Back to basics in the kitchen
Guidebook helps home cooks get organized and ditch extra gadgets
Cooking and baking in the time of the pandemic has not been without its revelations.
Perhaps you’re among those who have discovered that you actually own more than a dozen cake and tart pans. Or that you possess multiple whisks, tongs, sieves, rolling pins and potato mashers. Even worse: Are there useless gadgets — avocado slicer, asparagus peeler, strawberry huller, corn cobber, herb scissors — clogging your kitchen drawers?
If it at all concerns you that you once invested in a silly quesadilla-making machine or a never-used gizmo that creates an Egg McMuffin, food writer Lisa Chernick feels your pain.
The author of the new book “Your Starter Kitchen,” published next week, has written a user-friendly guide to setting up a beginner kitchen and how to intelligently expand on existing kitchen formats. The book covers must-have kitchen tools, pantry essentials and even offers classic, go-to recipes.
When Chernick began writing the book last summer, COVID-19 wasn’t in the picture; there wasn’t a hint that how and what we cook would be upended by a pandemic. But the book’s publication months into a global shift in our foodways has made “Your Starter Kitchen” exceedingly rele
vant. Home cooks everywhere have had to confront the challenges presented by the pandemic — food acquisition, meal planning, cooking and baking without ready access to ingredients and tools. And along the way come to a new understanding of the deficiencies and perhaps overabundance of the kitchen.
This is where Chernick’s book makes its mark. Organized in three sections for the beginner kitchen, intermediate and advanced, the book’s advice and checklists can help home cooks assess their kitchens and cupboards — something already happening months into the pandemic.
“People are spending a lot more time in a space they used to breeze in and out of and are much more intimate with their kitchens now,” she said. “Now, by virtue of this unfortunate circumstance,