Living Large In Our Little House

Organization in a small house isn't a res­o­lu­tion, but more of a way of life. I try to spend at least 10–15 min­utes each day orga­niz­ing some part of the house, but main areas such as the kitchen need a good reor­ga­niz­ing at least a cou­ple of times a year.

Last year, when Brette Sember's book, “The Organized Kitchen” came out, I got it and thought it was a great resource for any­one need­ing a lit­tle orga­ni­za­tional help.

If your New Year res­o­lu­tion is to orga­nize your home, par­tic­u­larly your kitchen, you’ll want this book, and Brette has gen­er­ously offered to give one copy away to one of our lucky Living Large community.

Entering is sim­ple. Just make a com­ment on this post before noon US CDT on Monday, January 14. Please make sure you check in on the post on Tuesday, January 15 to see if you won. If you want auto­matic notice of posts, go to the bot­tom right and click on “Entries RSS” and sign up for RSS Feed. If I announce that I drew your name, you must email me at fivecoat@​ozarkmountains.​com by noon CDT Wednesday, January 16 with your snail mail address to claim your book. Sorry, inter­na­tional read­ers, this one is open to U.S. res­i­dents only.

Tell us why you would like to have this book!

Today, we have a guest post from Brette Sember, author of the new book, Cookie: A Love Story: Fun Facts, Delicious Stories, Fascinating History, Tasty Recipes, and More. Brette also authored “The Organized Kitchen” and “The Muffin Tin Cookbook,” both excel­lent kitchen books for small house lovers. She has an excel­lent gift guide on her web­site, http://​PuttingItAllontheTable​.com pair­ing all of her books with other great gift ideas for the holidays.

For lots of peo­ple, it’s not Christmas with­out cook­ies. Our kids leave cook­ies out for Santa, we spend weeks bak­ing and dec­o­rat­ing our cook­ies, and there’s always a cookie plate at any party. The gin­ger­bread man has become syn­ony­mous with Christmas. But how did cook­ies come to be such an impor­tant sym­bol of Christmas?

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Put on your party hats and toot that party horn, our vir­tual orga­ni­za­tion party is on!

As promised, I’m start­ing orga­niz­ing in the kitchen of Our Little House and there is a cool give­away, so keep reading.

It can seem a lit­tle over­whelm­ing, even in a small kitchen, when look­ing at all of the cab­i­nets and try­ing to decide how to best organize.

For the kitchen, I have four goals:

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Photo cour­tesy of Brette Sember, No Pot Cooking

I wrote last week about get­ting my hus­band to try Beer Butt chicken, although I know he is not a roasted chicken fan.

This is actu­ally the third thing in as many months Dale said he didn’t like that he ended up liking.

I think this is the begin­ning of a wave of things I might get him to try and I have the Cookbook Goddess Brette Sember to thank.

Her book, “The Parchment Paper Cookbook” (some recipes from the book are now avail­able on Kindle for .99!) opened up this world of new tastes for Dale. Her recipe in the book on Brussels sprouts, which she blogged about on No Pot Cooking, was what got him hooked.

When I read the first line of her blog, “I’m mar­ried to a man who doesn’t much like Brussels sprouts…” and it ended up that her hus­band liked this recipe, I knew I had to give it a whirl.

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