Mixed Blessings of the 1980s: Microwave Popcorn

For most of North American history (corn is a New World crop, remember, so only Native Americans snacked on it before Columbus arrived) if you wanted to pop yourself some corn, you needed to have a sturdy pot and your wits about you.

Then Jiffy Pop came along in the 1950s and like magic, families were treated to the delight of freshly-popped corn in an overly expensive single-use container that was nevertheless entertaining for children. But it still took some doing. The Jiffy Pop threshold between "delicious" and "irretrievably scorched" is approximately three seconds.

Along came the 1980s, and the rise of a formidable new arena of snacking: the bag of microwave popcorn.

Now mind you, corn had been popped in a microwave before. In fact, the man who originally discovered the ability of microwaves to heat food in 1945, had experimented with kernels of popcorn. But it wasn't until General Mills patented the "susceptor" (that thin gray metallic bit at the bottom of the bag) in 1981 that microwave popcorn was ready to revolutionize the marketplace.

There were a lot of things not to like about microwave popcorn when it first hit the market. The distinctive smell, for one thing. It filled your house and seemed to get stuck in your hair and clothes. The incredibly high fat and salt content compared to "real" popcorn. And the texture took some getting used to, as well. Compared to real popcorn, the microwave stuff is spongy and sometimes has an even squeaky texture.

Of course, these days most people consider microwave popcorn to be the default state. If you want to buy plain popcorn kernels, you have to look on the very bottom shelf at the grocery store. Grubbing around on the floor like some kind of animal. Such is the power of microwave popcorn's meteoric rise to fame.

The susceptor is what made it possible to cook popcorn in the microwave without stirring, shaking, or (alternatively) scorching the heck out of the kernels at the bottom of the bag. The susceptor is why microwaving regular corn inside a brown paper sack - although Alton Brown advocates it - never works very well.

Of course, it took a while for them to work out all the kinks in this new technology. You actually had to adjust cooking time for your oven's wattage, which was much more varied in the 1980s. If you had one of the gigantic, turkey-roasting microwaves, you had to watch your corn pretty closely.

We had a regular-sized microwave, but I remember having to set my popcorn atop an overturned plate, which for some reason magically prevented the popcorn from being burnt. And of course you had to keep an ear cocked for the magical "1 to 2 seconds between pops," then leap for the microwave's Stop button before your popcorn burned.

(These days microwaves all have a "Popcorn" button, and it always works perfectly. I have no idea how it knows, but it does.)

For a while, in concert with stores that sold flavored popcorn, there was a fad for microwave popcorn flavorings. Some of these came in the same package, often as a little foil pack that you sprinkled on your popcorn. Others were sold as stand-alone sprinkle flavorings. I remember liking the ranch dressing flavor pretty well - although in hindsight I have a feeling it was actual ranch dressing powder packaged in a little packet with a 5,000% mark-up.

Photo credit: Flickr/miskan

The Mystery of Pine Nut Mouth

Yesterday afternoon I noticed a bad taste in the back of my mouth. I chalked it up to post-nasal drip from seasonal allergies and tried to get on with my life. But by this afternoon, the bad taste had crept all the way forward and really set up shop. It colored everything I ate and drank, whether I was having a banana or a cup of coffee, whether I had just brushed my teeth or chewed a stick of gum or gargled with salt water, the bad taste didn't budge.

After I put aside yet another meal only half-eaten, I decided to do a bit of Googling. Among all the web pages suggesting that I might have a brain tumor (really) I noticed a mention of pine nuts. And then I remembered two things: having read about Pine Nut Mouth a few months ago, and having eaten pine nuts (for the first time in years) on Sunday.

How tragic, that such a nice Easter brunch with a friend of the family should result in… this.

Pine Nut Mouth is quite a mystery, albeit a well-documented one. It is a form of very mild poisoning which results in several days - possibly up to several weeks - of a syndrome called metallogeusia, which is the medical term for a lingering bitter, metallic taste. It causes no real harm, which is good, because there is no cure but time.

