Friends, hear now the secret to peace and tranquility. A life filled with more time and less stress can be yours for a single, simple action:
Get rid of your kitchen.
That’s right. Throw your kitchen out. The cabinets. The stove. The sink. The dishwasher. The floor.
And bask in relaxation you have never dared to imagine.
I discovered this utopia during our current bout of remodeling. The contractor and his crew stripped our kitchen down to the nubbins, and I braced myself for the horrendous inconvenience friends had warned of.
What could they have been thinking?
Consider this heavenly concept: Without a kitchen, you can’t cook.
It isn’t that you don’t have time to cook. It isn’t that you don’t want to cook. You can’t cook. It is a physical impossibility. You are relieved not only of responsibility, but of guilt.
And it gets better. You can’t clean. You have no kitchen sink to clean with, and no kitchen to clean.
Even if you retain a few shreds of kitchen temporarily, it is foolish to clean them. They are about to undergo the most efficient type of cleaning imaginable–demolition. Why bother with a mop?
How I love my state of forced indolence! Every night, dinner is ready minutes after we pick out our frozen dinners and throw them in the dining room microwave. Freed from the burdensome yoke of a kitchen, we have dropped all pretenses of serving fresh meals. And we didn’t have many pretenses to start with.
Not that we always eat frozen food; sometimes, we eat canned. But the beauty part of the no-kitchen life is that we now have a powerful excuse:
“Normally, I would make my family delicious and nutritionally balanced meals using the freshest of ingredients,” I can lie.
“But alas and alack–I don’t have a kitchen.”
And you can apply the no-kitchen excuse to all sorts of unconnected lapses. Lost the notice about the school conference? “I couldn’t find it because I don’t have a kitchen.” Backed into your neighbor’s car in the alley? “I didn’t see it because I don’t have a kitchen.”
Then there is the beauty of after-meal cleanup. Friends, your environmentalist credentials will never recover once you experience the splendors of disposables.
You cannot imagine the joy a former cloth diaper-user feels upon throwing everything out after dinner including perfectly good food, lest I be compelled later to wash the leftover dish.
I have even gone beyond throwing out plastic ware to tossing actual dishes. The other night I finished using a conventional glass, decided that I never really liked it and just threw it in the garbage.
A kitchen-free lifestyle frees you from all sorts of niceties. Say you are peeling a carrot. Without a kitchen, you don’t want to bother to use an actual knife to cut off the nasty ends because then you will have to wash it.
Instead, do what I now do: Bite the carrot ends off and spit them into the garbage.
And I do more, to my daughters’ increasing admiration. I drink milk straight from the gallon jug. I reuse knives without washing them. Too lazy to trek to the bathroom to empty the milk from my paper cereal bowl, I lap it up like a dog.
“This place is becoming `Lord of the Flies’!” my husband cried as I used a pile of newspapers as a cutting board, although I must point out that the other day, he emptied his cereal bowl by giving it to our actual dog.
I prefer to think of it as an abstemious frat house. But whatever it is, it is home to a beautiful life. I am a new woman, although certain members of my family would say that I am a big slob.
I share my joy so that others might know these pleasures. It is like being the pampered lady of a manor whose servants deal with the kitchen, only without the servants.
In these remodeling times, think about it. Maybe you don’t need a new kitchen; maybe you need no kitchen. Because the next best thing to being born with a silver spoon in your mouth is using a plastic one.
