Cooking is just like any job: having the right tools will make all the difference in the world. Ever try to hammer a nail in with a screw driver? Serving spaghetti with a soup spoon is just about as frustrating… So, if you’re serious about cooking at home you’re going to need some tools. Chances are you already have some or even all of these, but if not here are the items I use without fail every week (though not of course for every meal).

Pots & Pans

For the most part you can easily get by with a medium frying pan, medium sauce pan, and small to medium sized pot. Buy the best you can because a decent set of cookware will last you ages and will wind up saving you money in the long run. If you’re short on cash or storage space, buy them by the piece rather than a whole set that you might not actually need right now.

What you buy is really going to be up to you: stainless, non-stick, porcelain coated, cast iron, etc. all have their pluses and minuses and can be better suited to different types of cooking styles. I currently have an 8 year old set of inexpensive non-stick cookware, but will be upgrading to a stainless steel Calphalon set soon. And, for what it’s worth: I personally wouldn’t get an all aluminum set. Yes they’re light and inexpensive, but they don’t heat particularly evenly (not to mention the concern over aluminum leeching into your food).

Some cookware may be dishwasher safe, but not all of it is. You’ll be tempted to make cleanup easier by putting a pot or pan in the sink and running water into it to let it soak, but be forewarned that putting cold water into a hot pot will warp the metal (ask me how I know…).

Cooking Utensils

The type of cooking utensils you buy will depend in part on what kind of cookware you have. For instance, metal utensils are a huge no-no on non-stick cookware because they’ll scratch the surface. High-heat resistant plastic/silicon is a good all-around choice because it works well with just about any cookware. And just because something is plastic doesn’t mean it’s heat-resistant: I’ve melted a spoon into a pot before (moral of the story is to check the label for heat resistance). Wood utensils are also a safe bet, however they may require some more care and maintenance than plastic or silicon.

As with cookware, you’re really best off buying the best you can afford for utensils. I started out with cheapo dollar store varieties and really regretted it: things broke, melted, warped, stained, etc. You might be tempted to opt for the pretty 36 piece set, but odds are you won’t need all the items and the quality just won’t be that great.

The must-haves in my crock of utensils are:

• at least two mixing spoons
• two spatulas
• tongs
• pasta fork
• ladle

Don’t try to make do with one spoon. There will be times when you have two separate things on the stove and you’ll need a spoon for each. And let’s just be honest: you might not do last night’s dishes and having more than one spoon saves you from having to wash dishes before you can even get started. The same goes for spatulas. I have two in my kitchen to do different things: a thin flexible one with a sharp edge that I used for pancakes, browning meat, and delicate items, and a sturdy thicker one I use for everything else.

The pasta fork and ladle are pretty self-explanatory, but I include tongs because I think they’re wonderful and highly underrated. I use my tongs for turning bacon, pork chops, steaks, serving, etc.

Other items I really use a lot that may or may not be high on your list of needs:

• whisk (for when I make cornbread, pancakes, scrambled eggs, etc.)
• gravy ladle (seriously, it holds just the right amount of pancake batter!)
• slotted spoon

Knives

This is going to sound repetative, so I apologize in advance: get some good knives. Please. I cooked for almost 10 years with really cruddy knives and it drove me nuts. Just like with utensils, you’re going to be tempted to get the matching 18 piece set of knives. I promise you that you’ll wind up hating them.

Also, don’t fall under the impression that you can using a steak knife in lieu of a chopping knife or vice versa. Get a set of steak knives to eat with (sure, go ahead and get a matching set if you want!), and then get yourself a couple of decent knives to use for everything else.

Right now, I have some J.A. Henckel knives. No, not an entire set because they were pricey. I just bought three: a 4 inch paring knife, a 6 inch utility knife, and and 8 inch chef’s knife. Those three knives handle pretty everything I do in the kitchen.