Pine nut toxicity is tentatively linked to pine nuts imported from China. The nuts have been tested and are free of any chemicals or heavy metal poisoning that researchers know could be toxic. The current theory is that it is caused by spoilage or oxidation of the pine nuts. It may also be something to do with a new species of pine nut being mixed in with the rest.

The reason why it's impossible to chase away the bad taste by eating or drinking something else is that the bad taste is actually happening in your brain, not in your mouth. Whatever substance causes the problem does so by interfering with the nerve impulses from your mouth to your brain. It's a misfire, in other words. But instead of producing a flash of light or sound, like a misfire in a car's engine would, this misfire produces a very bad taste.

Adding to the mystery of Pine Nut Syndrome is that it doesn't affect all people equally, and the CDC has been unable to find any chemical compound that would cause the problem. One batch that produced a lot of complaints came from Costco. In response, Costco sent samples of that batch plus a control that had received no complaints to several highly respected toxicology labs. None of the labs were able to find a difference between them. And the majority of people who had purchased and eaten the "bad" pine nuts showed no symptoms.

The FDA is continuing to examine the mystery of Pine Mouth. According to their website, most of the reports involve a particular species of Chinese pine nuts, and most of the nuts were consumed raw. If you experience a bout of Pine Mouth, you can report it to your state's FDA inspector here.

Photo credit: Flickr/scribbletaylor

Thoughts about a city of contradictions, Vienna, Austria

Since I studied abroad for three months in Vienna, Austria when I was in college, you’d expect that I’d know a lot about it.  Not really. In fact, after being there for that length of time, I thought of a lot more questions than I found answers. For example, why do Austrians pretend to be Hitler’s first victims during the Holocaust when they so enthusiastically welcomed him to their grandest city?  Why do they live so far in the past that they recreate identical models of buildings bombed during World War II, but also produce some of the most innovative—and darkest--art found anywhere in the world?  Why do they love classical music so much but let god-awful, breeches-wearing Mozart replicas run around the city luring unknowing tourists to third-rate concerts?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.  More than anything else, I suppose, I learned that Vienna is a place where people live in the past, but also on the cutting-edge of the present. It is a place of contradictions.

Here are some big ones—maybe you can explain them better than I can:

--Austria’s national cuisine is fatty, fatty and fatty, but the Viennese are tall, tan and fit (you see more Heidi Klum and Arnold Schwarzenegger replicates than you’d expect). Austria’s most popular dish is wienerschnitzel, a pounded patty of either veal or chicken breaded, deep fried and served with ketchup and lemon.  It sounds like fried chicken because it’s basically fried chicken. Their famous cake, Sachertorte, is a dry chocolate cake topped with chocolate frosting.  They also eat a lot of pastry. Seriously, you can always see these long-legged, blonde girls holding buttery pastries stuffed with raspberry and cream cheese probably on their way to their modeling casting or something.

--Classical music is like a religion here, but you can still get tickets to the opera or the symphony for less money than you can buy a burger, fries and a Coke here in the States. At the Vienna State Opera, you can get an opera ticket for about six Euros.

--Culture is strongly rooted in the past, but some of the greatest innovators from after World War II were reared and found their sea legs in this ancient city. Egon Schiele, an Austrian painter, painted distorted portraits of people with twisted limbs using bright, patchy streaks of paints and eventually killed himself.  Gustav Mahler, a famous innovator in modernist symphony, was born here and got a lot of his inspiration from the artists and architects in town.

--Vienna is glitzy and glamous on the outside—think grand balls with hoop skirts—but beneath the surface there is still tons of turmoil in re-purposing their identity as Austrians, not Germans, after World War II. Most Austrians claim to be Hitler’s first victims, saying that they never wanted to be part of the Holocaust. They are not German, they say, despite being right next door and speaking Deutsch.

