Home Cooking Essentials: Products

Unless otherwise specified, all the links on this page are to Cooking.com; I have bought many items from there. Free shipping, very speedy service, and the best price I was able to find online or in stores; I was and remain pleased.

KitchenAid Food Processor

If you cook for more than one person, do most of your cooking from scratch, and like to use fresh ingredients, a food processor will save you so much time and make your life so much easier! I use mine for everything from whipping up a quick bread batter to grating cheese to making bread crumbs to grinding dried ginger. Sure, I could do all those things by hand, but it's so much faster with the food processor that I'm more likely to cook, and cook well, now that I have it. KitchenAid is what I recommend; it's sturdy, powerful and cleans up easily--it's as easy to use and clean as a knife and cutting board, but much faster and more uniform. And onions--wow, what an improvement, though watch out when you open the bowl!

KitchenAid Stand Mixer

You've seen all the cooking show gurus use them. You've heard from your friends how great they are. I am here to tell you there is a REASON Julia Child uses this monster, and it's not just because they gave her one. Granted, this is the 4.5 quart stand mixer and she uses the ultra-humongous and more expensive Pro version. Unless you're cooking professionally, this one will do nicely. I got by for years with a wimpy little hand-mixer-with-stand that I inherited from my dear great-aunt but that probably cost $15 at Fred Meyer. Now that I have a professional tool I won't look back. Mine looks exactly like this one, by the way; is it RED! This is an heirloom-quality mixer that will enrich your life and the life of your heir; you will never have to buy another mixer for the rest of your life, and neither will your inheritor. This link also leads to Cooking.com. With a KitchenAid mixer and a KitchenAid food processor you are set in the big hardware department.

At Least One Good Chef's Knife
These are all-purpose knives, the kind that, if you could only have one knife, this would be the one. A chef's knife is wide-bladed, non-serrated, comes to a broad tip (excepting Asian-style ones, which are usually "sawed-off" at the tip--no point) and is between 6 and 10 inches in length. The best ones have a "tang" that extends into the handle; you can see that the handle is bolted directly on to an extension of the blade itself. The knife should be heavy and well-balanced.
I have an 8 inch standard chef's knife and a 6 inch Asian-style one. Nine-tenths of the time I have a knife in my hand in the kitchen it's one of these two, and if it's not, it's a little paring knife. I recommend that you buy paring knives by the handful at restaurant supply houses; they're cheap, hold a pretty mean edge, and if you break one who cares. I agree with Cheryl Mendelson that knife blocks are a pain in the gazoo. They're impossible to keep clean. Get yourself some magnetic knife holders and put your knives up where you can get at them. Makes your kitchen look real serious, too.

Various Kitchen Gadgets by Oxo/Good Grip
Everyone needs stuff like can openers, cheese graters and so on. Oxo/Good Grip makes the best ones as far as I'm concerned, especially if, like me, you have problems with your grip. Pictured is their lemon zester; it's hardly an item that you can't live without, but I tell you, it sure makes life nicer. A zester can help you liven up just about anything that would benefit from a citrusy taste, and if your recipe calls for citrus juice or flavoring it is almost but not quite a sin not to include a little zest while you're at it. Terrific for salad dressings, in baked goods, on fish. Make sure you buy organic citrus fruits, by the way. You never know what's on the peels of the non-organic kind.

Honorable Mention
Citrus Juicer

Completely unnecessary to a well-equipped kitchen, but a) snazzy and decorative, and b) more useful than you might think. There's no better way to juice a citrus fruit than these lever-activated squeezers, and if you have one and a nice big basket of fruit you'll be drinking more fresh juice than you think. In the afternoon a small glass of mixed juice (I like grapefruit, cocktail citrus and lemon, one each) is a better pick-me-up than a cup of coffee, with no annoying caffeine to keep you awake past bedtime. Great housewarming present, especially for the dedicated cook in your life. (Can you tell I'm on a citrus kick right now?)

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