Our kitchen(ette)

When feeding a family, it is prohibitively expensive to eat out for every meal. (Actually, in Western Europe and can be prohibitively expensive to eat out for ANY meal!)

Happily, our dormitory room includes a kitchenette: a small refrigerator, a sink, and two burners. The staff here at the dormitory thoughtfully rounded up enough plates and cups and silverware for us and even found us a big pot--which I use every single day!

I have been happily surprised at how easy it is to cook three meals a day in this space. Only having two burners has been the most limiting factor--if I need two burners for the main dish (pasta and sauce, for example), we have to have a salad instead of a cooked vegetable as there's nowhere to cook it!

We do most of the food preparation on the table since we have no counter space, but that generally works fine. Washing the dishes is really a one-person job, given the space limitations, so I'm afraid the littlest ones are not getting the soul-improving experience of dishwater hands.

I like to think of it as the sonnet approach to food preparation: in sonnets, you're strictly limited by the rhyme and the rhythm scheme, but you can still make beautiful poetry. Similarly, we're strictly limited as to what food we can make and how we prepare it, but within those limits, beautiful meals can still happen.