--Despite opposing German policies after World War II, Austria still has a lot of Aryan sympathizers, including seriously racist politicians and a distaste for the Turkish minority. Jörg Haider, maybe the biggest contradiction of all, was the leader of the neo-Nazi-ish Austrian Freedom Party and as such made xenophobic, Nazi-symphathizing and anti-Semitic comments. A few years ago, he died drunk in a car wreck leaving a gay bar in Klagenfurt. Also, after bringing in Turkish laborers to work for cheap in the 1980’s, Austrians tried to kick out these legal Austrian citizens with racist, anti-Turkish legislation. 

The list of contradictions could go on and on—it’s not really hard to find some of these serious discrepancies between what Austrians say and what they do.  A lot of Vienna seems to be outward flash, excess and romanticism, but there’s usually something else—something a bit darker—lurking just underneath the glamour. 

 

http://www.wien.info/en

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Haider

Everyday Food: Great Food Fast

A Great Cookbook for Beginning Cooks Wanting to Eat Healthier

 

Everyday Food: Great Food Fast is reportedly from the Kitchens of Martha Stewart Living. I have no idea how much or how little Martha Stewart was actually involved in the making of this particular cookbook, but as a novice cook, I can highly recommend Food Everyday to anyone wanting to cook simple, healthy food.

 

Seasonal Recipes in Everyday Food

 

The recipes in Everday Food are divided up into the four seasons; each section contains starters, main courses, and desserts. The recipes for each of the seasons are selected more based on the fresh ingredients and produce that you can get during each season than on anything else, which makes the cookbook handy to use at different times of the year.

 

Quick Easy Recipes in Everyday Food

 

As a newbie cook, one of the nicest things about Everday Food is the simplicity of the recipes; you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a nuclear physicist to follow the directions and most of the recipes take less than twenty minutes from start to finish. In fact, I tried many of the recipes from Everday Food (as well as a few others) on THIS BLOG about the life and times of a bad cook (mostly ME) and was more often than not surprised at how well the recipes came out.

 

The easiest recipes that I tried in Everyday Food are (in no particular order): parmesan-stuffed chicken breasts, fish tacos, chili-rubbed salmon, roasted salmon with lemon relish, and cashew chicken.

 

Since Everyday Food has 250 recipes listed inside, there are lots of recipes to try. While I’d mostly recommend the book to newbie cooks looking for healthier diet options that are easier to cook, I think that more experienced cooks might find some fast recipes within the pages, too.

 

Desserts in Everyday Food

 

I’ve tried a couple of the desserts in the cookbook, and the ones I’ve tried have been just as easy to prepare as the other recipes in the book. However, there are a few dessert recipes in the cookbook that look more than a little fattening, so not EVERY recipe in this cookbook is healthy.

 

What Everyday Food Doesn’t Have

 

Everyday Food lacks detailed a list or section on cookware and other useful tips.

 

What extra information Everyday Food has.

 

There is a small section on some cooking basics which includes a few extra sauce and rub recipes, but again, the section is really short. The cookbook does include the nutritional information for each recipe.

 

 

Flavor Flav and Flav's Fried Chicken

The Flav's Fried Chicken story sounds like a plot out of "Undercover Brother"

I just came across THIS about Flavor Flav and his chicken restaurant chain. The whole story sounds like a plot from Undercover Brother, but after some careful Internet research, I’ve come to the conclusion that the story is actually true and is just a case of life imitating art (or the other way around).

It seems that the rather aptly-named Flavor Flav has opened a chain of fried chicken restaurants—the Las Vegas FLav’s House of Flavor is just opening now. Unfortunately for Flavor Flav, not every Flav’s Fried Chicken restaurant is so successful, however. Flavor Flav is taking his name off of the Iowa Flav’s Fried Chicken either because of bounced checks, because of mismanagement by Flav’s business partner Nick Cimino, or because the potato salad expired too early—as Flavor Flav actually claimed.

The secret ingredients in Flav’s Fried Chicken belong to Flavor Flav alone; he is hoping to compete with KFC.

