“Capturing Knowledge” in My Utensil Crock

During my junior year of college, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to enroll in a course called “Capturing Knowledge.” I cannot imagine that this title is in the current catalog of my alma mater, but everything about it was a good idea. On Tuesday nights, about 20 of us would gather in a small lecture hall, and order warm cookies and milk from a delivery service. Yes, this is how class started. Perhaps it might help to know that the course was only open to members of my sorority. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, because cookies and milk are delicious in any environment, and frankly, I think we would all be happier and more productive at work if every meeting started this way.

As we settled in (with our cookies), the professor would guide us through various topics in organizational management and change. Looking back, our ultimate goal seems simple and even elementary. But in the late ’90s, the thought of creating a website to memorialize the information, ideas, and ingenuity that we generated was… well, worthy of an upperclassman seminar and college credit. Because college generations cycle quickly, our sorority was losing the inventiveness and hard work of officer after officer – hours and days were consistently used to reinvent the wheel. We had reference notebooks bursting at the seams with scraps of paper lining innumerable shelves – that we actually did use routinely – but at the precipice of the cyber revolution, it was time to memorialize our efforts in a more useful format.

The ceramic crock on my kitchen counter filled with my most-used gadgets is where I first turn when I need something in the kitchen; so when I was looking for a functional way to organize my most useful kitchen tools – recipes, tips, tricks, and more – my mind’s eye kept falling on … My Utensil Crock.

I hope you find it useful as well. I will also use this forum for Q&As, and to share lessons learned about kitchens and cooking with friends. Perhaps this will also help justify my quarter in college spent “Capturing Knowledge.” Because, as you can imagine, we did not actually publish a website. But we did enjoy the cookies.