Don’t store your knives in a drawer with other utensils: they get dull and nicked. You can keep them in a dedicated drawer, but that might be a safety concern. Standard wooden knife blocks can also dull your knives. I chose to buy a Kapoosh knife block about two years ago and have not looked back. The internal part is dishwasher safe for sanitary reasons, and it’ll hold any size knife. If you gently slide your knives in rather than ramming them every which way, the Kapoosh block will last ages.

Measuring Cups and Spoons

And yes, there really is a difference between liquid measure and dry measure measuring cups. Please don’t try to use one instead of the other, you really won’t be happy with the results.

I have three liquid measuring cups, which may or may not be overkill for you. I use a one cup measure a lot when making recipes, my two cup measure when making rice and oatmeal, and a huge 4 quart that can double as a mixing bowl. I really like having that huge measuring cup as it comes in handy when making soups and stocks (just imagine trying to measure out 2 quarts of water one cup at a time!). Having two different smaller measuring cups also means that if I’m in a hurry I don’t have to always rinse them out between ingredients.

For dry measure cups and spoons, it’s really all about your personal preference.

Bakeware

Stop! Don’t be tempted to skip this section just because you don’t intend to bake! There are uses for bakeware other than cookies and cakes, so just bear with me.

Even if you never intend to turn on your oven, you’re going to want a cookie sheet (specifically, one that will fit in your freezer). It won’t make sense now, but later on in the series I’ll talk about how that one little cookie sheet is going to save you a lot of time later on.

If you do intend to turn on your oven, make sure you have an 8×8 cake pan. I use mine all the time for cornbread, sweets, etc.

Mixing Bowls

Again, just because you’re not baking doesn’t mean you don’t need a set of mixing bowls. They double as serving dishes, containers to microwave vegetables, and places to store chopped ingredients before adding them to what you’re cooking. Or, if you’re like my husband, the perfect sized bowl for cereal…

Safety Equipment

The kitchen can be a dangerous place, folks. Hot oil, boiling water, sharp knives: everything in there is a hazard if you don’t have some basic safety equipment.

• pot holders (so you don’t get burned)
• trivets to put under hot pots (so your counters don’t get burned)
• a big box of baking soda (for oil and fat based fires)
• a fire extenguisher
• dishtowels (if you get cut, they’re invaluable for putting pressure on the wound)
• two separate chopping boards (or areas), one for meat and one for non-meat ingredients

And since I’ve mentioned chopping boards…  This is going to wind up being a personal preference thing as well. As long as your chopping boards are dishwasher safe, it doesn’t really matter if they’re plastic, glass, or wood: the high eat of a dishwasher cycle with sanatize them (to be safe, give your board a scrub under running water with a brush to remove any stuck food particles first). And even if your wood board isn’t dishwasher safe, you can sanitize with by spritzing with a 10% bleach solution after handwashing it. But having two separate places to chop your ingredients is really important to prevent cross contamination. Otherwise, you’re stuck chopping all your veggies first and then doing the meat last even if that doesn’t make the most sense.

Other Odds & Ends

These are items that aren’t absolutely necessary, per se, but will definitely make life easier.

• Collander or strainer (good for pasta, boiled potatoes, or washing veggies when you prep them).
• Vegetable peeler (personally, I don’t even own one but you might want one)
• Can opener (seriously, you don’t have one?)
• Storage containers for left overs (I love my Lock’n'Lock containers, but I also use Ziploc containers)
• Freezer bags (both quart and gallon sized)
• Plastic wrap and/or Glad Press’n Seal (the best invention of the past 10 years)

And there you have it: all the things that make my kitchen runneth over. In Learning To Eat At Home Part Two, I’ll actually start to talk about food, I promise!

Photo by rdpeyton

I have been given a challenge on FriendFeed to write a how-to of sorts. This person has asked for a guide on how to transition from a three meal a day eating out habit to cooking and eating at home. Neat!

