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The Fun Gourmet Kitchen, Part 1
Guest Column:
"Fun Gourmet" with Kerry Smith of The Cook's Revenge Planning Your Kitchen for Fun Gourmet! After a stress-filled day at work or rushing the children from activity to activity, it’s often hard to face
the challenge of making dinner. Yet it’s most often a quiet meal at home with family and friends that helps us relax,
unwind and get ready for a new day.
That’s why I’ve developed the concept of Fun Gourmet — to help people bring back that comfort and peace that they remember from dinner-time in their youth.
What’s Fun Gourmet? It’s about creating a cooking environment conducive to relaxing and decompressing, as well as an opportunity
for finding personal satisfaction in cooking a good meal. Often, cooking at home can seem overwhelming, simply because we
don’t have the appropriate tools, the required skills, the right recipes or the necessary ingredients at our fingertips. Fun Gourmet looks at putting the enjoyment back into cooking, allowing anyone to make quick, easy, healthy and tasty meals in their own comfortable, safe space. It requires a conscious, up-front effort to prepare your kitchen, your pantry, your table and yourself, and then just a little planning each week. A Practical Kitchen, Made for the Way You Cook. Many people think that you need to have an expensive, elaborate, professional kitchen to prepare good
meals…not true! The kitchen pictured above is Julia Child’s kitchen which was on display at the Smithsonian’s
Museum of American History. As you can see, it was not fancy or elegant, but it was practical and customized, in a very
homey way, to support Julia’s personal style of cooking and entertaining.
One of the most recognizable features of Julia’s kitchen was the peg board wall where she hung her pots and pans. It featured the outline of each pan drawn on the pegboard so that she could tell where to return them after she used them.
Julia Child exemplifies Fun Gourmet; she’s the first person I ever saw having fun cooking. Years ago, as I watched her cook on Public Television, Julia would make jokes and sip wine while she was cooking. And when she made a mistake, she laughed it off and adjusted. For first time, I began to suspect that cooking could potentially be fun! – a suspicion I’ve since confirmed. The Fun Gourmet
Kitchen: Basic Appliances
A good working kitchen only needs a working stove, oven (two ovens would
be ideal), and a refrigerator/freezer. If you’re lucky enough to be able to choose the major appliances you want, congratulations,
your primary considerations should be how you want to cook and what you can afford.
Plan to bake a lot? You definitely need two ovens. Want to focus on fresh ingredients? You probably need a larger refrigerator. Need to prepare large meals for several days and freeze them? Then the freezer needs to be a primary focus. For stoves: Many cooks prefer gas, but in most situations, an electric stove can work just as well.
The primary consideration in choosing a stove top should be how many burners you will need and the range of control available
for each burner. Fun Gourmet Small Appliances:
There’s a wide variety of small appliances that can make cooking easier — and many reliable models available with a broad range of prices. Once again, you need to consider how you cook and your budget. Another consideration: the amount of countertop or cupboard space you have. For very small spaces, look at combination appliances are available which take less space. (Cuisinart, for example, offers a combination blender and food processor.) My basic recommendations for small appliances:
Next: Cookware
Cookware is one of the most important components of a well equipped kitchen — and one place where you don’t want to cut corners. Cheap cookware will provide uneven heating and unnecessary sticking that will lead to a frustrating cooking experience. Good quality stainless steel cookware is normally the best choice for most cooking needs that do not require a non-stick surface. Make sure your stainless steel cookware has at least 3 ply’s of bonded metal with at least one ply of aluminum or copper to ensure that they heat evenly and conduct heat well. There are many brands available that satisfy this requirement. Check carefully for this feature. Non-stick cookware is particularly important if you do a lot of frying and want to minimize the fats you use to cook. Most non-stick surfaces are coated with a Teflon composite, which is the subject of some controversy these days. Teflon coating processes are not all equal. Good quality pans don’t tend to peel or wear as quickly as those of lesser quality. There are alternative non-stick surfaces available in the marketplace that do not contain Teflon. One
example is the diamond composite coated pans manufactured by the Swiss Diamond Corporation. These aluminum pans are coated
with a non-stick diamond composite that helps the pan heat evenly and hold the heat. Because the surface is coated with
diamond dust, any kind of utensils can be used in the pans without peeling or wearing — and the manufacturer guarantees
them for life.
With just these basics, your kitchen will start to perform the way you need it to; creating a more enjoyable
experience. Reaching for the right pan, and knowing it will deliver a better product makes cooking so much easier.
Next month, we’ll talk about rounding out your kitchen with CUTLERY, KNIVES AND COOKING UTENSILS. Comments? Questions so far? Stop by and see me at The Cooks’ Revenge located at 197 Main Street in Annapolis, or e-mail me at www.thecooksrevenge@aol.com |
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