There isn’t a ton of content at Start Cooking, yet what is there so far is very promising, breaking down cooking into simple steps with lots of pictures.
There’s even plenty of information about best kitchen practices, like washing ones hands, buying the seven essential utensils, and setting a table.
It’s exactly the sort of content a fledgling cook needs and painfully obviates the use of this week’s theme on Dethroner. Time for me to scramble!
So, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? We all need to eat to live… so that means either we cook or we hope that we can hook up with someone who can or we hope we can mooch enough food from the “client lunches” to keep ourselves alive…
I’m fortunate enough to be married to a very good cook. I do have a question for the dethroner crowd, though, and that is:
What are the REAL essential kitchen tools? StartCooking has a good list for people that just really don’t know (thanks for the list, though!) but if we Dethroners were left to choose the *absolutely required* kitchen tools, what would they be, and why?
I’m baffled because, as a mid-thirties techie-type knowledge manager, I can tell you all about building an awesome custom PC, or why it’s important to share business knowledge with your coworkers, or even who to talk to about getting a bespoke suit of clothes, but I cannot tell you why we have 900 different implements in the kitchen…
HELP me declutter my once beautiful kitchen with your words of wisdom…
Assuming as a techie, that you probably have taken over the dining room or spare room- you should look at your PC area first; you probably have enough spare parts in the house to make a couple (or 20) extra computers right? It’s easy to look at someone else’s stuff and see the excess. Show some respect. At least you get to eat the product of your spouse’s hobby, what does your spouse get out of your habit? Lost time? Don’t make her/him a tech-widow.
We should probably do a “The Wardrobe”-style list. I’m going to go from the hip and say: A chef’s knife, a paring knife, a chopping mat, a cast-iron skillet, a pot big enough in which to boil, and aluminum foil.
Thanks Catnip for bringing me back down to earth. In all honesty, my comment was posted with my wife looking over my shoulder, as she was wondering how we could pare down the kitchen stuff as well.
But yes, as a techie, I have enough computer stuff lying around that I *could* make a bunch of extra computers (actually computer CASES since that’s a hobby… see http://www.kikboxes.com for more on my nerdy hobby), AND one of those computers gives my wife wireless access form the kitchen to her recipe collection, but that’s beside the point, really… because our question was about how far can we pare down the kitchen stuff and have her still actually be able to cook the things she likes to cook.
So don’t get me wrong, I definitely appreciate all the cooking she does since I’m about as useful in the kitchen as a platypus. We just wanted to know what other people thought we could do without, since our kitchen sometimes looks like one of those williams sonoma stores (without all the nice stainless steel stuff).
Hi Joel, Thanks for noticing startcooking.com! I’m curious about how aluminum foil made it to your top ten list?
There is one HUGE way anyone can help their cooking spouse .. clean up the kitchen (maybe even WHILE s/he is cooking to help her/him work clean - you might even learn a thing or two).
Cooking isnt hard and the best gadget you have is a cross-platform one - your hands.
Its not rocket science, you just have not be afraid of failure and commit to learning from your failures.
If you feel the kitchen is cluttered, buy a storage box from Walmart and pitch it all in there except for a couple of knives, cutting board, can opener, a pot, a medium sized pan. If you are overflowing with appliances, put those away too. You dont have to pitch them, just store them.