Obviously, those following the Flavor Flav’s Fried Chicken restaurant story will note that there are some significant differences between the Flavor Flav story and the chicken restaurant plotline from Undercover Brother, which is a James Bond/Blaxpoitation spoof about African-American under-cover operatives. In Undercover Brother, a Colonel Powell-type character starts a fried-chicken restaurant chain as part of a diabolical plot to keep him from running for President; this offends the black operatives because of the racial stereotyping and because the character didn’t even make it to Manchurian candidate status.

I don’t think there is anything that diabolical about Flavor Flav’s fried chicken restaurants and hope that he is not planning a run for president, but the idea of a black rapper opening a chain of fried chicken restaurants does reinforce more than a few negative racial and cultural stereotypes.

Buy Aunt Jemima brand and let a mammy make you breakfast!

image

In 1889, Chris Rutt, a newspaper man, along with his business partner Charles Underwood, was attempting to sell the new innovation of self-rising pancake flour. Rutt happened into a blackface minstrel house in St. Joseph, Missouri and saw Billy Kersand’s perform as “Aunt Jemima” in a bandanna and apron. The idea for his invention's mascot was born--she would be a mammy.

The mammy character began cropping up in the mid-19th century, becoming well-known in popular culture by 1850. Mammies, generally matronly, dark-skinned and large, were domestic superheroes: they could take care of the house, the children, and the cooking. Mammies’ happiness in performing slave labor was used for a larger purpose. Pre-emancipation, mammy characters were used in literature and other arts to illustrate the kinder side of slavery—mammies were content in their roles as slaves, and had no wish to leave their white families. After emancipation, the mammy figure entered popular culture as a nostalgic symbol of these loving race relations in the Old South.

Aunt Jemima became a fairly popular character by 1890, but she rocketed to national renown, however, only after Rutt and Underwood sold the trademark and image to R.J. Davis, a seasoned grocery producer from Missouri. One of Davis’ best marketing ploys was his hiring of a real-life Aunt Jemima, whom he found in the Chicago-based housekeeper, Nancy Green, to dress in mammy gear and travel to fairs, make up stories about Aunt Jemima’s life in the pre-emancipated South, and cook pancakes for her adoring crowds.

Davis also created an illustrated pamphlet called The Life of Aunt Jemima, the Most Famous Colored Woman in the World, which included a story written by Purd Wright that merged Nancy Green’s stories with aspects of other mammy stories to create Aunt Jemima’s life story. Aunt Jemima is the loyal slave to Confederate Colonel Higbee in Louisiana, and makes better pancakes than any of the white women in the area. During the Civil War, Union soldiers come to Higbee’s plantation and threaten to rip his moustache off of his face, so Aunt Jemima cooks them pancakes to stop them. The soldiers beg Jemima for her recipe, but she refuses to give it to them. Eventually, they succeed in persuading Aunt Jemima to come up river to the north and give them her pancake recipe. The soldiers pay her handsomely, but in gold and not currency.

Inauthentic slave representations like Aunt Jemima helped create a yearning in both the South and the North for the leisure of the plantation south. Nostalgic ideas like these were only exacerbated post-emancipation, in the South in particular, where food preparation traditions for white women and black cooks were quickly shifting. Both urban and rural Southern women post-emancipation changed the way they provided food for their families. Rural women spent most of their days cooking, often having to buy large portions of their food on credit in hopes that their next harvest would bring in enough money to pay off their debts, while urban women began working in larger numbers in textile factories. This type of national nostalgia for black mammies made Aunt Jemima particularly appealing; even though she was only a face on a pancake bag and box, Aunt Jemima capitalized on a complex, but loving nostalgia for mammy characters, and let white Northern and Southern women buy a mammy and cook her pancakes up for breakfast.

