Good Shit: The Kitchen Edition

Everything I've found useful in our new kitchen

Sep 12, 2024

This is Good Shit: the monthly edition of stuff I’ve bought or used (or read or cooked or liked or things I’ve done) and want to recommend to make your life better. Edition themes will vary, they will traverse many niche interests but all are tried, tested and vetted by me.

Heart of The Home

It’s September and I can finally, finally write that my kitchen installation is complete. We still have some painting and patching to do but the unbridled joy I feel at having a dishwasher door is so sweet, if a bit deranged.

Despite the long wait since this circus started back in February, the kitchen has been in a functional state for a couple of months now. And of course I was buying new shit to replace some old things and a pretty thing or two because it looked nice and I wanted it. I do want to emphasise though, that I have kept most of my old stuff. A lot of it works perfectly fine, in some instances even better in the new space! It’s easy to see someone’s renovation and assume that everything inside the cupboards and displayed on the benches is also new. I think it’s even easier to feel the pressure yourself to shell out even more cash post-reno and start fresh for your it’s-so-new-it’s-still-plastic-wrapped space. Don’t do that, no one else really cares but you. Buy it because you genuinely want or need to, not because Instagram (or even me!) told you to.

This issue will be a mixed bag of things for organisation, things to make your life easier and things that look good. I hope you’ll tell me some of your holy grail kitchen items, too.

A note on design

When I was in the planning stage of the renovation, I told my designer that I wanted a spice drawer. He agreed and gave me three: two internal drawers for spices and an open drawer at the bottom to hold all the vinegars and oils and dressings. I generally like cooking, despite the novelty well and truly wearing off since becoming an adult, then a parent. So if the recipe calls for an obscure combination of ingredients to make a single sauce that I’m highly unlikely to replicate in the next six months, I am absolutely purchasing it. Fripperies like tarragon-infused vinegar generally have a long shelf life and I do manage to convince myself that I’ll use it in a myriad of other ways. Add to that my husband, who ensures we have the full gamut of Chinese cooking essentials for any dish we desire, and we have a lot of condiments that do not neatly fit onto one of those revolving perspex tray things you see in the home organisation videos. So really, this is a paragraph of waffle to tell you that if you’re thinking about a new kitchen and have the space and finances, I beg you to get a set of drawers like this and place it in the direct vicinity of your stove top. It’s one my favourite design features in our home.

Spice jar organisation

If you, like me, own half the spice section from Woolies, then this is the organisation system for you. I’ve been through so many trials of how to store my spices and thought that I wanted those perspex draw inserts that would perfectly tilt my jar of fennel seeds, the label perfectly displayed. The problem here, of course, is that I have many spices to store and those things are not efficient with space and refused to find any compatibility with the dimensions of my drawer. I spent an unhealthy amount of time looking for a solution and stumbled across this square glass spice jar set from The Pretty Store and I love them. The jars are glass, which leaves the spices fresher for longer, hold a large volume, have a large opening so I can get a tablespoon inside easily (so you don’t have to incorrectly pour your clumpy cumin directly from the jar) and come with a set of pre-printed labels so you can peruse your collection easily while cooking. I ordered a second set of labels to go on the side of the jar in addition to the lid, and a couple of custom labels for the less common spices or homemade blends we use. It’s also a little Aussie online shop too, which I love!

Salt and Pepper

For years, I’ve used a small, blue tagine from Morocco to store my salt flakes and positioned it right next to my stovetop for easy access while cooking. The tagine is the perfect receptacle because its wide base ensures you don’t have to be a contortionist making a shadow puppet to grab a few flakes from the bowl. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an aesthetically pleasing option for the poor pepper; the refillable plastic grinder I usually hide because it was ruining the vibe. During a late night Instagram lurk, I saw a brass pepper mill sitting beautifully on Rebecca Harding’s bench top and immediately set about searching and found a Greek family-run business that specialise in making mills for salt, pepper and coffee. These mills are so beautiful and will patina with age and use. Bonus points for not having to acquire seperate salt and pepper shakers for mealtimes.

Elite bench top staples: salt, pepper, olive oil

Herb Storage

The never-ending battle of my kitchen always seemed to be how to store my herbs without taking up too much space across the kitchen. I do not find the little basil plants from the supermarket useful, where the assumption is that I’m using five leaves per dish over multiple meals. I’m fucking shredding that bunch bare for my chorizo and spinach pasta until I’m left with bare green stalks that will sit in a glass of water on my bench top, dead a few days later. Add to that the coriander sitting in my fridge drawer getting pummelled by the carrots as someone violently roots around for a stray radish, the delicate leaves bruising and sliming with each assault. I had wanted to try the OXO herb storage container for a while and got one when I saw it on sale. I’ve had it for two months or so and I am obsessed with it. Yes, the container takes up fridge door space (I got the large one, wouldn’t bother with the small) but it has kept my herbs fresh and slime-free for so much longer. The herbs happily sit upright in the container with a small reservoir of water in the base and do not have to stomach the indignity of a rock-solid avocado being flung into their space daily.

