The Kitchen

Is there any house which doesn't have a kitchen ? I highly doubt it. Although, we won't talk much about this unique and essential room of every house but it is certainly an important and critical part of house. This is the place where the source of energy of people residing in house is generated. Kitchen is the place from which, all the raw materials are taken as input and provides an output of delicious eatable items. The entire process happens in this room, kitchen.

I often compare the Kitchen room to an industry or a factory. Similar to an industry/factory, kitchen also needs to be maintained. There are so many degradable items inside kitchen that they all need to be properly taken care of; otherwise might end up in mess with ants and cockroaches all around if kept more that their expiry time. Similar to as an industry input raw materials, kitchen also needs several raw material from turmeric powder, curd, oil, vegetables, sugar, rice, flour etc and the list goes on and on. These all items have to be properly arranged in their unique places (few things cannot be mixed or kept near other things as they get spoiled). At regular intervals, the quantity of these items need to be monitored and should be re-filled accordingly.

Another important material of kitchen are utensils. There are wide variety of utensils which serve various purpose during cooking. There are few essential utensils while others are luxury to own. Each utensil complements the other in the process of cooking. Time to time, these utensils have to be cleaned after usage else it may lead to untidiness inside the kitchen. Refrigerator has become the new entry and a must have item in every modern kitchen of contemporary world. It helps the cook in several ways by storing perishable food items and extending their lives for few more days.

A factory cannot be run by an individual as it is a complex entity similarly its very hard to cleanly maintain the kitchen by an individual. But still there are so called “housewives” who single handedly maintain the kitchen. Trust me, maintaining a clean kitchen is not an easy task. If you don’t believe me, take a challenge and own responsibility of maintaining the kitchen for 2 weeks to realize. It has its very own complexities and requires a different kind of skill and intelligence which housewives posses. We casually ignore the effort of mother, wife, daughter, sister or even hired cook who prepares food for us and serve it deliciously by hiding all the internal effort spent on preparing it. Its not just preparing, there is aftermath also in cleaning and maintaining it back. Don't get me started on Hygiene part.

While preparing for food in Kitchen, one needs to be equipped with lot of techniques on managing the available resource to its best use. For example, what can be replaced with what item when you fall short of an item, how many people food are you going to cook and how much hungry they might be, what to do if food is over estimated, how to handle when it is under estimated, how much time is it going to take to cook to ensure food is served hot etc etc. Such wisdom doesn’t solemnly appears to anyone. It needs lot of patience, effort, experience, failures, knowledge etc to gain tidings about kitchen entity.

Generally when you visit someone’s house, you see their hall where you sit and talk and if you are quite close to them, probably they might show you their living room, bedroom, balcony etc but its very rare that someone takes you to their kitchen also and show it unless you are very special or closed one or a family member. According to me, don’t be impressed on how well they maintain their living room or bed room but based on how clean and organized have they maintained their Kitchen. This is the place where things get real. If possible, peek into their refrigerator to understand them better.

At last, what I would like to say in conclusion is, maintaining and organizing kitchen is indeed a challenging task which may look quite simple from outside but its certainly not. When someone spends most of their life time in kitchen, don’t think they are useless or undexterous but infact they have immense experience of unique skill set which is quite forgotten and heavily underrated. So next time, when you meet any housewife, please remember they are multi talented people and honor them by recognizing their craft and competence. There are few working professionals who are exceptional in managing both office and kitchen, I salute them too. Going forward, I wish both genders are taught basics of handling kitchen in their childhood for betterment of hygiene and it enables them to master yet another unique skill set.