3.5′ x 3.8′ space is equipped with a sink, a mini fridge, a microwave, a single-burner hot plate, and a very seldom used toaster oven. In case you hadn’t heard me mention it before, I live in a micro-apartment, the urban apartment equivalent of a “tiny house”. And I love it, for the most part. Really the biggest challenge is the kitchen situation. I cook a lot of the same things over and over, because they’re easy and I know that I can cook them in the space I have with the things I have available to me. There IS a shared full kitchen downstairs, but I’ve used it… maybe 3 times in the year that I’ve lived here. Hauling bags of food, pots, pans, spoons, oven mitts, etc. down four flights of stairs isn’t fun or convenient, and it’s even less fun and convenient when all of those things are piping hot and you are carrying them back up 4 flights of stairs.

Part of the reason why I’ve been thinking of doing food posts is not only to diversify Brighter Sides a little bit, but also because it will be motivation to diversify what I cook and eat, and get me out of this curry/chili/frozen microwave burrito rut. I LIKE to cook and I know HOW to make other things, I just don’t because it’s difficult. But I want to start branching out a little bit, learning and creating new recipes. I’m interested to see what else I can do to make cooking in this tiny space more enjoyable.

The results of the poll were mostly positive, with a couple “nah’s” and a couple “eh’s” but mostly “heck yeah’s”. So hopefully in the future, you’ll be seeing more of this little area of my life and my home. Although sadly, this little plate (which was the first in my Seattle/Washington decorative plate collection) has passed out of this realm of existence, as I recently bumped into it (I bump into things a lot), and knocked it off the wall. Rest in pieces, little World’s Fair collector’s plate.

If you’d like to vote, I still have the poll running in the sidebar on the left. Also, feel free to leave me a comment!