Nancy Green, the real-life Aunt Jemima, is a different case, however, in that both her cooking skills and her ability to transform herself into a mammy were what allowed her to move outside of the traditional domestic spheres for black women. Green’s willingness to be Aunt Jemima--not only act as Aunt Jemima--her storytelling skills, and her cooking were what caused the Davis Milling Company to choose her as their Jemima, as well as what made her so popular with white audiences. At fairs, Green’s food presentation display was housed in a large flour barrel, and her space was made to look like a kitchen. This literal move of the kitchen and the black cook outside of the home illustrates a willingness on the part of white audiences to accept a mammy in an Old Southern kitchen in their public spheres, even if she was truly a black woman from Chicago in a stylized reproduction of a southern kitchen.

Aunt Jemima brand pancake mix and syrup still features a smiling mammy, drawn with pearls and sans bandanna, on its logo, and the familiar red box is sold in supermarkets today.

 

Beer Chili: The Stew of Champions

I jump at the opportunity to combine two of my favorite things into one super-favorite thing. Nutella and bananas, peanut butter and chocolate, David Tennant and kittens. So you can imagine I was stoked to discover that not only could you make chili with beer instead of water, but that it was at least twenty times more delicious if you did. Finally, I had a way to integrate my love of good beer and good food in a manner more meaningful than just consuming them side by side.
 
This recipe is a combination of a few other great chili recipes that I've tweaked over the past year or so. It's cheap to make, vegan, and absurdly delicious. With the quantities listed you'll make enough chili for four to six people, or three very hungry dudes (my typical clientele). It also keeps splendidly and isn't half bad cold. Sometimes I'll make a big pot for myself and feed on it for two weeks. 

If you're the carnivorous sort, you could probably integrate ground beef or chicken into this pretty easily. Maybe take out some of the beans when you do. I've never cooked meat in anything so I don't know how that works. 

First, you're going to need to go to the store and find the biggest onion in the whole pile. Seriously, this thing should be almost as big as your head. If you couldn't use it as a blunt weapon, you shouldn't be using it in this chili. You'll also need these things:

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 2-4 cloves garlic
  • 3 tablespoons chili powder
  • 1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
  • half a teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (or 1 minced chipotle in adobo if you're fancy)
  • 1 28-ounce can crushed or diced tomatoes
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped (or 1 15-ounce can crushed/diced tomatoes)
  • 1 15-ounce can dark red kidney beans, rinsed
  • 1 15-ounce can small white beans, rinsed
  • 1 15-ounce can black beans, rinsed
  • some delicious beer (pale or wheat ales are best)
  • half a teaspoon black pepper

You'll start out by completely destroying onionzilla. Take out your sharpest knife and dice the beast to pieces. Mince those garlic cloves while you're at it. Chop the tomatoes if you're using fresh ones. You'll also want to open all your cans before you start, otherwise you're going to be wrestling with the can opener while your onion burns.

Heat up your oil (I cook with olive cause it's healthy but canola is fine) in a Dutch oven or stock pot over medium heat. Once it splatters a little when you sprinkle water on it, throw in what's left of your once mighty onion. Cook it, stirring now and again, until it's just starting to soften and get translucent. Then up the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring often, until the onion is very soft and almost beginning to brown. This takes me about seven minutes on average but I've known onions to be variable in their browning time so just play it by ear. 

Stir in the garlic, then add your chili powder, cumin, and chipotle or cayenne. If you like spicier chili feel free to be generous with your spoonfuls. Stir everything together rapidly until it smells awesome (takes about a minute). Then throw in everything else: tomatoes, beans, and black pepper first, then about half a bottle of beer and some additional water if you like. I usually do six ounces of beer and water each, but if you want more of the beer flavor you could go ahead and pour in a whole bottle. 

Turn the heat up to high and bring to a boil, stirring often to make sure stuff doesn't stick to the bottom of the pot and burn. Once you're bubbling, reduce heat to a simmer and cook, stirring sometimes, until the chili is thick enough for your liking. I usually let it go for half an hour but less is fine if you're okay with thinner chili. 

When you're done, ladle and garnish with sour cream, cilantro, cheese, crushed tortilla chips, or whatever makes you happy. Beer chili is best enjoyed alongside the beer you used to make it. Eat a big bowl and then run out to enjoy your newfound championdom. 

