The Barefoot Cook

It's a trend I see a lot in American blogs, whether it's clean­ing rou­tines (with Clean My Space), dec­o­rat­ing or cook­ing blogs: being bare­foot at home while clean­ing or cooking.

Like

I real­ly don't see why I'm clean­ing since my floors are so clean that I already walk on them barefoot

or

but what idiot invent­ed pro­fes­sion­al shoes, my kitchen is so clean all the time that I even put a big car­pet in it?

(The video is in French, use subtitles…)

We're going to for­get over house­work in gen­er­al, but when it comes to the kitchen, my broom is my third favourite utensil.

There's the splash from the sink, the stuff that falls out of place (lots of stuff), the cat that drops what it want­ed to taste and didn't like, etc. Not to men­tion the risk of more seri­ous acci­dents, the day the oil catch­es fire and sprays around you, the day you have to open your oven in a hur­ry and you drop the very hot dish on the floor… in short, every­thing that nev­er hap­pens in the life of an Instagrammable food blog­ger but very often in real life.

Personally, I had :

• tripped while hold­ing the (big) jumper full of wild boar stew, which was a mon­strous fall, I man­aged not to spill almost any­thing but I was stunned on the floor for a good minute and had a bat­tered wife's face for a week: I had pre­served the con­tents of my jumper at the cost of a dive with my arm out­stretched towards the ground and a very rough encounter between the ground and my cheek­bone; that said, there was still some splashing. ..
• the Italian cof­fee pot that got clogged and explod­ed, artis­ti­cal­ly colour­ing the walls, floor and ceil­ing with dark brown splash­es wor­thy of Jackson Pollock
• the garbage bag that was a lit­tle too full and that tore itself apart (and that, of course, con­tained very liq­uid stuff)
• the cat that for­got its piece of chick­en or the lit­tle hard thing that it chased around the flat (like Lego but even more devious)
• the knife that slips out of the hand and almost makes a hole in the flooring
• the glass, the plate that com­mits sui­cide by slip­ping and hit­ting the tiles and send­ing lit­tle splin­ters everywhere
• the earthy pota­toes brought back from the mar­ket that sadis­ti­cal­ly leave their soil on the tiles while I put them away
• the big release of steam when the oven is opened, which almost makes the dish drop out of solidarity
• the acci­dent when trans­fer­ring from the pan to the dish
• etc

I don't feel like I cook like a pig, and I real­ly like to live bare­foot, but NEVER in the kitchen.

So when I see Caroline Chambers, blog­ger and recipe cre­ator, intro­duce her­self in this way, what can I say?

Without going as far as wear­ing a pro­fes­sion­al out­fit with anti-slip shoes, I advise you, in front of these pic­tures, to remem­ber that a kitchen is not a wel­com­ing room for bare feet, that acci­dents always hap­pen when you don't expect them, that a bro­ken toe is extreme­ly painful, and that jump­ing on tip­toe to fetch a broom to pick up bro­ken glass is the best way to end up with a nice cut on your foot.

Plus, spend­ing sev­er­al hours cook­ing while stand­ing bare­foot on a hard sur­face is tir­ing. If you don't have com­fort­able soles, you should use an anti-fatigue mat or, worse, a real mat. (PVC mats clean up bet­ter than real mats…)

So the bare­foot cook cooks on a mat.… 

The rea­son pro­fes­sion­al kitchens have drains is so that you can reg­u­lar­ly wash with water. You don't have to go that far, but don't think that Caroline Chambers actu­al­ly cooks barefoot!