Friday, June 29, 2007

Pots and pans

When I moved into my cramped kitchen in 1999, I'd been living in much more spacious quarters, so I had a big collection of pots and pans.
  • Soup pots? Small and large.
  • Frying pans? Four or five - three sizes of cast iron, plus a Revereware pan and a medium Calphalon pan.
  • A small saucepan
  • A large saucepan
  • A stovetop-mac-and-cheese size pot
  • A Dutch oven
  • An absurd plug-in electric frying pan
It took me a couple of years to whittle the collection down to the essentials, mostly because I was reluctant to Goodwill so many nice pans.

Now I have:
  • One cast-iron frying pan (about 10 inches)
  • One small saucepan (stovetop mac and cheese size)
  • One large saucepan (mac and cheese for 10)
  • Two large soup pots (about 10 quarts).
  • That Dutch oven, be it ever so infrequently used.
The soup pots are identical and both contain large and small steaming baskets. I probably only *need* one, but if you're feeding 20-30 every so often, the flexibility is a big plus. As for the Dutch oven, well, they're expensive, so I'm loath to ditch it. I keep thinking I'll do a bean-hole supper some fall, too, in which case it will be wicked useful.

2 comments:

Field Notes said...

Sounds like you have mac n' cheese on the brain! Sounds good to me :-) Any suggestions on how to make a really tasty single serving of it?

Alasdair said...

Yes, and I'll post that immediately!