7 ways to get inspired in the kitchen

Want to cook great food? The key is to get your kitchen working for you. Here’s how.

1. Organise your space

If you want to love your kitchen, particularly if it’s small, you need to be organised. This means having a place for everything and keeping everything in its place.

Decluttering your kitchen can feel overwhelming, but start with one shelf or area at a time. Get rid of food that is expired and you’ll immediately find you have a lot more room to work with.

Experts recommend putting pantry items into labelled containers so they don’t spill or spoil, and suggest having a ‘backstock’ area for unopened items.

Keeping your kitchen organised takes a bit of work and requires you to form new habits but once you get used to keeping things in their place and having a regular clearout you’ll find the space so much easier to work in.

Try to store things by category and put them back when they have been used. If you and your partner feel frustrated or if you have children who get confused, add some labels to drawers, baskets and shelves.

2. Stock up your pantry.

Popular food blog Smitten Kitchen has a great list of pantry staples on her website. The writer is based in a tiny NYC kitchen, but the items are still useful for Australian kitchens. If you always have flour, pasta, beans, tinned tomato, coconut milk, oils and sweeteners to hand, you’ll be able to use what’s in the fridge to make a meal.

3. Update your equipment

Want to be inspired in the kitchen? Having good-quality knives, some different baking dishes and a blender etc can make cooking faster and more enjoyable.

Six suggestions from Jamie Oliver include:

Vegetable peeler
Mortar & pestle
Baking sheet
Food processor
Set of knives
Non-stick fry pan

Try to avoid gimmicky gadgets that take up a lot of space and seem like a good idea but don’t really do anything that can’t be achieved with a knife and your own two hands.

4. Shop locally.

Farmers’ markets are a good place to get inspired to cook, as are local fruit and veg shops and butchers. Get to know your local shops and where you can find the best ingredients to build a meal.

Northside Produce Market is a twice-monthly farmers’ market close to Neutral Bay, while Mosman Produce Market is an organic market running on Wednesdays from 8am until 2pm. Le Marché in Willoughby is another one of our favourites, a fortnightly Sunday market with many dedicated artisan food stalls. And we like Shoulder to Shank, which purchases meat directly from farmers to sell from its location in the Grove.

5. Grow a herb garden

It’s easy to grow herbs and other veggies even on a window skill, and these can make a big difference to your creativity as well as the flavour of your cooking. Here’s a great book by an Aussie author about balcony gardening.

6. Get inspiration from local chefs

Sydney has world-class chefs and some go on to write their own cookbooks. Get out and about to see what they do with ingredients. For cookbooks, it’s hard to go past Bill Granger for easy, family-friendly recipes using local ingredients.

You can also learn from some of the best at Sydney Cooking School. Once you have a few excellent recipes in your repertoire, you’ll be able to build on them and branch out.

7. Cook with the seasons

Cooking with the seasons means enjoying ingredients at their peak and often at the lowest price, too, so you can eat better for less. Here’s a guide to what’s in season in Sydney year round: autumn, for example, is a great time for apples, pears, kiwi fruit, pears and strawberries.

Stephanie Alexander’s classic Australian cookbook, The Cooks’ Companion, has an alphabetical list of ingredients so you can look for recipes according to what’s in season and what you find at the shops.

Sometimes it’s a matter of getting stuck in and trying something new. When you find a dish you like, write it down somewhere so you can be inspired next time you find yourself staring into the fridge wondering what to cook.

Thinking of selling in Neutral Bay and want to know what the market’s doing? Give us a call today – we’re always ready to chat.