Fridge Storage

We’ve all seen them. The impossibly aesthetic videos of women (it’s always women, find me a fridge restock video featuring a man) restocking their fridges with perfectly proportioned fruit and vegetables to go into their perfectly sized containers, along with the soda can holders and overflowing drawers of miniature shit that I guarantee they do not eat. While I love looking at these videos for a bit of mindless entertainment at the end of the day, they are impractical and unrealistic and waste so much space. I had to quarantine half a shelf in the fridge for my husband to keep his pickles on, where the fuck would I fit a seperate container of pre-packaged Babybels amongst all that? But we shouldn’t write it off completely because some of the products can be quite useful. My biggest wins have come in the form of the fridge storage containers from Kmart. I’m trying to meal plan for the week to reduce the amount of times I set foot in a fucking supermarket per week and that also means prepping some food after I shop to make my life easier during the week with a clingy toddler with an ravenous appetite for berries. And yes, I am that wanker that washes my fruit and veg before putting it away when I get back from the shops but it does make my life easier when prepping snacks and dinner and I am soothed knowing I’ve washed eleventy thousand fingerprints and God knows what else from the apples. I use this food saver for my berries, radishes and smaller veg (also prevents my kid inhaling $20 of berries in a single sitting) and this one for any larger veg.

Sink organisation

If you haven’t deduced already, I’m a fussy bitch if not a practical one and I take sink organisation very seriously. In my BC (before children) era, I would sometimes put my kitchen scourer and dishwashing liquid under the sink when we finished the dishes for the day but when you’re a parent and home a lot more like I am now, that shit just does not happen. The time spent in your kitchen increases infinitely when you have a baby. You’re washing hands thrice the normal amount, sterilising bottles and pump parts, cooking purees, washing snack plates ad infinitum on top of all your other usual crap. I used to use the al.ive sink caddy like forty three million other people but I hated how small it was, having to constantly refill the dish liquid and hand soap and the caddy kept getting slimy and there was no space for my sponge (rude). So Sherlock got back on Google and I solved my problem with this silicone sink tray which is the perfect receptacle for my sponge and refillable, reusable dish and hand soap bottles by Thankyou. In addition to this, I also picked up this silicone drying mat. Typically, I hate drying racks and such. It’s another thing to clean and encourages dish piling (I’m really giving myself away here in this newsletter) but I like that this one is easy to clean and folds up neatly when I’m done.

And if we can dive beneath very quickly, I’d also like to recommend this little storage unit from Kmart for underneath your sink. This is great if you have an open sink cabinet but if yours is small or has multiple shelves, it might be too tall for you. Luckily, Kmart has 476 other storage options for you to peruse and choose from. Their clear plastic trays have helped me reorganise the kitchen and are crucial for controlling the chaos in the utensil drawer.

A note on cleaning

It’s inevitable that once I start yapping on about kitchen devices, my mind will turn to cleaning. And to prevent this from turning into a newsletter on ethnic cleaning tips and risk someone calling me an antifeminist tradwife (I dare you), I’m just going to mention one item that has quickly become a staple. The Pink Stuff cleaning paste feels like the result of an evolutionary process, the modern version of what my Baba (Jiff cream cleanser, the OG) and mum (Gumption) used in their kitchens. It’s slightly less abrasive than the aforementioned iterations and I’m assuming less chemical-laden, but let’s not look too closely as there will inevitably be something problematic in the ingredients list. I love this for scrubbing pots, the oven and getting annoying marks off my bench tops. Smells good too.

Tea Towels

Recently, my mum recommended tea towels from Country Road to me. I went into the store for a look and feel (because some things you need to purchase IRL instead of online) and came out with three different types to road test and I am very impressed. They actually absorb which seems like a remarkably basic requirement of such an implement but I guess that goes to show you how shit some of them actually are. The primary function of a tea towel is to dry and if I’ve already swiped the plate and smeared more water across a surface than I’ve absorbed, it’s a no from me. That shit needs to hold some water. Previously, I’d purchased tea towels from Adairs and for the most part, they’ve done okay, but the Country Road ones are the best I’ve tried; the top picks for me are these and these.