I feel like there are some area in which I’ve really come a long way, and then others where I haven’t even scratched the surface.

I’ve started actually cooking recipes from scratch from my many, many cookbooks just recently. That was definitely on my “meant to do but never do” list for ages. I also used to kill anything that grew in dirt. I actually have harvested quite a bit of fresh homegrown organic tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.

I now currently have a pretty awesome fall and winter garden going, and I have so many pumpkins emerging in my front yard it will be a challenge to use them all. I have been teaching my kids about the importance of these issues, including a fun visit to a local orchard to pick our own apples and pumpkins.

I definitely have focused a lot more on buying local food products, as well as making my own food from scratch much more often and buying far less prepackaged foods.

But then there are also so many things I haven’t gotten to, or haven’t mastered like I had hoped. I have purchased graham flour and even a very cute set of animal cracker presses to make my own healthier, homemade snack cookies for the kids. All of that has just sat in the pantry.

I have, however, finally nailed down my three primary Sustainable KJitchen Project Challenges. I am betting many of you have similar challenges, so I will address each one and the solutions that have worked or that I plan to try.

Sustainable Kitchen Project Challenge #1: Time

This has to be, by far, the biggest challenge for me. I constantly feel like I’m fighting to steal a few moments to do something related to this project. In some ways, those stolen moments work out. I come to get antsy each afternoon to go tend to my garden, even though it’s just a couple minutes’ time of rushed watering and picking. Shoot, my whole fall/winter garden was planted pretty much in spurts of weeding and tossing out seeds.

I’ve got a plan to improve this situation. I plan to have one day a week set aside for food. I am hoping even if I just dedicate naptime once a week to baking bread or making a stockpile from scratch of a food I buy prepared now or canning something from the garden, this will eventually make a huge difference. We’ll see if I can actually stick to this.

Sustainable Kitchen Project Challenge #2: Money

Right from the beginning, I learned something. Having a sustainable kitchen doesn’t come without a price, especially at the front end. In many cases, it does pay off in the long run by saving on the expense for buying produce or buying pricy packaged foods. But it would be very easy to spend way more on going sustainable than you spend just buying items at the store.

A couple ways I have solved this is to simply go with the cheapest route, not the easiest or coolest. I almost always start from seed for the vegetables, for example. Then if they don’t make it, I’m only out a couple bucks. Also, as I go through this process, in many ways being sustainable means reducing your dependence on buying things.

For example, once I get some nice compost I won’t need to spend so much money on organic vegetable garden dirt. I am spending money buying canning jars, but I can reuse those. I am also taking one project on at a time. Instead of spending a fortune buying gear and supplies and ingredients for everything I want to try making, I do a little at a time.

I also go vintage when I can. I have found some pretty cool finds, from vintage cookbooks to kitchen gadgets to furniture (do you know about the coolness that is the early 20th century Hoosier cabinet?… I am in a quest to find the perfect one right now). Thrift stores, antiques dealers and Goodwill shops are all great places to forage for nice kitchen supples, and it is supporting the sustainability notion by recycling instead of consuming new products.

Sustainable Kitchen Challenge #3: Space

This is another truly pesky one. My kitchen is way smaller than I’d like. I have almost no counter space. That means even when I have the time and money challenges conquered above, I have no good place to work so I avoid it. I have gone on a mildly psychotic binge of buying cheap baskets and bins to try to get better organized, and my next step is to get above-mentioned Hoosier.

These are kitchen cabinets that are designed to be baking centers, and I hope to make this cabinet my cooking from scratch epicenter. They even have these amazing bins for flour that lead below to a sifter. You can find them in antiques stores for anywhere from $200 to $1,200 (and I’m sure even higher). It’s certainly not cheap, but it’s an awful lot cheaper than buying new built-in kitchen cabinets and counter! And no new trees need to be sacrificed for the cause.

So those are the challenges I have faced. I am still working towards Sustainable Kitchen bliss. I have lots of work left to do. I hope next year that I can post a killer, cool picture like this amazing canning mania pantry photo.

And I’d love to hear from you. What challenges do you have to pursuing your kitchen goals? What solutions have you found? And are you up to join me in the challenge? If so, I will let you know when I get my page with cool SKP badge posted.

_{Photo of girls picking apples, © Kelby Carr, photo of Hoosier cabinet, public domain photo at Wikipedia.}

My husband took a couple tubs of books we don’t need any more to a local used book store, and now we have a sweet credit to buy more used books. We’ve also been hitting some local antiques stores, the cool Asheville Habitat for Humanity home store, and even a free book exchange (you’ve got to love Asheville!). I’ve made some cool finds, price tag for everything below like $10 (actually I’m still in the negative if you figure we still have bookstore credit).

This was my favorite find, a first American edition of Larousse Gastronomique packed with dozens and dozens of great classic French recipes. I’m so in love…

Here is the cover (it has a protective wrap, so I apologize for the glare):

And here’s the cool thing you get with a vintage cookbook that you just won’t find buying new. There was an old New Orleans Times-Picayune article on truffles tucked inside the back cover (which has great food illustrations on it):

And check out these hilarious 1961-era French food pics. Gag me!

And here is my personal favorite find, a hilarious 1963-era book, The Working Wives’ (Salaried or Otherwise) Cookbook. I was just going to laugh at it, but the whole theme of the book is recipes you make ahead the night beforehand and heat the day of. That actually could come in handy, and it included some classics like Beef Burgundy.

As cool as those cookbooks are, the coolest find was at the local Habitat store: a vintage Betty Crocker recipe card file in which the person actually got all of the recipes. How retro-cool is this?

And here are some of the categories. My personal fave? “Men’s Favorites,” whatever the hell that means (no it isn’t cards with recipes for beer, pizza and sex… but it probably should be):

I was sold when I saw a whole file section on recipes for kids to make, but I think we might skip the pizza with hamburger crust. It’s kind of a miracle the baby boomers who ate this crap in childhood are still around, don’t you think?

But there actually are some healthy options in the recipes for kids to make:

Here is the best part. Whoever once owned this must have used it to store all recipes, because there are several other recipes tucked in (and even filed properly!). Some are handwritten, and some typed (yes, typewriter typed), and some clipped from magazines. There’s even one that’s scribbled on note paper without even a name for the recipe. I’m dying to try that one!