Apparently in every professional kitchen my chef/husband has taken over in his career, he’s always gone in and reorganized, just shortly after he started.  He gets rid of things that are taking up “prime real estate” that are never used, throws away things in the freezer that shouldn’t be there . . . I’m sure many of your chefs have done the same things numerous times.

But what happens when the chef’s new kitchen he’s taking over is the one in your home?

Let’s be honest.  The kitchen at home has always been MINE!  It’s been mine because I do the majority of the cooking, obviously.  Half the time he can’t find anything because the way I organize is not how he would choose to organize, and it just doesn’t make sense to him.  Plus, he doesn’t cook at home very often because, well . . . he’s working!

But for the time being, our home kitchen will now be HIS.  So you know what that means . . . yep . . . total reorganization of the entire kitchen.

I was a fairly silent observer from the sofa as he worked for a few hours on Friday, taking things out and talking to me about where he was putting things and why he was putting them there.

Tell me if you can relate to any of these comments:

• What’s this meat in the freezer? (Clearly I had not labeled it. Oops!)
• Do we always run out of spoons or only when I’m home?  (Only when he’s home, which means we will run out every day and he will be buying more – lol!)
• When you’re cooking at home, it’s better to just use up entire packages of things even if the recipe doesn’t call for it.  Otherwise you have little bits of things sitting around everywhere (like the half used taco seasoning packet in the pantry).
• If we’re going to buy a large quantity of cheese, we need to make sure it’s broken up into usable quantities and wrapped right so it doesn’t go bad.

There is a well planned menu in OneNote (where he keeps his very organized notes for work and now for home) and it’s also printed out and is on the refrigerator.  Along with the menu there are things that need to be prepped each day as he looks to what is coming on future days.

Each morning he goes through the refrigerator so it’s clear what is in there and so that nothing goes to waste.

He’s commented on the quantity of food waste we have after each meal based on what the girls have not eaten.  (And they have apologized a few times for not liking things.  That will be changing soon as they learn to enjoy the better seasoned food we are eating.)

He told me the quantity of something we had in the freezer or pantry at a random moment today . . . he said he always knows things like that for the restaurant at all times, so why would home be any different.

I have never seen anything like it!

I have learned so much this past week.  If I keep taking notes and paying attention closely, by the end of the year, I should be ready to write a book about how to run a home kitchen like a chef.

My husband is AMAZING!!

From one chef’s wife to another,