McKel Hill Kooienga, MS, RDN, LDN
Founder of Nutrition Stripped and the Mindful Nutrition Method™
When you organize your kitchen properly, it can make healthy cooking so much easier and more enjoyable!
We all know that cooking healthy meals is what makes it possible for us to eat well on a daily basis.
But that can be really tricky if you haven’t organized your kitchen, making it challenging for you to easily put together a meal in minutes. You may not even realize it right now that this may be what’s making cooking healthy meals feel challenging.
With a few simple tweaks, your kitchen organization can completely change the way you feel about cooking and help you be more efficient with your time.
5 Simple Ways to Organize Your Kitchen that Make a Big Difference
I could talk for hours about this topic — I seriously geek out over organization and setting yourself up for success in the kitchen and I even have an entire module in my membership that breaks it down for each part of the kitchen, so I’m going to give you a few of my best tips that will make the biggest impact on your space, so be sure to catch them all!
1. Stock Your Pantry, Fridge, and Freezer
This sounds really simple, but people often forget to reevaluate what they need to stock their pantry, fridge, and freezer for being able to make healthy, plant-based meals easily.
The best guideline I can give you is to have ingredients on hand each week that make up what I call the Foundational Five. The Foundational Five is my framework for creating a balanced meal and consists of protein, healthy fats, starchy carbohydrates, non-starchy carbohydrates, and flavor factor. If you aren’t familiar with this yet, you can download my free guide where I share more about it!
When you make a meal, you want to include those five things in it, so making sure you have those ingredients on hand is key!
For example, with protein, you’ll want to have some tempeh or tofu in your fridge along with nuts and seeds in your pantry. Nuts and seeds are also a great source of healthy fats, so they double up!
You’ll also want to have a variety of starchy carbohydrates, like quinoa, oats, buckwheat, brown rice, or potatoes.
And then fill your fridge with plenty of fresh vegetables that are non-starchy carbohydrates like zucchini, carrots, peppers, onions, greens, and the like.
Finally, make sure you have a variety of seasonings, homemade dressings and sauces that add a flavor factor to your dish.
2. Invest in a Few Kitchen Essentials
Once you’ve stocked your kitchen with food items, also take inventory of your essential kitchen items.
Cooking is such an important skill to develop, and that starts with having the right tools and equipment that will make it easier for you to try new recipes, develop basic cooking skills, and be more comfortable overall.
There are so many things you can get for your kitchen and some will even vary depending on what you like to cook, but there are a few items I think every kitchen should have.
These essentials are:
- A great chef’s knife and cutting board
- Glass storage containers for meal prepped items
- A non-toxic cookware set
- And a high-quality blender
If you have those things, you’ll be able to learn a few skills to make the most out of them and be able to create almost any meal.
3. Make Your Space as Functional as Possible — Even if You Have a Small Space
I remember when one of my members inside of my Method Membership had such a big breakthrough with this!
She shared that she lived in an apartment with a small kitchen and really wasn’t cooking a lot. But after going through the lesson on how to organize her kitchen, she completely rearranged it and now has been cooking every day!
She had put her pots and pans, along with her food processor and juicer in a bottom cabinet. Every time she wanted one of those things, she had to pull them all out and put them all in.
So all she did was find new places for those things and now everything was easily accessible to her!
Kitchen organization is definitely something I geek out about, but it’s true because it can make such a big difference on the flow and the function of the space.
So to organize your kitchen, one of the best tips I can give you is to make all of the things that you use on a daily basis — or would like to use on a daily basis — like your pots and pans, a blender if you want to make smoothies in the morning, and your cutting board and knife set, all in an easy to access place.
4. Organize Your Kitchen so it’s a Space You Enjoy
Give your kitchen some love and actually make it a place you want to spend time in. I personally love having fresh flowers on my kitchen counter and we have beautiful plants all around. We also have a big window that we keep open as much as possible to let fresh air and natural sunlight come in.
5. Keep Your Kitchen Clean
Most importantly, my husband, Jesse, and I, clean up after each meal so that the next time we go in there, it’s all ready for us to cook.
This is a really simple tip, but it can be easy to leave dishes in the sink or create a big mess when you’re cooking and then it can feel like more work on yourself to use the kitchen.
Try cleaning as you go so the mess doesn’t seem as daunting and make a commitment to always leaving the kitchen in a way that it’s ready to go for the next meal.
Putting these Tips for Organizing Your Kitchen into Practice
All of these things are meant to help you in creating a more easy, efficient, and ultimately more enjoyable experience in the kitchen.
Eating is part of our daily lives and if cooking can become easier and more enjoyable for you, you’ll be much more able to stick with healthy eating habits.
So now it’s time for you to put this into practice: which of these 5 tips do you think you can put into practice this week?
