The size of a person's kitchen has nothing to do with their ability to turn out delicious food. The best cook I know – a celebrated writer of recipes – has a small kitchen, and he seems to manage just fine. It's easy to feel envious when you visit someone whose kitchen is vast and gleaming and straight out of an interiors magazine; you look at their endless work surfaces and think: what I could do with all that space! But then they'll give you something they've "assembled" for supper – a chicken breast minus its skin, usually, with out-of-season green beans on the side and blueberries to follow (I despise blueberries, and all who sail in them; they taste of bubble gum and, probably, Botox) – and you soon come to your senses. A kitchen, like a Celine handbag or a cashmere coat, is undoubtedly a status symbol. But that doesn't mean that one with a professional plancha is going to turn you into Ferran Adrià. The desire has to be there first, not to mention the greed.

My kitchen is tiny. When it came to dividing the room – it's in the basement – I decided it was better to devote square feet to people than appliances. Most of the space is taken up with the table, plus two armchairs, into which a friend may sink, stiff drink in hand, while I stand at the stove and stir. The kitchen bit, shoved into one corner, is straight out of the 1950s (I mean the early, pre-Formica 50s). It has stainless steel work surfaces, now pleasingly scuffed, drawers that do not close properly and a total absence of wall cupboards because I prefer to keep my china on shelves, even if this does mean I'm forever dusting. (Or not.) It's the kind of kitchen that requires you to clean up as you go along, and to be in possession of no airs or graces. You can't lean against it pretending that you're in the weekend cottage in Fatal Attraction (yes, I do see that this might a bad example of kitchen chic, but it's the only one that came to mind – and lapin is so fashionable just now). You're there to chop, to whisk, to taste – something the Protestant in me rather likes.

But there is, I must admit, a downside. What cupboards I do have (at floor level) are deep, dark and do not come with those handy racks that swing out when you open the door, the better to reveal all the stuff therein. Result: you shove a tin of tomatoes or a jar of pickle into them and, over time, it slowly moves to the back, where it is eventually forgotten, like an old football left at the bottom of a garden. In the end, it's easier – or it can feel easier – to go out and buy a new bag of self-raising flour than to exhume the old one from its mournful grave.

But of course, this is disgraceful. The waste! And so it was that the other night I finally tackled the most over‑stuffed of these cupboards. My thought was: I'll put everything that's at the back at the front, and then we'll eat these things until they're used up, and save money and feel virtuous. As I write, then, I'm sitting beside a cairn of dried goods, tins and jars. It's like school harvest festival, minus the tinned peaches and corn dollies. The pile includes: three half-used bags of plain flour; two half-used packets of lasagne, plus one each of rigatoni, farfalle and bucatini; one box of red rice (unopened); one box of giant couscous (ditto); three tins of "cannellini express"; eight tins of tuna (in oil); four jars of marmalade (homemade); three jars of peanut butter (varying textures); one jar of Marmite; an improbably vast box of rooibos tea. Wow. That cupboard! It's like the old TV Times ad: I never knew there was so much in it.

At first, I was dispirited by this dusty, sticky pile; I hardly dared look for "use by" dates. My toil had turned up no treasures: no saffron or vanilla pods and what, really, is to be done with a surfeit of peanut butter? Now, though, I've decided to think of it as bounty. I'm hunting down recipes that include large amounts of marmalade, and sauces that might be at home on bucatini, Italy's most badly designed pasta.

This could, of course, be a bumpy ride. A Google search reveals that rooibos tea – I bought it for medicinal purposes, tasted it and decided I'd rather be an insomniac – can be used in the making of ice-cream. Dare I? Still, it's pleasing to be able to see the back of the cupboard again – the humble equivalent, I suppose, of the sleek counters, long as motorway trunk roads, that some people seem to take for granted.