Why Fake It? The Problem with Imitation Meat

When I went vegetarian at the age of 11, I was still dependent on my parents--in particular my mother--to feed me. Ours wasn't a hugely meat-dependent household, but we enjoyed the occasional chicken or fish. I was even partial to steak and lobster at one point in my childhood. As I got older, I became more and more aware that animals were sentient beings made of muscle, just like me. I started to relate to them too much to eat them; the texture of meat still freaks me out.

My decision presented my mother with the conundrum of what to make for family dinners. I'm an only child, so I was a solid third of the family she was cooking for on a nightly basis. Fortunately both she and my father were supportive of my dietary choice, and we worked out something of a compromise for dinner. We cut out red meat entirely--my mother had been considering doing so already for health reasons--and on nights when my parents had fish, I'd be given some kind of meat replacement. I wasn't a big fan of straight tofu back then, so we cycled through various kinds of processed vegetable protein.

I came to hate pretty much all of them. At best, they were chewy, rubbery and dry. No matter how much the package claimed its contents would be indistinguishable from chicken patties or ground beef, it was all lies. Since moving out of my parents' house and beginning to cook for myself, I've barely touched TVP. I'll still order the occasional veggie burger when it's an option at restaurants, but most quality vegetarian patties don't even try to be beef anymore. They're content with themselves as conglomerates of vegetables and beans, and they're tastier for it.

I honestly don't see the point of trying to replace meat texturally. The sensation of eating cooked muscle completely turns me off; I don't need an awkward imitation of it. So much vegetarian food is naturally delicious and meant to be eaten as is. I mean, trees pre-package their fruit for our convenience; ditto hens with their eggs. Onions even come pre-sliced in one direction. Most of the time I'm content just to eat raw plant matter. 

As for nutrition, there's not too much in meat or its analogues that can't be found elsewhere. My mother was once concerned that I wouldn't get enough protein as a vegetarian, but I probably get more than I need now on beans, dairy and eggs. Really, unless you're trying to build muscle, the need for protein tends to be exaggerated in warnings against vegetarianism. Besides, with all the processing that goes into it, there's no way TVP is as good for you as fresh, whole foods. 

I suppose if you're new to vegetarianism and trying to wean yourself off of meat, TVP is a good temporary option to fill out your meals. I definitely thought meat was delicious once, and the TVP my mother fed me in its place probably helped me lose my taste for it over time. After over a decade of not eating animals, I can say that I no longer have any desire to go back to my old carnivorous ways. When there's so much tasty stuff in nature that you don't have to slaughter and bleed dry to eat, I don't miss meat or its imitations at all. 

(Photo credit: Boca Burger)

Defending Vegan Cuisine (as a non-vegan)

 

I'm not a vegan. Not even close. I'm one of those rare creatures who lives on the west coast but has no dietary restrictions, either by choice or from allergy. I love meat, dairy, honey and whatever the hell gelatin is made out of these days, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate good vegan food where I find it. And yes, there is such a thing as good vegan food, though with a significant caveat. The crux of my argument could not be better illustrated than it was by VegNews recently. The vegetarian and vegan culture magazine got in trouble recently for publishing pictures of meat-filled dishes as meatless. When asked why they went for the fleshy pics, the reps from VegNews cited the difficulty of finding appetizing photos of actual vegan food and the high price to the rights of those few images that do exist. There are two things wrong with this: Tasty-looking vegan food exists in greater abundance than one would imagine and there's no reason VegNews couldn't have used original photography instead.

I'm a food writer. I've personally taken pictures of delicious-looking vegan food (that actually was rather satisfying). But I have a rule when it comes to the vegan food I eat, write about and photograph. Simply, if it's trying to mimic meat, it has no place on my plate.

Hear me out on this one. So far, imitation meat is as unpleasant to the eye, tongue and teeth as it sounds, which may be a development issue or may just be because vegetable matter doesn't have what it takes to act like meat. Then again, meat couldn't really mimic vegetable consistency, either. These two things are good for what they do naturally. It takes too much fiddling to make produce look, act and taste like meat, so you end up scarfing down a whole lot of processed goods, which is a bigger problem than the health concerns surrounding meat and dairy to begin with.

