If you have issues with your kitchen, they’re most likely mushrooming (sorry) right about now. The holiday season  which might as well be nicknamed the cooking and eating season  will quickly show off any deficiencies in your kitchen.

Perhaps you’ve been hoping to resolve those inadequacies with a major overhaul. But it’s likely that your economic picture isn’t looking as good as it was last Christmas.

I’m here to help you feel better. My own kitchen, which is what many New Yorkers would consider halfway decent (and is much like the one my mother cooked in when I was growing up), is about 7 feet long and 6 feet wide. It has a moderate-size refrigerator, what was once considered a full-size stove (as opposed to the compact “apartment-size” stove or the monsters recently gaining popularity), annoyingly little counter and storage space (yes, I sometimes must remove the stored pots and pans before using the oven) and even a small dishwasher.

I complain, but I make do. And it’s here where I develop and test most of the recipes for my cookbooks and articles. So imagine my surprise when I posted a picture of my kitchen on my blog a few weeks ago and received a flood of e-mail messages from readers who wondered how someone could write large and evidently useful cookbooks, even a weekly column for The Times, while suffering such deprivation. (In the middle of all this, a young journalist called and asked what, after all, I considered essential in a modern kitchen? “A stove, a sink, a refrigerator, some pots and pans, a knife and some serving spoons,” I answered. “All else is optional.”)