This Is The Best Way To Store Knives, According To Martha Stewart

Ah, the home kitchen. The hearth of the house, a place of crackling creativity, a room that restores peace and sanity as we shuffle between the refrigerator, the stove, and the cutting board, working our magic to produce beautiful, tasty meals.

Can you relate? On our best days, this is, indeed, what the kitchen feels like to us. As passionate home cooks, we want to stride into the kitchen and feel not only inspired but organized. Cooks love to use the term "mise en place" — things in their place — and aside from properly prepared ingredients, it's important that kitchen tools and accessories be well organized, too. Our kitchen is often a mess, but you know whose isn't? Martha Stewart's. The doyenne of home cooking and flawless hostessing, Stewart could bring order to the most disastrous of kitchens. She has some tips, specifically, for the best way to store knives safely and efficiently. If you think you could benefit from her wisdom, read on.

If you've been haphazardly storing your knives — tucking them into drawers already brimming with can openers and potholders — you're not alone. We're often guilty of the same, but it's not an ideal way to store this workhorse of the kitchen. First of all, it's dangerous; if you reach into that drawer without looking, you might injure yourself on a sharp blade (via CNET). And it's not an ideal situation for the knives, either: jostled around among other tools and objects, the blades can get dinged or dulled (via CNET).

Leave it to Martha Stewart to suggest a better alternative. Over on CBS News, Stewart recommended making a knife drawer. This is a regular drawer in your kitchen where you can insert wooden dividers, then lay down a cork liner with slits into which you slide your knives, keeping your fingers out of harm's way and keeping the knife blades nice and sharp. You can find plenty of knife storage solutions on Amazon, as well as at retailers like The Container Store.

Once you've got your knife storage in place, don't forget to organize the knives by size, making it easy to select just the right tool for each slicing and dicing job. "You start with small and get to larger, larger, larger," Stewart tells CBS News. "Don't forget your serrated knives for bread." We most certainly won't, Martha!