How to Makeover Your Kitchen for Traditional Foods Cooking

The whole foods lifestyle is about more than just what you and your family eats. It’s also about how you prepare that food and the tools you use. Learn how to makeover your kitchen for traditional cooking and a traditional foods lifestyle.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Reassign the counter space in your kitchen because you’ll need all the space you can get for food preparation and storage. Move appliances that you often don’t use to an out of the way storage area.
2. Replace plastic cups and storage bowls with glass and stainless steel. Plastic has a short life span and is rarely recycled. There is also an ongoing controversy about some flexible plastics and a chemical compound called phthalates, which may leach into your food. Glass storage jars are great for storing bacon fat, fermenting sodas and kefir and for displaying dried fruits and snacks.
3. Purchase stainless steel, glassware, stoneware and cast iron for cookware. Ongoing controversies about the safety of aluminum and non-stick cookware make the more traditional cookware options a better buy.
4. Install a drying rack for common herbs like fresh mint, basil and fennel. This rack can be as simple as a horizontal string to which bundles of herbs are attached so they can dry in the open air.
5. Set up a large wide-mouth jar for kitchen compost. It should hold a minimum of one gallon and should come with a screw-top lid. Use it to dispose of your eggshells, produce peels and other biodegradable kitchen garbage. When it fills up, dump the contents into your compost bin outside.
6. Purchase a meat grinder and grind your own hamburger or sausage.
7. Add a food dehydrator for drying meats and produce. Stainless steel is best.
8. Round out your kitchen equipment with a digital scale since you’ll be preparing many dishes by hand and will need the accuracy of a scale.
9. Retire the microwave and make better use of your conventional oven. It doesn’t really matter whether your stove uses gas or electricity. A traditional foods kitchen makeover can change the way you cook and the way you live.

Tips & Warnings

• The only way to get to know how your stove heats is to use it.
• Thrift stores are excellent places to find cast iron cookware.
• Watch out for aluminum cookware that is advertised as stainless steel.