Simple Living | Kitchen Composting
It’s near noon on a weekday and I’m in the kitchen making a salad lunch. Tumbled together in the bowl are locally grown greenhouse lettuces, sprouts, a shave of red onion, sliced mini peppers, carrot curls, any variety of tender canned beans, briny feta, and roasted sunflower seeds. Over top, I drizzle a ribbon of homemade vinaigrette, then scatter on a good crack of black pepper. All the veggie tails and inedible bits are scooped up and popped into the compost bin in the freezer.
It’s the popping-the-ends-and-pieces-into-the-bin-in-the-freezer part that’s giving me the smiles, lately. Because, finally, I have a kitchen composting situation that’s both easy and odor-free. It’s taken a while to get here.
When I was a girl, my dad created a chore chart for my sister and I, complete with pencil-drawn illustrations of the chore. Emptying the compost bucket was assigned to me, so there, on my side of the chart, he sketched a pail full of veggie scraps, complete with its stinky odor curling out the top. All my life since then, I’d assumed two things about kitchen compost: it goes into a pail, and it stinks! Thus the variety of on-and-off efforts I’ve employed over the years to avoid the odor: buy one of those special compost pails with an odor filter in the lid, empty the pail more frequently, don’t compost at all - none of which proved to be a best solution. As for function, there was always the conundrum of needing the compost pail handy, while also wanting the stinky thing tucked as far away as possible.
Loves? Sometimes, the figuring-out of a simple life feels very complicated, indeed
It was a few months ago, when I was knee-deep in an autumn-induced kitchen reorganization, that I realized the place in my small kitchen that had the most available space to keep a compost pail was not under the sink where I’d been keeping it, but in the freezer. And, considering the shape of the freezer space, a lidded pail wasn’t the best receptacle at all, a bin was. A shorter, rectangular, open-top bin of some sort that could act like a drawer- pull it out and set it on the counter near the cutting board for a big prep job, or, for the smaller ones, simply open the freezer door, reach in, and drop in the handful of eggshells from the morning’s omelette. I’d heard of people keeping their compost in the freezer before, but it wasn’t until then that an imaginary page turned, everything aligned, and the implementation of the practice fell into place in my kitchen.
Finding the right bin would be the trickiest part, and it would take some time, I knew. But, why not improvise with what I had and give the practice a trial run in the meantime? I cut the height of a paper grocery bag down and lined it with a compostable trash bag. Although not ideal, it was close enough, and helped determined the size of bin to be looking for. Even better, it confirmed that, flimsy paper bag aside, this was, indeed, the best kitchen composting solution I’d ever tried. Then, finally one day last month, there, sitting on a thrift store shelf, was a bin stuffed with bath soaps and shower poufs in the exact dimensions I was looking for. Made of a fabric that easily wipes clean, and lined with a compostable bag (that I reuse many times over), it now sits on the shelf in my freezer, containing the kitchen’s compost. It is, quite simply, perfect.
This is simple living to me. It’s finding the sweet spot, settling in, and experiencing every day the flow of a well-designed space. It’s a lifestyle where everything is considered, even the compost bin.
