How to have a Minimalist Kitchen with Paula Rizzo and Melissa Coleman

Hey there, Paula Rizzo here from ListProducer.com, and I am joined by the fabulous Melissa Coleman. She is the author of The Minimalist Kitchen, and I'm proud to say that she was one of my media training clients. I helped her when this book first came out. So thanks for joining me, Melissa.

Thank you for having me. It's good to be with you again.

I know, it's so fun to be on this side of things, right? We met many, many times this way, but, uh, it was for a different purpose.

Yes. You met me stumbling over my words so many times. Helping me.

So give me a little background, 'cause I, you know, when I was obviously working with your publisher and they said, oh, this new book is coming out, it's called The Minimalist Kitchen. And I was like, this is right up my alley. I love this kind of thing. So it's the practical art of making more with less. Yeah. So just tell me a little bit about, you know, how'd you come up with this? Why are you so obsessed with minimalism?

Yes. So I had, I had my daughter about, she's 5 now and the kitchen completely broke for me. I was cooking before, I was a food blogger. I hired myself. Nobody hired me to do that. I always like to make sure people know that. But when I had my daughter, the kitchen completely broke for me. I did not know how to get dinner on the dinner table. Like it was mind-blowing. And it got to the point that I looked over at my husband and I said, I'm going, to either quit this space or fix it. And The Minimalist Kitchen was born. I love food, I love to eat, and so I wanted to preserve the dinner table. And getting back to the dinner table took a long time. It took making over my pantry, it took changing my shopping habits, it took convincing my husband to change his shopping habits.

Ah, see, that's tough too, right? It's not when it's just, it's not just you, it's like there's a whole other people who live here too.

Yeah, totally. I started to think about my kitchen as a restaurant and I'm the restaurant owner and I need to build a system for my employees. I don't like that hierarchy, but just for an example. And it needs to work for my employees. Like the snack little bin for my 5-year-old needs to be at a place she can reach it or she's going to scale the pantry and it's going to all fall apart.

There's going to be a big issue, right? It's going to be even worse than a hungry kid. Yeah. So when you say that the kitchen was broken, Broken? Like what was happening? What was the issue?

I had, oh, what did I have? I had spilling bags of pasta and rice. I had every variety of rice because different recipes called for different varieties. So I trusted the recipe, which is a good thing to do, but I trusted the recipe and I bought a ton of different types of rice. And the hard thing with rice is they each cook differently, different amounts of time, different amounts of liquids. So every time I'd pick up that bag of rice, I'd have to relearn how to cook that particular bag of rice. I'd often end up with really crunchy rice, just poor results. And the problem I kept coming back to is I have too much in my kitchen. I'm trying to—

Ah, so it's the overflow of way too many things. I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, wow, how many batch— how many different kinds of rice do I have in my pantry? You know? I mean, it's really— you buy it for one recipe and then you keep it and you never use. Same with pasta.

Same with— Yes.

Your whole idea is to pare it down to what you use most, right?

To what you use most, or an ingredient that you really like how it performs. Like, I imagine if you looked in your pantry, there would be one rice that you pick up every time, or when it runs out, you replace that rice even though you've got 5 other bags. Or the same with pasta. There's a bunch of different varieties of pasta, and I imagine that you, you go pick the same one. And when I started cooking like that, it changed the way that I shopped, because I only shopped for that particular rice. I didn't have to stand at the rice aisle, read all the different bags, go through my decision paralysis that I have all the time. It just made every step of the kitchen and kind of of life easier.

Hmm. So what is it? What's the first rule? Like, let's say people are watching this and they're like, oh my gosh, my pantry is a total disaster. What should I do? I mean, I know we talked about getting those little clear containers with the little pop-up, like those are awesome. But before you go buy all of those, what should you do first?

Yeah, now people aren't gonna like this rule, but it is the best rule. It's a rule that I use no matter what space I am in, in my house or even in my work life. It can work in your physical space and in your mental space, is just pay attention to your habits. Like, look and see which rice you're always buying, and then buy that rice and discard the rest. Go to the back of your pantry, like to the back of the shelf, Who knows what's back there, if it's even good.

I know, I don't want to look.

Yes, your answers. You know, we sometimes we go look everywhere else for answers and they're always almost right in front of us. And in this case, they're in the back shelf of the pantry. Or it's in the front too. You can see what's in the front. Anything that's in the front, you're probably using all the time and putting it right back.

It's like your closet, you know, like your clothes. I mean, I know you've been very minimalist about your clothes too. I mean, I am as well. You know, you end up looking— you're not really using most of the stuff that's in there, if you're honest with yourself, you know.

Right, right. And that's, that's kind of the conclusion I came to. I was like, I'm— I— why am I storing all these things that I'm not using? How about I just keep the things that I'm using and then discard the rest? And that's what I started doing in my pantry, in my closet. Everywhere, like where this starts and stops in your life is totally unpredictable. Just let it be, let it go.

And what have, what have you noticed for yourself that has changed since you started to do this in all areas of your life?

