Warning to guy cooks!

I hear you. I'm OK with my husband moving my kitchen stuff around and even putting things in a different place, as long as the placement MAKES SENSE. It's not gonna fly if he puts the baking soda in my sugar shelf. He will quickly find out just how un-sweet I can be. ;-)

May the biggest relationship problem anyone has to face be finding their paprika or measuring spoons in the wrong place. Okay, got to scoot back to Girl Land now...that kitchen isn't going to make itself look pretty!

pierino, since you can spell you could at least find the spices she alphabetized. What if she had put the red lids with the red lids, green with green, glass with the glass, and thrown-out the metal lids because they didn't match?

It's your space, so why don't you try explaining why something goes where it does. Especially knives in the water is very dangerous!

Oddly enough, we haven't had this issue yet. I have better things to do than obsess about the placement of every little thing, and my fiancé couldn't care less. The only thing we require is a clean kitchen, and we always take turns doing dishes and letting the chickens out in the morning. After all, no one should have to do dishes AND let the chickens out in the same morning ;)
I also have to state the obvious, Pierino: not all women are alike. As cooking and kitchen work has been a primarily feminine occupation for some time now, many of us know our way around a kitchen and don't need everything to be "pretty." Great rant though. Hope you can work it out.

After 41 years, it's my kitchen unless it's breakfast where I'll succumb to the spouse. If he doesn't actually knows where it goes, he leaves it sitting on the counter. And if he does put things in the wrong place or steals my kitchen shears, I just throw a hissy fit until he retrieves them for me!

I'm always happy when my partner cleans the kitchen, or does some organization. Sure, I'll sometimes have to ask where he put an item I commonly use, or something minor like that, but in the great scheme of things--you'll get over it. Relationships are not one-way, if you want happiness; and after 25 years you get used to compromises in life and know that material things are just minor road bumps.

I think you're dating the wrong kind of women, Pierino. I kicked a man to the curb who thought I needed to know how he thought I should organize my kitchen. And my truck. And my life.

Perhaps there are no problems with wives, husbands, friends, moms, sisters, brothers. Maybe there are people who love one another wanting to participate in the kitchen with great food, which is really the heart of life.

One of the problems with wives is that, for some silly reason, they seem to believe they share rights to the kitchen. I solved most of my problems by declaring running and unloading the dishwasher to be my job. That way most things make it back to where they belong.

It's amazing how easily women will relinquish dishwashing duty on a permanent basis. Sometimes I think I could have negotiated a better deal, but other times I wonder if she didn't spend the first month of married life deliberately putting things away in random drawers just to get more work out of me.

My daughter is an excellent cook in her own right and when she comes to visit my kitchen gets turned around because she organizes differently than I do. It is worth the inconvenience to eat her meals!

Interesting concept on organizing spices, from www.theperfectpantry.com --

Next time I reorganize my spice rack, I'm abandoning my usual system.

Next time, I will not group the little jars into peppers, salts, baking spices, warm spices and leafy green herbs.

Next time, I'll sort my dried herbs and spices this way:

aphrodisiacs
miracle cures
brings prosperity and good fortune
used for embalming pharoahs in ancient Egypt

Ready to try it?

In addition to alphabetizing the spices the other really bad one is putting your knives in the sink and then piling dishes on them. Even worse, running a knife through the dish washer.

My husband and I have a deal: he'll do dishes during the week if I make dinners. This means he often puts things away in slightly odd places, though he really does try to put them where I keep them. When I can't find my measuring spoons, I growl a little and remind myself how awesome it is I didn't have to clean them in the first place. (He's also well-trained on which pans not to touch.)

Pierino, I'm sorry to turn my back to you on this one, man. I'm happy to have my wife in the kitchen because, even though we use different methods, she and I both know where we are in space, and don't constantly bump or get in each other's way. That would get my goat.

If I can't find something in it's preferred place, she is right there to tell me where she hid it. She'll ask, "What can I do now?" And I'll say "Well, you could clear the sink." The next time I turn around the sink is clear. That's priceless.

Also she is in charge when we do sweet, and I'm only the boss of savory.

My son alphabetized the spices in the kitchen (after he was no longer living at home). He couldn't find what he wanted because they were organized by use. My (female) cousin did the same thing to her mother. There's a rationale, but basically, the issue is Whose kitchen is it?

My wife is an engineer and I don't think she has ever made an 'prettier over here' argument. My sister, however, has had many similar frustrations with mothers. When she was on bed rest after having my niece, my mother and my sister's mother-in-law effectively ran her kitchen for nearly two months. The first two weeks my sister was back on her feet she spent un-reorganizing all of the 'helpful' shortcuts the mothers had made.

My SO helpfully cleaned a 15 year old hammered steel wok for me with a brillo pad. He knows better now. That wok is showing it's age now and well re-seasoned, a little loose with the handle..but still my go to wok.
I don't have a gas range and pull out a portable gas burner to use it tho.
Nope, it's not just females---I think every one has their own stories about things like that.

Husbands do the same thing. Maybe not with the "prettier" argument, but when something's gone, it's still gone.