As you might imagine, there are lots of perks to cooking for yourself rather than eating out all the time. The simple fact is eating at home is healthier for you and your budget. It’s more than that, though. For me, cooking dinner can be a perfect way to transition from my day at work to my evening at home. I’m still in task mode working towards a pre-defined goal while doing something kind of fun. Granted, there are times when the thought of boiling water wears me out, but under normal circumstances cooking is something I enjoy.

There is also another rarely discussed side effect: when you eat most of your meals at home, eating out becomes special again. I remember being a teenager and looking forward to a date at Outback Steakhouse all week. Of course it’s cheesy, but at the same time I really liked that feeling.

Now that I’m making a point to cook at home more, dinners out with my husband get to feel a little special again. For instance, tomorrow we’re going to go to the Paris Cafe as an early birthday celebration. I’ve been looking forward to it for days (and I think I might have the duck but I’m still not sure). *drool*

Anyways, back to the series. Requested topics include

• When to shop
• When to cook
• What to make from scratch versus what to buy prepared
• How to accommodate multiple small meals a day

I’m going to cover how to make things easier on the cook by preparing ahead of time, how to deal with leftovers, and how to make your freezer your best friend. I am in no way a chef or an expert in the kitchen, but since I am physically incapable of cooking for just two people these are all lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way.

So, while I get the first part of the series ready, I lob the ball into your court: are there any topics you’d like to see included? Any special requests or dedications? Leave ‘em in the comments!

Photo Credit: Nickster 2000

Dear Present Day Self:

You’ve got a birthday coming up, which means it’s the perfect time for some reflection on who you are and who you want to be. Knowing that you’ll be doing this, I’m going to make a suggestion to you: stop annoying your future self, OK?

See, Future Self gets really annoyed when you do things that are selfish, Present Day Self. Remember that time you were too tired to make up the coffee pot before going to bed? When Future Self woke up the next morning, she was pissed. PISSED. She groggily came down the stairs only to find no java waiting, which meant she had to figure out how to put everything together while half asleep and still suffering from blurry sleep-induced vision. That wasn’t very nice of you.

There are lots of other examples, it’s not just about the coffee. When you decide to be lazy on a weeknight so you can play around on your computer, Future Self gets stuck cleaning the bathrooms on her day off. And those bills that Past Self in college put off paying? You got it: Future Self got stuck with them.

It’s inevitable that you’re going to let people down. I’m realistic and I understand that it’s going to happen. But letting yourself down gets really frustrating and I know you’re better than that. The next time you look at something you need to do and debate about putting it off, just take a moment to think about how that’s going to make Future Self feel. I promise you, it’ll be worth the effort.

Sincerely,

Me

I’m making my way into day three of hospital living: I’ve been here since Monday evening (well, with the exception of ten hours). During the day our time has been spent as professional waiters. Wait for the nurse, wait for the therapist, wait for a test, wait for results, wait for the neurologist, etc. At night, my job is to make sure my dad remembers he’s go an IV when he gets up to pee.  It sounds a lot simpler than it is, unfortunately.

At any rate, here are some of the things I’ve learned so far as a guest in Hospital Land.

