What’s A Kitchen Top? A Sexy Guide to Bossy Cooking

Welcome to The Kitchen Top! Do you get annoyed when other people are in your kitchen while you’re cooking? Do people innocently ask you if there’s something they can do to help, but nothing sounds worse? You might be a Kitchen Top. 

Hi, I’m M! This blog is the culmination of 15 years of vegetarian and vegan kitchen crafting I learned through trial and error and from other folks on the internet. I originally started keeping a spreadsheet of my favorite recipes for my own purposes. A year or two later, I had a solid 40 recipes of vegan and vegetarian comfort food. I’ve been teaching myself to cook and am excited to share what I’ve learned and how I’ve applied it to my home cooking. 

This is a joke between my partner and I about chefs being tops and sous chefs being bottoms. It usually has to do with whoever came up (or found) with the recipe. Home turf means you’re “topping” in the kitchen tonight (you know what ingredients you need and the recipe steps) and the other person is “bottoming” (taking orders, chopping veg). Listen up and say “Yes, Chef.”

I think it’s hilarious to apply “Topping” to lots of things in life. For instance, I’m also a Driving Top, meaning that I like to drive. I’m a safe driver and if someone else is driving and driving aggressively (read: unsafely) I’ve been known to ask them to pull over and let me drive so we don’t die on the road. But it’s not always this aggressive. Driving Top can also mean you’re taking care of a Passenger Princess, which I think is a much sweeter way to do it.

Topping in the kitchen, for me, means that I’ve got it. No one else needs to stress about dinner because I’ve got it taken care of. And it’s going to be delicious. I’ll make you try new experiments and I don’t expect you to lie to me if a recipe needs tweaking. Kitchen Topping is all about taking some control over what’s going on in your kitchen and trusting that it’ll work out if you know what you’re doing.

I want to share this cooking mentality with any other hotties out there who feel lost in the kitchen. Years ago, I started turning anything I was unsure of into a sexy little game with myself. Don’t know how to change a tire? You’re a hot, capable bitch and you can learn. Not sure if you can swing it in the corporate world? Learn how and act like it! At least that’s what I told myself. And it worked for me! Same applied to cooking.

My freshman year of college was my first year being a vegetarian out in the world by myself. I was blessed to have a phenomenal home cook as a mother and had never really had to think about cooking for myself. I was broke as hell and completely lost in the kitchen. I ate cream of mushroom soup mixed with white rice and the lightest (cheapest) items from the Whole Foods salad bar for like 5 months while working 2 jobs. And while that is *technically* food that sustains you, I needed to branch out. I started living with a friend who made bomb burritos out of like $0.79 worth of ingredients and I was astonished what he could do with spices and a can of black beans. SO, I started working on my own skills! I bought a few vegan cookbooks and started building a spice cabinet of my own.

Through some illnesses and learning more about myself, I went back and forth on vegan and vegetarian to full on scarfing deli turkey out of the fridge in the middle of the night over the next few years. In 2016, I became a dedicated vegetarian and started to take cooking a lot more seriously. I learned more about the cultural heritage of spices and ingredients from around the world. In 2018 I went vegan and it was wonderful.

THIS IS A WIP, PLEASE COME BACK PERIODICALLY 🙂