In a small kitchen, you don’t need a lot of equipment to cook great food. Still, you do need some pots, pans, utensils, and dishes–obviously. In the BGSK book, you’ll find a bare bones list of necessary tools, but I’ve long wanted to bring you a similar resource on the web.
So we’re going one by one, stocking up our virtual pantries and maybe our real ones too.
If you make pasta as much as I do, you likely recognize this sequence of events: 1) put pasta into a pot of boiling water to cook. 2) realize your sink is full of dirty dishes. 3) wash dishes as fast as possible to make room for a colander to fit in the sink, all before the pasta is al dente. 4) manage to spray boiling water around the kitchen as you pour the pasta into the colander.
A good, sturdy colander like this All-Clad one makes that perpetual kitchen rush much less dramatic and dangerous than lacking one. A flimsy, collapsable, or plastic colander may collapse beneath the weight of the pasta and hot water, dumping your freshly cooked noodles into the belly of the sink, and if you didn’t quite finish washing all those dirty dishes…not a good scenario. Go for sturdy instead.
Here are some of the pastas you’ll make in your new unshakeable colander (which can join your metal mesh strainer in the “draining things” drawer in your kitchen):
- Baked Shells with Tomato & Mozzarella
- Salmon Spaghetti with Plum Tomatoes & Avocado
- Brown Butter Broccoli Spaghetti
