Enthused viewers of Budget Eats have been asking for this kitchen tour with so much determination and patience that Julia and I could no longer deny the people their earnest appeals.
It's a little hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of showing off my 90-square foot kitchen because if you've seen one Budget Eats episode, you've seen basically my entire kitchen. Most tours feature celebs touting kitchens twice the size of my entire studio apartment (or "junior 1-bedroom" if you want to be that realtor), so it feels rather strange to feature my rather confined cooking space in a dedicated video tour.
But here is proof that size is not always the most important thing: Though I wish I had more counter space (who doesn't?), I think we can all agree that this is a powerful kitchen. To really get cooking, you just have to know how to use it to the max. Hot tip #1: Keep it clean with vinegar and a microfiber cloth, ideally with a built-in patch of scrubby pad. Hot tip #2: Store all nuts and flours in the freezer, where the cold temperature preserve the oils in those ingredients so they don't turn rancid. Hot tip #3: Push all of your Tupperware into a cabinet and pray to the kitchen gods that nothing falls out every time you open it—and you will open that cabinet door very slowly.
For most viewers of the series, the highlight of this tour will be the peek into my spice cabinet. Questions flood in every day about what spices I would recommend for home cooks to always have on hand, and while I'd love to be a giver of concise and clear-cut answers, there just isn't one here. Spices are deeply personal to your taste buds and flavor inclinations and I don't have the magical roster of spices that would please every single human. That being said, Aaron and I love Szechuan peppercorns (both the red and the green kinds); I especially love having seeds of all kinds on hand like cumin, coriander, and fennel, which all taste so much better freshly toasted and ground just before use; and cardamom pods and dried lavender flowers have a special place in my dessert spice collection.
June's Favorite Spices
Cloud Forest Cardamom
Xinjiang Cumin
Desert Fennel
Catch me during a good week and you can actually peer into my fridge, where there's always butter, eggs, peanut butter, apples, Shark brand Sriracha sauce, and Kewpie mayo. There's never margarine, never steak, but there might be some organ meat. Should you dare pull open my freezer door, you will find very random things like soursop puree that I bought once upon a time and never used, plus a plastic container of frozen fried chicken bones (don't ask, I don't have answers).
To see me geek out about my spoons, forks, and sporks and to witness my embarrassment concerning how I never read my cookbook collection, you'll have to watch the whole video above. And if you want to get your hands on future issues of Delish quarterly, you can subscribe here!