Besides, there are plenty of vegan "meat replacements" that are good on their own merits. Consider falafel. That stuff is delicious in a dozen different ways. Nothing wrong with fried chickpeas in spices. The same could be said for that Indonesian soy patty, tempeh. Slap a slab of tempeh on a wheat bun with garden veggies and a sweet sauce, you've got a heck of a sandwich. And go ahead and call it what it is. There's no need to slap the word "burger" on it.

That's really the root of the vegan food problem. Just like VegNews being unethical because of aesthetic insecurity, a lot vegan food producers and restaurants feel it's necessary to frame their cuisine through the lens of meat just because meat is dominant in mainstream culture. This is also the source of a lot of backlash. Non-vegans expecting something to taste like meat because it was marketed to them with meat-based terms shouldn't be faulted for their displeasure. It would be better if makers of vegan food just accepted that their products are what they are. It has worked for Asian tofu dishes, Middle Eastern falafel stands and the raw food movement. It can work for vegan cuisine as well.

As for the visual component that drove VegNews to slap a beef stew image on their article, that's just a lack of creativity at work. Vegetables are naturally colorful and textured. It shouldn't be hard to take a few digital snaps of vibrant green, wild red and golden brown. Vegan food has plenty of appeal when it's made and presented with confidence. It's when those who make it and eat it fall to their own insecurities as a minority that the image fails.

Outfitting the Frugal Kitchen

This article at The Atlantic is a great illustration of how easy it is to run amok when buying kitchen tools and equipment. By the author's own admission she has hundreds of dollars of Shun knives (a high-end chef's knife brand) and virtually never uses any of them.

It's easy to be swayed by the dream. The dream of effortlessly slicing tomatoes and onions into dishes of your own devising. "If only I had the right tools," we think, "I would cook at home all the time! My food would taste so much better! Life would be so much simpler!"

This attitude was lampooned in a South Park episode (also mentioned in the article) when Stan's father purchases a Margaritaville Frozen Drink Maker (basically a very expensive blender). When Stan tries to return the blender because their family can't afford such an extravagantly useless appliance, he falls down the rabbit hole of toxic assets and CDOs.

The truth is, there is very little that you need in order to equip your kitchen for 99% of what you will be doing in there. It may not be flashy, it may not impress people, but it will get the job done. And imagine how smug you will feel, knowing you can equip an entire kitchen for the price of one preposterously expensive Shun knife!

1. A big knife.

This should be something with a blade about eight inches long, and sturdy. This is the knife you will end up using for pretty much everything.

You must keep it sharp, so either buy a Ginsu-style "never needs sharpening" knife, or a simple and easy-to-use knife sharpener. My go-to knife for over a decade was a "never needs sharpening" store brand chef's knife that I bought at Safeway for about $6. It worked great! Now I have a low-end Henckel knife which I bought on sale at Target. I religiously sharpen it using a cheap but effective plastic knife sharpener.

2. A decent cutting board.

This can be either plastic or wood, as you prefer. It should be generous in size, but not gigantic. Somewhere in the middle of the range.

If you buy a wood cutting board, get a bottle of mineral oil from a pharmacy. Oil the board about once a month, to keep it in good condition.

If you prefer a plastic cutting board, you can keep it from slipping on the counter by placing it on a tea towel or paper towel.

3. A skillet.

The specifics don't matter, but it should be at least eight inches, and have sides at least two inches tall. You can use this to cook just about anything on your stove top, including pancakes, eggs, bacon, browning meat, reducing sauce, making home fries, stir fry… the list goes on.

4. A pot.

This should hold at least three quarts of water.

5. Three pans for baking things in your oven: 9x13, 8x8, and a cookie sheet.

This trio will handle just about anything you need to bake.

Photo credit: Flickr/Chloester

Pages