1. Images of a blue sky and puffy white clouds is the wrong thing to have on the ceiling of the elevator, especially one used to transport patients on gurneys. Lucid people find it rather “Charlie In The Chocolate Factory”-esque. Those who aren’t so lucid tend to think they’re taking an elevator to heaven.
2. Even hospital cafeterias can be behind the curve when it comes to celiac awareness. My sister has decided to write the hospital requesting gluten free signage, or at least that ingredient lists be posted with the menu.
3. When your finances take a turn for the worse, spend some time in the hospital. Well, if you’re not gluten intolerant…  Seriously, the cafeteria food is rather tasty and you can eat three meals a day for under $10. Plus, the wifi is open and there’s free coffee on the upper floors.
4. No matter how badly you’ve slept and how uncomfortable you were, these four things will make you feel human in the morning: wash your face, brush your hair, change into clean socks, and get a cup of coffee. To tell the truth, I’d already learned this lesson the really hard way: stranded overnight in the Buenos Aires airport. I’m just getting a refresher course right now.
5. Apparently snoring men can sleep through the most heinous alarm beeps known to humanity, but will wake up and grumble the instant someone bumps the lighting up from one candlewatt to two. It’s an interesting phenomenon, surely someone has written a paper on this already.
6. Hitting the recommended 10,000 steps a day is really easy: just make three trips to your car from the second floor of the hospital. Another option is to pace incessantly in front of the elevator bays as you curse the fact that only half the elevators are working.
7. Dysphagia (problems swallowing) can be a contraindicator of speaking difficulties and can be managed and treated by eating different food textures. That is the good news. The bad news is that suffering from dysphagia means that at first everything you ingest has to have a consistency somewhere between tomato juice and pudding. And I do mean everything, including your coffee, peaches, and chicken. Trust me, if you’ve never seen chicken with the consistency of pudding, you are a lucky person. And if you do happen to see chicken pudding, whatever you do, don’t smell it.
8. Nurses will actually ask you if you want your prescribed stool softener suppository rather than just giving it to you. Amazingly, they report that some people do in fact say yes. Obviously those patients are not subsisting on a diet of chicken  pudding.
9. The surefire way to get taken away for that test you’ve been waiting for? Have your meal delivered. My father has had one hot meal in the past two days. Rumor has it that cold chicken pudding is even more horrific than hot chicken pudding.
10. There’s always someone worse of than you are. Period. Don’t believe me? Walk through the hospital during visitors hours. Heck, just walk through a parking deck and you’ll hear enough to convince you it’s true.

It’s 3a EST and I’ve just returned from the hospital. I’m hopped up on coffee and adrenaline, so the odds of me going to sleep any time soon are slim. I wanted to say ‘thank you’ to everyone on FriendFeed who has shared their kind words and support, however I found I had more to say than the space would allow. So, I’m posting it here.

This is my second trip to the ER within a week: last week we spent four fun-filled hours dealing with my husband’s first kidney stone. In hindsight, last Monday was a walk in the park because today my father had a stroke. The scary thing is that it may very well not be his first one.

Daddy is 51, still young in this day and age. He’s been to the hospital twice in my lifetime: once for out-patient knee surgery, and once 20+ years ago when he was a construction worker (he fell off a building). Other than that, he’s always been healthy as a horse.

But a year or two ago he had an episode of faintness where it was hard to stand and speak. The doctor said it was too much coffee on an empty stomach. This past November he stopped driving because his eyesight suddenly got worse (previously he had 20/10 vision). Even after he got his new glasses, he said things still didn’t look right and drove as little as possible, never at night.

And now he’s laying in a hospital bed, curled on his side looking smaller than me. Well, technically speaking he is, by about 10 pounds… And I’m left wondering about those episodes over the past two years.

While I know it’s common for stroke victims to make a very full recovery, I’m still preparing myself for something worse. His body has already bounced back: he couldn’t stand or walk at 7p tonight and at 10p he flew through the neurologist’s physical tests with no issues. But he couldn’t see properly: anything more than 12 inches away didn’t get a reaction. He’s not speaking properly, nor fully comprehending what he’s hearing. The doctor had to pantomime the actions for the physical test.

He didn’t know how old he was, or my mother’s name. I don’t know that he knew which one was me and which was my sister. It didn’t even register with him when the doctor said he’d had a stroke, an hour later he asked what was wrong with him.

So now I find myself hoping for the best but planning for the worst. It’s a bad habit of mine, actually, so in a way this morbid train of thought is familiar and comforting. He closed his business last month, and with it went the insurance. The bills will start coming and odds are he won’t be in a position to work (at least, not for some time). Where he’s going to live, how he’s going to get to therapy, how we’re going to keep his prescriptions filled…

It’s too much to think about, but at the same time I can’t help it. I’m supposed to be getting a couple hours of sleep while my husband camps out at the hospital until work, but I think sleep will prove elusive tonight. Perhaps tomorrow will prove to be a better day.

