Earlier today Dana offered some thoughts on organizing your cookbook collection. She admits that how you choose to organize your cookbooks is all about personal preference, but if you need some visual inspiration, where better to look than our Kitchen Tour archives? Here's a quick peek at how 15 different cooks find ways to store their beloved cookbooks in the kitchen.

I cook a lot. These past couple of weeks, for instance, I've been cooking through all the un-photographed recipes in Bakeless Sweets and shooting them for the book's website. The amount of dishes generated by these 75 recipes has been mountainous. So this clutter of dishes expresses how my kitchen looks, most of the time (and actually, this isn't too bad, in comparison! I will under no circumstances, however, show you my stovetop right now.). And yet I have an open kitchen, with the mess on display for everyone to see. (See my whole kitchen renovation reveal here.)

So can you guess what the most important element of my open kitchen is? 

OK.  So we've made our peace with our cookbook addiction.  Now, how are we going organize all those precious volumes in a way that is attractive, useful, and practical?  Read on for a few hints.

It's always fascinating to see what stirs up the most vehement comments on our family of sites. And over at Apartment Therapy, there is one sure way to start a spat: Talk about organizing books by color! And yet I think that it actually can be a great option, especially for cookbooks! Why is it so controversial, and why do I like it in spite of this? Read on for more, plus a really awesome picture of cookbooks organized by color...

Aimee and Rene's Brooklyn home has a lot of charm. Rene is a chef, so we imagine the home kitchen must see a lot of action. And who wouldn't want to spend time in such a space? Rene actually built the kitchen cabinets himself, and the other details — the mint green walls, the black and white checkerboard floor tiles — make the whole thing feel sweet, cozy, and a little vintage.

We've shared our love for garbage bowls before, but that devotion may only be because we don't have this: a trash chute built right into the countertop! The idea behind a garbage bowl is to have somewhere to toss yours scraps while you're cooking, so how convenient to be able to just slide them into a hole and send them right into the trash or compost bucket below!

As a child, Daniela spent summers at her grandparent's country cottage outside of Prague. Now she fills her home with sentimental objects and collections passed down to through the generations. One of those collections — her grandmother's bundt pans — is on display in her Newport, Rhode Island kitchen: "Looking at the bundt pans that my grandma used," she tells Apartment Therapy, "brings back that smell of fresh-baked bundt cake and my grandfather’s aftershave; such distinct smells just flood in."

Loft kitchens can feel cold and cavernous, but this kitchen is anything but! It's colorful and full of life. Want to emulate some of it in your own kitchen? Here are sources to help you get the look. (Fill in the blanks in the comments!)

Last week we asked those of you who garden in small spaces to share your best advice for starting and maintaining a successful kitchen garden in pots or containers. You had lots of tips to share, but we culled the top five. If you're ready to jump in and start your own cook's garden, read on for advice from those who've done it before:

Paint is a powerful tool, as this kitchen makeover proves. As Nina of Swanky Swell told us, when she took on this project the kitchen was a standard builder's kitchen with lots of orange-toned wood — pretty flat and uninspiring. But the appliances were still in good shape and she needed to keep the overall costs down. So rather than gut the whole kitchen, she just focused on updating three major areas. See the 'After' photos below: