Cheapskate Cookery, Kitchen Tools Edition

Of all the things worth spending money on, good tools are right up there. It's worth living on rice and beans for a while if it means you're putting the money towards buying a tool that will make cooking them more fun. If your tools are a pleasure to use, you'll use them. Conversely, if your tools are a headache, you'll find yourself avoiding them, and that means not cooking as much, or as well, as you want to.

One great thing about kitchen gadgets: they are easy to find cheap - often, the more obscure they are, the cheaper they will be on the secondhand market. People give other people kitchen things when they don't know what else to give them, and then after a few years they wind up in a yard sale or a Goodwill box. Show me a thrift store without a fondue set, and I'll show you a thrift store that doesn't have its donations program together. You've got to keep your eyes open with any secondhand kitchen goods, of course. A shoddy secondhand good is more trouble than it's worth, and it's not a bargain to get a cheap tool of poor quality. Electronics are a bit of a roulette wheel, and much as I hate to say it, it's worth looking for name brands

The big exception to this? Cutting tools. I've never had much luck finding cutting tools of any variety - knives, graters, peelers, etc. - on the secondhand market. It's not surprising, I suppose - they're dangerous to handle, and people don't get rid of them until they have lost their edge altogether.

If you're not willing to cruise the tag sales for your kitchen tools, another way to furnish your empty kitchen is to help friends and acquaintances move. People divest themselves of astonishing amounts of stuff in the moving process, and if you make clear that you're interested in any leftover kitchen equipment, you may be able to round out the gaps in your collection.

So here are my thoughts on which kitchen tools you need, organized by range of quality:

Getting the Good Stuff

Absolutely Essential

• Skillet: If you're going to cook, you need a skillet you love. I have a skillet I love. It's medium-sized, square, about two inches deep, and has a lid. I can use it to make basically any stovetop dish short of mashed potatoes or large quantities of stew. You want something that's easy to clean, heats and cools quickly and evenly, holds enough food for more than one person, has a solid and stable handle, and doesn't slide around on the stovetop. I think most households have a skillet like this. You can tell because it's the one that's always on the stove, the sink, or the dish-drainer, even as fancier or prettier ones languish unused. A skillet like this can be found secondhand fairly easily - look for something heavily used but in good condition. That alone should tell you it's worth trying out.
• Chef's Knife. This is hard to find cheap. If people have good knives, they hang onto them. Suck it up, buy a good one, and take care of it. 

Next on the List

• Pot: Anything between a saucepan and a small Dutch oven. Something with a lid. Big enough to make a rice or a small stew in. Same caveats about handles and stability. 
• Paring knife. See above.
• Spatula (turner): This is the one you use for pushing stuff around in a hot pot, flipping things that need to be flipped, and so on. Yes, at a pinch you can use a fork to do this. At a pinch you can use a fork to do anything. But you're already on step two, so you've graduated from forks, and so you want a decent one of these - one that won't melt if you leave it on your pan too long and won't tear up your food or the surface of your pan. Get this one new. Even the good ones wear out.

Stuff You Should Have where Quality Doesn't Make Much of a Difference

• Baking sheets. Obviously, it's nicer to have a good baking sheet than a bad baking sheet, and how important the quality of your baking sheet is to you will depend in part on how delicate the items you propose to bake are. But if you're not on the level of French pastry, you basically need something large and flat that you can put in the oven.
• Forks. This is the first, and some would argue the only, mixing tool you need. (Whipping egg whites to stiff peaks with a fork is a pain in the neck, but it can be done!) The good thing is, almost any fork will do the job! You want it to be reasonable large, sturdy, and easy to clean, but beyond that, there's not much difference 
• Bowls. You really just need something to mix things in. As long as it doesn't have corners and isn't coated in anything toxic, you're fine.
• Stockpot. This is the third of your three essential pots (the skillet, the saucepan, and the stockpot, or the flat one, the medium one, and the big one. Because anything you'll be making in it will start with a lot of liquid, its heat-conducting qualities aren't nearly as important as those for the other two. 

Stuff It's Nice to Have where Quality Makes or Breaks the Item

• Spatulas (for scraping). A spatula should have just the right blend of sturdiness, flexibility, and drag, otherwise you're better off just scraping your bowls with spoons.
• Food processors/Blenders. The cheap ones will just blow out the second you give them something even slightly challenging. Don't encourage the cheap blender industry. Encourage rich people to buy even more expensive ones so you can pick up their old ones. 

Don't Both Getting It If You Don't Get the Nice One

• Pan sets. If you find a whole pan set for cheap, you're either incredibly lucky or it's just junk. One junk pan in a kitchen is okay, a whole set of junk pans in a kitchen is a wearisome pain and takes up space that could be better used. Save it for when you get married.
• Cutting Implements. A blunt pizza cutter is worse than useless. A blunt peeler somehow still manages to cut the tips of your fingers. And you don't even want to think about what happens when the filmsy metal of your cheap knife breaks. No. Pay good money for good cutting things.

I know you have opinions about kitchenware - let me hear 'em! What's worth paying for? What's a waste of money? What's your favorite kitchen tool?

Pricing Rules

I mentioned advanced techniques for the Grocery Game the other day - one of the most useful, time-savey ones is the mental price bank.

A lot of brains are really, really good at keeping track of this sort of thing. Do you drive? Think about filling up your gas tank. When you approach a gas station, do you automatically have a sense of “Hey, this is higher than I paid last week!” or “Woohoo, it’s gone down, time to fill up!”. If so, you’ve got in your head a smaller and occasionally alarmingly imprecise version of those computer algorithms that tell brokerages when to buy and sell on the stock market.

Most of this is unconscious for me. I just think “Pfft, too high,” or “Hey, now that’s a sale! Stock up!” But there are some pretty specific numbers attached to it, and here they are, dragged up fresh from under the surface of my mind.

Standard Cheese (cheddar, mozzarella, swiss)

Over $6/lb: Don’t buy

Under $3/lb: Is something wrong?

Milk:

Over $3/gallon: don’t buy regular

Over $3/half-gallon: don’t buy organic

Eggs:

Over $2/doz: don’t buy industrial

Over $3/doz: don’t buy cage-free/organic

Over $4/doz: don’t buy local

Canned Goods

Over $1/can: don’t buy

Dried Beans:

Over $1/lb: don’t buy.

Greens:

Over $1/lb: don’t buy. (This $1.29 stuff is nonsense. We are talking about collards, people.)

Onions and Potatoes

Over $1.50/3lbs: don’t buy. Check for mushiness though.

Most other veggies:

Over $2/lb: don’t buy standard

Spinach:

Over $2/unit: don’t buy (unless the unit is one of those big containers of washed baby spinach, in which case you can go up to $4)

Frozen Veggies in a Bag:

Over $2/bag: don’t buy. (Exceptions made as bags get larger. And don’t buy those little bitty bags. No one needs those.)

Apples:

Over $2/lb: don’t buy (no, not even the organic local ones, unless you are particularly in the mood to support your farmers, in which case knock yourself out!)

Under $1/lb: What’s wrong with them?

Yogurt:

Over $3/tub: don’t buy. (The little fruit on the bottom things are usually a ripoff even on their frequent sales, though if they are convenient enough that it’s worth it to you, go for it!)

The Grocery Store Video Game

If I had kids, I’d like to take them grocery shopping; teach ‘em how to play the Great Grocery Game. Really, the whole grocery store is like a video game, although the educational kind rather than the kind where you can kill aliens. (Now there’s a way to get kids excited about grocery shopping...) Think about it. You have a certain amount of points you can spend (we could even call them dollars or something) a variety of items you need, and a bunch of distractors trying to get you to make choices that will serve not your interests but their own. This is the Grocery Game! It’s you versus the market - but you can win!

The same way you learn right quick to spot an extra life or a save point, you should be able to spot the sale tags in an aisle or pick out the store brand in seconds. It’s usually the one without any fancy coloration; alternately (especially if you are in a store for the first time) it’s the brand you don’t recognize. Just let your eyes glide right over everything they already know, and catch on the one you don’t recognize.

Once you’ve spotted the sale tag (o my hypothetical child), it’s time for the Stock Check! Is this item on your list of Things We Usually Need? If it’s not there, is it on the list of Things It Might Be Cool to Try? Great! Now it’s on to the Lightning Math Round! Does this sale put it below the store brand or comparable items? Price per unit is usually there on the sign; to try and trip you up during the Lightning Math Round sometimes the unit something ridiculous and random like “pack”. Or it will be in ounces while everything else is in pounds. You don’t need to know the exact answer - it’s just like those GRE math questions where all you have to know is if B is larger, smaller, or the same size as A.

Look, hypothetical child, we’re not just winning the grocery game, we’re doing GRE prep! Man, you are going to be the smartest hypothetical child!

Package sizing is another puzzle to watch out for. If you see an item that is notably cheaper than its comparables, check the package sizing. Is it an 11 oz bag of tortilla chips while everything else is 13 oz? Is it a 64-square roll of toilet paper while everything else is 100? These are some sneaky things - you will think you have beaten the grocery game, but in fact the final boss (CAPITALISM) is laughing at you.

What?! Hypothetical child, get out of the cereal! No, I’m not going to buy you a candy bar! Stop screaming, everyone’s staring at us! Look - um - quick, tell me which brand of coconut water is cheapest!

Can’t take you anywhere, hypothetical child.

Grub and Grace

I was thinking about the habit of blessing food, saying grace before meals, or even the little pause-phrases ("Bon appetit!") that signal that it's okay to begin eating. My impression is that such customs are, if not universal, at least very widespread.

There's an awful lot to be thankful for in food. Not just the fact of nourishment, not only the proximate labor that went into cooking and serving the food, but the distant labor that went into growing, harvesting, and transporting it, the laws that attend all stages of its production, the vast complex of civil infrastructure that makes it possible for you to chop your food with a knife on a counter and turn a knob to cook it. And what about the history and culture that told you that this was food in the first place, and that this is how you eat it? You can infer a whole society from a lunch. Seen this way it seems almost disturbing that food should be eaten alone.

But I do eat alone, of course, shoveling food into my face like a stoker shoveling coal into a firebox, concerned with nothing more than the moment's gratification, and considering the debt that I owe for my body's sustenance to have been entirely discharged by the time that I've converted into money and forked over for the meal. That doesn't seem healthy.

Lent's a season of fasting, but I don't think I'll give anything up this Lent. In this age of diets I'm forever giving up one thing or another - sugar, wheat, dairy, meat, alcohol, caffeine - and it's now not so much a discipline as a nervous tic. Instead, I think I'll add something on. If I'm going to eat, I'm going to say thanks for it. And if I'm going to buy myself a meal rather than preparing it, I'm going to buy someone else a meal as well.

What about you? Are there any rituals surrounding the act of eating that you partake in, alone or with others? Do you have anything special that you do before meals?