ADDENDUM

Just so no one will think that I’m entirely morose and loosing my oddball sense of character, let me tell you the story about the broken hearted meatloaf picnic in the ER waiting room.

My soon-to-be-ex brother-in-law (STBeBIL) was supposed to bring a meatloaf to our house tonight for dinner: I was starting mashed potatoes when my mom called. My family has a tradition of eating heart-shaped meatloaf for Valentine’s Day, and STBeBIL had made his own heart-shaped meatloaf since he wouldn’t be joining us for Saturday’s festivities (what with him and my sister splitting up and all).

STBeBIL was already on his way to our house, so we called him to let him know we were headed to my mom’s. The amublance was leaving when we got there and we immediately headed to the hospital. So, we placed another call to STBeBIL telling him to change his route to go there instead. Now, STBeBIL has a horrible sense of direction, he couldn’t find his way our of a paper bag. He made it to the hospital after changing his GPS three times, one for each intended destination. And tonight’s meatloaf was still in tow.

After a few hours in the waiting room we were all getting nibbly and started joking about bringing in the meatloaf. The liaison brought us cups and forks and said it wouldn’t be a problem, so STBeBIL and my husband promptly headed to the car and came back with 5 pounds of meatloaf. Which, by the way, was wrapped in aluminum foil and had to go past a metal detector.

So we get ready to unwrap the meatloaf and STBeBIL says he has to explain something first. Basically, he’d made the heart-shaped meatloaf but since he’s getting a divorce he thought it’d be funny to make a statement with it: he’d broken the heart in half. Which is kinda funny, until you find yourself sitting in the critical care waiting room with your soon to be ex and about to eat said meatloaf…

And hey, at least we weren’t there for a heart attack. Then the broken hearted meatloaf would’ve been all kinds of wrong.

Something rather unremarkable happened to me at lunch today. I needed to cross the street.

My office is on a corner, marked A in the image to your right. I needed to cross the street and make it to B. A gentleman was standing next to me, and needed to go from point A to point B as well. As you can see, though, our progress was impeded by a not-so-friendly “Do Not Walk” sign. Because there is a left turn arrow at this intersection, the rightmost “Do Not Walk” will cycle before the one between points A and B.

I can only attribute what happened next to a basic difference in psychology. I waited on the corner in order to go straight from A to B. The gentleman next to me crossed to our right (the bottom green checked sidewalk), took take advantage of the rightmost walk signal, and wound up jaywalking through the top of the intersection to arrive at point B.And for all that effort, he still arrived after I did.

The question is, what did this gentleman gain by traveling three times as far to make the same journey? He didn’t save time, that’s for sure. It was chilly outside, so it’s possible all that walking warmed him up, but I think the wind probably offset that.

The only thing I can see that he really gained was the feeling of control via action: rather than waiting on the light to change, he took control of the situation to find an alternate solution. This is a pretty normal human thing to do, actually. The only problem is the result: he got nothing extra for his effort. His actions to control the situation did absolutely nothing. Moreover, had he taken just a moment to review the situation, he would have seen that all that extra action (not to mention the risk of injury by jaywalking) would be fruitless.

Like I said, it’s actually a very normal human reaction. When faced with an uncontrollable situation, we want to take action, do something, anything, to try and make the circumstances fit what we want. We even take risks that we know aren’t outweighed by the possible rewards.

And in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not just talking about crossing the street here. We engage in this kind of behavior all the time. Think of how you drive during high traffic: are you more likely to take side streets so you can keep moving, even though you might arrive home no earlier than if you’d taken the stop-and-go main route? What about computer issues: do you take the time to review the logs to see what exactly went wrong? How about the stock market, or a crisis at work?

Our initial reaction is to jump in, get moving, and stay moving, even though analyzing the situation we may be better served by taking less action. Or even no action at all.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s one worth remembering. Action doesn’t always equal progress.