The sometimes over stylized food world that magazines and blogs portray these days leaves no room for a messy kitchen. They just aren't seen. Beautiful food comes from thin air where there isn't a single dirty dish or empty can left on the counter. When this photo from The Pioneer Woman herself, Ree Drummond popped up yesterday it was a big sigh of relief for me.
Although there's no reason you can't clean as you go when you're working in the kitchen, sometimes you're just enjoying the creative part of cooking too much to tackle the cleaning part. Do you find a dirty kitchen comforting, knowing good things came from the mess. Or is it unnerving and makes you want to grab the closest sponge you see.
Either way, we're glad Ree is upfront about such things as it makes her all the more down to earth. It just does to show that behind every perfectly styled dish, there's a bit of chaos that grounds even this food vixen!
• Check out more of Ree's photos from Instagram
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(Image: Ree Drummond via Twitter)
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this is exactly what my kitchen looks like while I'm cooking. I try and clean as I go, but it never really works out and then once you clean the counters, then you have to deal with.....the dishes. The only downside to home cooking & baking.
I appreciate this photo! Cook with abandon and then clean like you mean it!! I love making a big giant mess but I also enjoying cleaning up after a big mess too. Two totally different states of mind.
I'm going to send a link of this story to my wife. She calls it 'a small explosion in the kitchen'. Nice to know I'm not alone.
I wish I had that much space in my kitchen to mess up! =)
my kitchen is so small if I didn't at least throw everything in the sink as I went along, I'd have no space left to work! *note to self, get new house with huge kitchen island
Not that my kitchen hasn't looked like this at times but it stresses me out when it does. We have so little counter space that I really have to clean and organize as I go as much as possible.
I can't even look at this picture without getting stressed out. I have to clear into the sink as I go...and if a recipe somehow required this much mess, unless it was MIND-BLOWING I would not be making it again....
There's probably a math formula that expresses the stress level created by square footage vs. mess. That mess takes up the total available space in my kitchen, so I actually physically cannot make that big a mess.
I made a fresh cherry sformata once that made as big a mess as I can actually contain within my kitchen. It was absolutely draining. My daughter mentions it every summer: can you make that cherry ice cream in the loaf pan? No, I'm still traumatized from the last time!
Perhaps food bloggers' lack of washing up is the real reason everyone is photgraphing all of their drinks in canning and jam jars. And here's me thinking it was a styling thing. Clean some glasses!
Just looking at that pile makes me want to clean it. I'm a clean-as-you-go kind of person. That way I can enjoy what I made and not worry about coming back later to clean up the kitchen (plus, dried on food always seems to be more work to clean off and there's only so much room in the sink for soaking).
Wow. I don't generally let things get QUITE that bad, but that's mostly because I have a much smaller kitchen and a far more limited array of utensils.
Paradoxically, I can only seem to "clean as I go" when the kitchen is already clean. Probably because then stuff isn't already piled in the sink....
"even?" - she made her reputation out of being charmingly careless
I'm with Kat88, this is pretty horrifying to me. I can definitely wind up with a few bowls or pots out at once, but I can't imagine anything like this happening in my kitchen. It's just not that hard to keep a mess in check, and this would only stress me out to no end.
It totally stresses me out ,because unless I clean the mess ,I wont be able to prepare anything :)
Well, that is pretty clearly a mess from a wide variety of dishes, which most people would not be cooking on a regular basis. My guess is it's either a result of her cooking for a very large party or when she was cooking for work (her book, her new show, etc). So I think us average folks would have to try pretty hard to ever create a mess that size.
But I certainly create smaller scale messes! I try to clean as I go but I find it takes so much more time to keep stopping and starting, so usually I give up halfway through and just make a pile.
That's not messy!
I've come close to a mess that big following a 3 course dinner. I like mess- I find it therapeutic to clean a really messy kitchen/bedroom/house.
idk...that looks like a few days worth of not doing dishes if you ask me.
My daughter's comment on my cooking style was "Good cookers make messes"
i just like that she has the slice of pie (?) sitting out, either to provide strength for cleaning, or as a reward for when she's done. smart :)
I can help with that! http://goodhusbanding.com/handy-helpful-kitchen-cleaning-checklist
I too am a clean-as-I-go type of cook/baker, so I could never let things get like this. In fact, I thought I was terribly messy because I'll leave dishes in the sink for a few days (not on the counter though).
That said, I live in an efficiency apartment with a tiny kitchen and a small amount of dishes and tools and so on, so if I'm cooking something more elaborate I actually have to clean as I go just so that I have the things I need (such as my only large mixing bowel or a cutting board that I just used for something else).
Years ago when my children were small I took a picture like that on a really bad kitchen day. Then I wrote a silly rhyme and made up cards to send to my girlfriends who had little ones. They loved it!