Mise en place

mise en place for coffee cake with cinnamon pecan streusel

I love mise en place.  What is that, you ask?  It's a French phrase meaning putting in place or to set up.  What it means for the kitchen is that before starting to cook or bake something, set everything up that you need -- all the ingredients, all the tools and dishes, and anything else that is required.  If you have to dice carrots or celery, you do it ahead of time.  If you have to weigh ingredients such as flour and butter and sugar, you do it ahead of time.  And you set it all up so that everything is at hand, in bowls or containers, measured out, all prepared to go into the mixing bowl or the pan at the instant you need it.  

I personally find this practice to be relaxing and very satisfying.  Whether I'm planning on making one thing or many, I always set everything up ahead of time. When I was kid, I had no notion of doing that. I'd simply pull out the recipe and put the ingredients in one at a time, getting them out of the cupboard or canister or refrigerator as I needed them.  After I became more experienced, I learned how gratifying it can be to prepare things ahead of time and how much easier, so much easier it is.  When you don't do this, it's very common to miss important things such as an entire ingredient that you forget to put in because you're in a rush, or the fact that you have to process an ingredient, such as chopping nuts, or melting and then cooling butter, but which needs to be done and ready to be mixed into the other ingredients while they are hot or before a certain amount of time has elapsed. 

Planning everything out, fully reading the recipe, setting up your timeline for each step, and putting out all the ingredients is immeasurably helpful and reduces the amount of stress that can result from making complicated or even simple recipes.  And this also makes it much easier to make multiple things on the same day.

Late in the evening, my kitchen might have several restaurant trays placed here and there, each with small covered containers with measured amounts of flour or spices, and in the refrigerator are multiple small plates of butter portioned out, and so on.  When I get up in the morning, sometimes very early if I'm making a lot of things, everything is all set to be used, and I start making everything batch by batch, one at a time, but much more quickly than if I hadn't gone to the effort the night before to set everything up.  Try it sometime, if you don't already do it, and I think you will find it immensely satisfying and much more enjoyable to make anything in your kitchen.