Tools of the Trade
Sep. 4th, 2010 07:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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cookabilityA comment axelrod made in an earlier post struck a note with me: rice cookers are awesome because you put ingredients in, can go back to bed and wake up to hot food waiting for you.
For the same reason, I love my slow cooker. I appreciate something that lets me make even complex meals with no tending, just prep and go.
I've also been recently reminded that a good knife makes prep work so much easier. (I now really grok why chefs will use anyone's pans, pots and appliances but carry their own knives with them.) With arthritic hands, I am far more capable of doing cutting/chopping prep work with a good knife that fits my hand and has a good sharp edge on it than I was with a drawer full of mediocre knives.
Our focus thus far has largely been on recipes, but I'm curious what tools, appliances and "hardware" are important parts of your kitchen arsenal?
axelrod made in an earlier post struck a note with me: rice cookers are awesome because you put ingredients in, can go back to bed and wake up to hot food waiting for you.For the same reason, I love my slow cooker. I appreciate something that lets me make even complex meals with no tending, just prep and go.
I've also been recently reminded that a good knife makes prep work so much easier. (I now really grok why chefs will use anyone's pans, pots and appliances but carry their own knives with them.) With arthritic hands, I am far more capable of doing cutting/chopping prep work with a good knife that fits my hand and has a good sharp edge on it than I was with a drawer full of mediocre knives.
Our focus thus far has largely been on recipes, but I'm curious what tools, appliances and "hardware" are important parts of your kitchen arsenal?
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Date: 2010-09-04 01:30 pm (UTC)A nice optional extra is a bread machine. The big thing for me with cooking is cognitive load: if I have to think hard about it, I'm much less likely to do it. Now that I have a simple bread recipe in my head, and all the ingredients at home, it is actually easier to make a load of bread in the bread machine than to go outside and face social anxiety and buy a loaf of bread. And the home-made bread is the same price or cheaper!
Like the slow cooker, the bread machine is set and forget. It will even keep the bread warm for a few hours and then turn itself off if I forget to come turn it off and take the bread out when it finishes.
The sad thing is that I've discovered that my insulin resistance is a larger factor than I had realised in my daytime fatigue, so I'm probably going to have to have a lot less bread from now on. Bother it.