Kitchen Essentials

I haven’t posted a blog entry for a while because we have been in Arizona, busily setting up the home we bought in Phoenix last March.

Setting up a new home has been an interesting experience for me. We have lived in our house in Denver since we were married 18 years ago. We have no intention of moving to Phoenix permanently, or even of becoming so-called snowbirds, any time soon. All but one of our children, and all but one of our grandchildren, are here, so here is where we want to be most of the time. Instead, our plan is to get out of Dodge when we see or hear about some bad weather coming. We will probably be in our Arizona house a few weeks at a time throughout the winter.

But, when we are there, we want it to feel like home. For me, that means being able to cook and eat at home. So I headed straight for the kitchen to begin my nesting.

My kitchen in Denver has everything I need. In fact, my family mocks me for some of the can’t-live-without appliances and accessories that I have purchased over the years. I don’t use the term lightly. Frankly, the mocking is often well deserved.

For example, do I really need that long, thin olive dish that I have used exactly never? What about the teeny-tiny propane torch to heat up the sugar on the top of the crème brulee that I have made once? Then there’s the food mill that I felt was a critical purchase because my beloved Lidia Bastianich uses it to make her red sauce. I used it once only to discover that it was an extreme pain in the you-know-what. Oh, and don’t forget those three crock pots which attract dust in my basement storage room.

Setting up this new kitchen, particularly since we are on a budget as we are now making a new house payment, has required that I think carefully about what sorts of things I really CAN’T live without to be a good cook as opposed to those things I THINK I can’t live without.

Here is the list of things that I have decided I can’t live without, in no particular order:

· One good chef’s knife
· A reasonably good paring knife
· One 10-12 inch cast iron skillet (to fry chicken and steaks) with lid
· One good 10-12 inch non-stick skillet (to cook everything else) with lid
· One decent sized saucepan with lid
· A Dutch oven that can be used on the stovetop and in the oven – preferably cast iron, and most preferably with enamel coating
· A coffee pot
· A toaster
· A cookie sheet
· 9 X 11 pan
· 8 X 8 pan
· Tongs
· A couple of wooden spoons
· A spatula
· Dining plates and utensils
· Steak knives
· A corkscrew
· A bottle opener
· A can opener

There’s probably more. My bigger point is that I certainly need far less than I think I do when I visit kitchen stores. After all, pioneer women probably cooked and baked using a cast iron pan and little else. This isn’t to say, however, that I have any intention of throwing away my electric waffle iron any time soon, despite the fact that I’m much more likely to breakfast at Village Inn than to fire up the waffle iron. And while I can’t currently afford to purchase a second one for my Phoenix home, you would truly have to pry my Kitchen Aid standup mixer out of my cold, dead fingers to take it from me.

Even though I never saw Ma use one on Little House on the Prairie.