Yeah, so I should back up a little bit. I am a graphic designer by trade, and before that I was a painter. And a technique or a philosophy or tool that I always grabbed was negative space. And then when I became a designer, they called it white space. And I realized that what I was, what I'm doing now is what I was doing then. I am trying to minimize what's around me in my physical space to create physical white space and mental white space, just a space to breathe and think. My brain naturally doesn't handle chaos well. And even if you ask me, if I don't have a plan for dinner and you ask me at 5 o'clock, I kind of go a little spazzy. I kind of spaz out. My brain doesn't fire. But if I have a plan, if I have physical white space around me and mental white space, I know how to think. I've just learned how to help myself, what my natural tendencies are, and work backwards and create a space around that that benefits me rather than hinders me.

And lists, right? List-making is an important part of your life. Tell me about that.

Yes, so lists are so important. We were talking about this ahead of time, But I have learned over the years that I am a highly visual person. I'm not an auditory processor. Sometimes I feel like if you're talking to me, you might think I'm chugging a little slowly, but visually I'm functioning really fast. And one way that I— one thing that I've used are lists to help myself trigger fast. If I write something down, if I see it, then I can recall it and remember it. And I do that with meal planning. Like, I have to write down a meal plan. I have to not only write it down, I have to see it. So we have this huge chalkboard in our house that I write the meal plan on for the week. So as I am going throughout my week, I see that list and then I make that list and it does not, dinnertime does not feel, it is so weird. I used to loathe dinnertime and when I see that list, I know what to do. I know what to buy at the store. I just make dinner and it is It feels light. It feels easy and really doable. But prior to not having a list, trusting my brain, it was not working so well.

Not good. No, not at all. I get it. I get it. Well, the thing I love about the cookbook, and this is the book, and it has, you know, not only how do you set up your pantry and how you set up all your stuff, but these delicious recipes that I remember when you and I were doing our media training, I was like, let's talk about this one. Tell me about that one. Like, I was so excited to hear all about it and hear you talk about it. But the good thing is that there's not a ton a ton of ingredients in these recipes, which a lot of times, you know, you pick up a cookbook that somebody's written and it's like, it feels so undoable. So why for you is it important to have just like a few core ingredients?

Yeah, I found that that's when I was successful, when I pared down my pantry to a set of ingredients. And you'll find that list that I cooked from in the book. I have a list and there's a lot of pantry staples. Some people, it's funny, we've gotten reviews that say it's too minimalist, it's not minimalist enough, but the beauty of this book is that you can apply these same concepts to your kitchen and it will look different, and that's a really good thing. But basically what I've done is I pared down my ingredient list. I've even written it out. You could do the same thing. And then now I cook from that with those ingredients. So I've kind of created for myself a framework to create in, which as a graphic designer, that was something that was, was taught to us to create frameworks so that you know how to create. Blank canvases are really intimidating, whether you're an artist or not, they're really intimidating. So give yourself some parameters. I'm going to paint this subject or this XYZ, and that, that same philosophy is what's happening in the kitchen. I've given myself parameters and a set of parameters. And it looks like a list of ingredients. And in the case of this book, a list of tools as well.

I love it.

Some rules.

Yes.

Rules. Rules can be good. A lot of people hate rules, but they can be so good.

Yes. It's so true. I think it helps you to be more creative. It helps you to be, when you have that framework, it really then helps you. So my favorite two recipes, and you probably know this, but are the barbecue black bean quick slaw tacos.

How long does it take you to make those?

Oh my god, it's so quick. The only thing that I had to, like, I bought like the biggest cabbage ever. I think I told you this when I made it. I was like, um, now I have all this extra cabbage, I don't really know what to do. So like, now I'm smarter about the way that I buy it.

Yeah.

And then the takeout cashew chicken, that one must be my absolute favorite one.

Yes, those, if this was, if this book was a CD, those would be some of the It's a hit on the— and the chicken tinga tacos. People love the chicken tacos.

I gotta check that one out.

I haven't tried it yet.

Awesome. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for chit-chatting with me. I'm glad to catch up with you and see your face again.

Yes, it's so good to talk with you, Paula.

Yeah. So tell me, the Faux Martha is your website, right? FauxMartha.com? Yep.

TheFauxMartha.com.

TheFauxMartha.com.

Yeah, that kind of—

Okay, perfect. And so there, people can find out where to buy the book, they can read up on what you're up to, your blog posts, you have some other exciting stuff coming up in the future.

Yeah, and I haven't announced this yet, but I'll announce it here. In January, we're going to launch a deeper pantry cleanse. It's taking the same concepts of the book but taking a deeper dive, doing worksheets, really making it so practical so that you can makeover your kitchen to make it more doable.

Awesome. Well, great. Well, when that, when that happens, I'd love to promote it and let people know all about how you can make your pantry even more minimalist. I definitely need it because, you know, since you and I have been talking, I mean, this has been months and months and months. I'm like, oh yeah, I need to do that. Do you think I've done it? Nope, not at all.

So I should tell you really fast, it took me probably 3 years to really get mine, 3 to 4 years to get mine to where it is now. So give yourself a little room to—

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you.