Organizing your Kitchen
Setting yourself up to enjoy a healthy and varied diet is much easier than you think. Whether you’re learning about the kitchen for the first time or building on the skills you already have, the following techniques can help you get organized and manage food and kitchen tasks efficiently.
Cleanliness
- Always wash your hands before preparing food and have a clean, damp cloth on hand as you cook. This reduces the risk of contamination and helps you keep drawers, cupboards and appliances clean while you’re handling food.
- Always use a separate cutting board for raw meats. This keeps bacteria away from vegetables, cheese and other items that need to be cut and chopped.
Location
- Store equipment and foods in consistent locations. Put things away after use.
- Keep dishes easy and safe to reach.
- Store glasses and mugs upside down on shelves to keep them clean and stable. Put shorter ones in front.
- Arrange measuring spoons and cups in order of size and hang them close to your workspace. Two sets of each is a good idea—one each for wet and dry ingredients.
- If you share your kitchen with others, let them know that keeping things in place is important. It helps you to use the kitchen safely and independently.
Labelling
To work efficiently in the kitchen, you need to be able to find and identify what you need, when you need it. This means labelling and organizing food items, cleaning products, and appliances.
General guidelines
- Consider what type of system is best for you—visual, tactile or both? You can buy specialized products like tactile labels, plastic Braille labelling sheets or Braille and large print labelling guns. But you can also use everyday items like elastic bands, safety pins, buttons, file cards, and labels cut from plastic report-cover sheets.
- Remember that less is more. Labelling every item is often unnecessary, especially if you also use placement as a way of identifying things. Assign different items to specific sections of shelves and drawers. Then put different numbers of elastic bands on each item, and in different positions. For example: two elastic bands on a can of corn and three on a can of beans. Record how your system works in case you forget.
Labelling food
- Place items on different shelves—soup on one shelf, for example, and canned fruit on another. Create rows or stacks of items and put a label at the beginning of each row or on top of each stack.
- Consider using magnetic tape for labelling cans. Magnetic tape can be embossed with Braille or large print.
- Try Loeb Labels for packages and cans. They come in the shape of fruits, vegetables and other food products, and also work well for labelling items for the freezer.
- Experiment with shaping pieces of pipe-cleaner into letters and taping them to cans and boxes. Your labelling system can be as innovative as your imagination.
To learn more about labelling, see these other pages on our site: Getting Used to your Electric Stove and Oven, Small Kitchen Appliances, Cleaning your House or Apartment, and Labelling and Organization—General Tips.
Learning to Work in the Kitchen
If you have recently experienced vision loss, these techniques will help you adapt your skills in the kitchen for safety and efficiency. If you experienced vision impairment at a young age, you may need additional instruction. This could include feeling how things look, being shown hand-over-hand how to do various tasks, learning cooking procedures, or learning how to use kitchen appliances, cookware, and utensils.
We recommend that you get assistance from a Daily Living Skills instructor if you are learning these skills for the first time or adapting your existing skills. Due to safety considerations, we do not provide detailed information on using kitchen appliances. BALANCE instructors are trained to provide one-on-one instruction and safety techniques.
General techniques
- Use a tray to keep your workspace organized. Solid trays with sides give a secure frame of reference for organizing equipment and ingredients. They also make it easy to “clean as you go.”
- Clear spaces ahead of time so you know it’s safe to put things down, especially hot pans.
- Use your free hand to make sure the space ahead of you is clear when you are carrying food or drink.
- Always have a trivet or other heat-resistant surface on the counter next to the stove.
- Use recipes in your accessible format. See Accessing Recipes for tips and techniques.
- Organize the ingredients and equipment you need for the recipe before you begin.
- Put a small garbage container on the counter and on your workspace tray. Keep a clean, damp cloth on hand to wipe your hands.
- Remind kitchen helpers that concepts like “golden brown” are not useful to someone who has never had vision or to cooks who have recently experienced vision loss. Visual cues need to be converted into lengths of time at a particular temperature.
- Check the “doneness” of different foods by smell or by testing with a fork for texture and wetness.