Kitchen Strategies and Sea Legs

Cooking thrice daily for two dozen guests in a galley kitchen aboard a historic schooner requires a flexible strategy, and sea legs. Annie Mahle headed east from her Midwestern home the day after she graduated from college, working as a mess cook on a friend’s family’s boat in Maine. She’s left port many, many times, but she didn’t leave the galley kitchen behind until last year, when she and her husband sold their Maine windjammer, a schooner called the J. & E. Riggin.

After 20 years making much-lauded meals from a kitchen with a mere six square feet of counter space, Mahle has plenty to teach cooks who call studio apartments, camper vans, or tiny houses home. She imparts that wisdom in her new cookbook The Tiny Kitchen Cookbook: Strategies and Recipes for Creating Amazing Meals in Small Spaces. “When the kitchen is small, everything must have its own place. The second you’re done using any tool or ingredient, it’s got to go back in that place,” says Mahle. At sea, stowing gear and ingredients is done for safety, so things don’t fly around when the boat pitches with the waves. On land, kitchen gear is stowed smartly for sanity’s sake. The opening chapters of The Tiny Kitchen Cookbook are tightly packed with space-conscious tips, from storing pot lids to avoiding culinary tools that have a single use.

Flexible recipes are also key to a cook’s success when serving meals from a small space. When Mahle was cooking on the J. & E. Riggin, a last-minute trip to the grocery store was not an option. “This means I’ve gotten good at substituting ingredients and being creative with what I have on hand,” she writes. In many of her recipes, Mahle offers substitution ideas. But she warns cooks not to push any recipe so far that it becomes unpalatable. “If you force a substitution, then it often doesn’t work. Instead, allow the substitution to inform the rest of the creative process,” says Mahle. The following pages present four of Mahle’s recipes to give you a taste of what her book offers. We invite you to use your creative process to make them your own.