Showing posts with label equipment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label equipment. Show all posts

Friday, 10 August 2012

My favourite kitchen things ...

For me cooking isn't just about the food. It's also about the cooking. Sometimes I like to create something quick and easy. Other times I like to mess around for hours. But whatever I'm doing in the kitchen, I have certain bits of equipment and other things that I love.


  • My camphor wood chopping board - this is a truly beautiful object - naturally anti-bacterial with a beautiful scent
  • My pasta machine - because it's so much fun to roll and re-roll and create beautifully thin, silky pasta sheets
  • My microplane grater - it's a fine-tooth one which is perfect for grating parmesan and nutmeg
  • My Nespresso Pixie - because whenever I'm cooking (and even when I'm not) I need coffee and this one makes it quickly with minimal effort on my part
  • My recipe books - food porn - gotta love it. I have the gloriously heavyweight, outrageously striped tome, The Cook's Companion, by Stephanie Alexander, A couple of books by Greg and Lucy Malouf which are definitely more than cook books, Arabesque and Saraban. Then there's Yotam Ottolenghi's beautiful Plenty and Ottolenghi: The Cook Book.
  • My personal recipe collections - recipes pasted in from hundreds of magazines, hand-scribbled notes made at cooking demonstrations, courses and masterclasses, and ideas that I've come up with when I've been messing around (at the moment there are 5 books - sadly I haven't tried all the recipes yet)
  • My iPhone - because I use Evernote to store recipes I find on the web, or that people email me and I using an off-line notebook, I can access these wherever I have a phone line or wifi connection
  • My chef's knife - a sharp, fine blade that does everything I ask it too, and its complement - a small blade which comes into its own when I'm peeling fruit and veg
Finally, perhaps the most important presence in my kitchen is that of someone to eat the food I prepare. I don't mind cooking for one. I like it really. But just sometimes it's truly delightful to have the opportunity to prepare food for another.