Publisher: TeenyTinyKitchen - Big Recipes, Tiny Kitchen - Jedd & Launie Kettler

Welcome to Teeny Tiny Kitchen. “Teeny” (as we affectionately call it) is our blog about cooking in a small kitchen in our northern Vermont apartment. When we first moved here we fell in love with the kitchen. It's very small, but – out of necessity - really well organized. Our kitchen is 48 square feet - not including the doorway which we consider lost space - so it's trim as a ship's galley. Luckily there is a healthy amount of storage space in this small area. But, we only have a combined prep area/flat space of 1 ½ x 3 ½ feet. And for the first couple of years we lived here, when we would invite friends or family over for dinner, the resounding refrain was, “You made (insert meal), in that small kitchen?” It became a reoccurring joke. Paninis made on our small Foreman grill one New Year's Eve were instantly christened by our group of friends as “Teeny Tiny Paninis.” The nickname stuck and we decided to use it to name our blog – but we dropped the “Paninis” and replaced it with “Kitchen.” Why start a blog? At this point there are literally thousands of food blogs, but we enjoy chronicling cooking in a very limited space. We also don't cook with any processed food. There are no cans of Campbell's soup on our shelves and no packages of Lipton's onion soup either. We don't exclude processed foods because we are snobs or even overly healthy. We're not. We enjoy cream, butter, cheese and wine. We like food. But we also like to know what we're eating. Making your own food from fresh ingredients instead of relying on processed ingredients doesn't mean you have to eat the same thing every night and it doesn't have to make cooking more difficult, even in a small space. It also doesn't mean you have to get all of your ingredients directly from a local farm, but we're lucky enough to live in an area that is seeing a revival of diversified agriculture. We're near an affordable CSA farm, and so - when it's in season - we can get most of our ingredients straight from the source. There's nothing fresher than food that was picked the day you bought it. It tastes better and lasts longer, and that's not even mentioning the benefits to the environment and the local economy. We also like a good challenge: having a CSA means getting a surprise in your kitchen on a regular basis – introducing you to new ingredients and forcing you to learn how to manage the bounty of the season. In the summer when we get our bi-weekly shares, the kitchen turns into a mini-processing plant. We are overrun with fresh vegetables and we have to work fast to blanch and freeze vegetables or make them into “quickles” before they go to waste. Again, another challenge in a small space, but a rewarding one and not as difficult as it might sound. (Except for stacking dishes perpendicularly, on top of a row of cookbooks. That's tricky.) And that's why we started Teeny, to show that size doesn't have to matter when it comes to good food.