Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

The size of your kitchen is a ridiculous excuse for not cooking. Mine is tiny--I have a little stove, right next to the sink, right next to about a foot of counter space taken up by my drying rack. If I have four pots on the stove they end up edge to edge (pots on the left right against the wall, pots on the right dangling somewhat precariously over my sink) because it's so small. It's a pain in the ass to dismantle my drying rack (which is foldable so I can stick it under the kitchen trolley I got from ikea) in order to plug in my toaster (retrieved from the closet), or my blender (kept on the top of the fridge along with, it seems, half the other things in my kitchen), but all it is is annoying. It's hard to do things like roll out dough, there's no room for cooling racks ANYWHERE, so not much baking, but I still cook every day.

the day i tasted turkish delight was one of the most disappointing of my life.

I also cook for one and while I haven't come up with any solutions regarding produce like celery (apart from lots of recipe planning before I go shopping), freezing is a good way of preserving herbs, which I can never use before they wilt. They go a little limp but the flavor and color are like fresh for two or three months.

Having had a minor tempeh disaster today I'd love some new ideas on how to work with it, too. I've made a couple attempts to cook it, but so far nothing very good; it dries out too easily and is so strongly flavored that it probably takes more than a few meals to acquire a taste for it. I'd try it crumbled and fried, then added to a curry, though. Today I made Bittman's recipe for crumbled tempeh, spinach & rice and it was pretty awful (not much seasoning in his recipe--what made me think this would taste good?) but the crumbled, fried tempeh on its own wasn't bad--much better than baked tempeh, which is what I tried last time. Maybe you can try adding it to a spicy curry as a beef replacement--the flavor of tempeh is so complex and deep that I think it would work well for this.