kitchen

Tool for Living: A Strangely Perfect $8 Spatula

The best eight bucks I’ve spent lately is the OXO’s Good Grips Jar Spatula, a silicone spatula meant for reaching into jars. It’s so curiously-perfect I find myself using it daily for all sorts of kitchen endeavors.

Favorite Things: Really Big Cotton Dish Towels

We’ve used these these HUGE dish towels for many things in addition to drying dishes…

Simple Furoshiki Cloth Becomes a Carry Bag, Apron, Kitchen Towel, Scarf…

This useful little video and chart demonstrate ways of using furoshiki cloths — large multipurpose squares of cotton fabric — to make carry bags, aprons, more…

Annals of Bad Design: The Mixed Message Kitchen Island

In yet another high-design, uninhabited space recently sold at auction in Australia, we discovered a surprising design flaw at odds its superlative description. It made us look closely into kitchen islands, and the mixed messages they can inadvertently be made to send.

Secret Flavor Amplifiers of Clever Cooks + Parmesan Bone Broth Recipe

In Parm Bones: How to Raise Flavor From Foods You Might Throw Away, Zingerman’s Mo Frechette outlines tricks traditional, i.e. frugal, ie savvy cooks use to amplify flavor from the last bits of ingredients. They’re essential, as is this Parm Bone Broth recipe.

Summer in a Jar: Flower and Herb Teas and Seasonings

There are some kitchen processes I do so automatically that I hardly think about them, until I become suddenly conscious that it is a principle I am using, and not a recipe. For years I’ve used a simple method to transform summer herbs and flowers into teas and seasonings for use all year round.

Giant Chewy, Crispy, Eggy Popover-Pancake (Savory or Sweet)

As we were gobbling a giant sweet, lemony dessert popover with pancake overtones, we thought: Wouldn’t this also be great SAVORY instead of sweet? So we added Parmigiano Regginao to the basic egg and flour structure with to make delectable lunch, supper, hors d’oeuvre.

Tasting Spoons: Essential Kitchen Tool and Welcome Gift

A tasting spoon is an essential kitchen tool, allowing you to add flavor experiments directly to the “taste” to see if you like them. Over the years I’ve collected —and given — quite a few tasting spoons. They make great, unexpected gifts. Here’s a roundup:

Sublime (and Easy): Seven Hour “Spoon” Lamb

One of my favorite chilly-weather dishes is also the homeliest-looking. But a leg of lamb cooked seven hours unattended when I’m home working elicits sighs and raves at a dinner party that night, and sublime leftovers in the days that follow.

DIY or Buy: Kitchen Knife Holder

We saw this knife holder in a friend’s kitchen and thought: seriously clever. It’s simply a tall, narrow box filled with vertically-standing wooden skewers. The skewers hold the knives in place without dulling the blade. Although we tracked down where you can buy one, the formula for making it yourself is simple…

Foraging & Feasting’s Agua Fresca and Other Wild Recipes

Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi, illustrated by Wendy Hollender, will enable you to actually cook with the many abundant, common wild foods hiding in plain sight, or available at your farmer’s market.

The Many Surprising Uses of a Kitchen Hammer

Matthias Wandel is a clever improviser whose YouTube channel is full of good ideas. Our favorite: a kitchen hammer, something you rarely see on any “kitchen essentials” list. We use ours — a rubber mallet— for variety of general household whacks, where a hammer would be too harsh. We hadn’t thought of Wandal’s great use, done with…

Favorite Kitchen Tool: French-Style Universal Pot Lid

On my first trip to France, I bought a classic French pot lid in a flea market. Ten inches in diameter, it is a tin-lined copper disk with a cast iron handle. Little did I know that it would become one of my most-used kitchen tools. Or that the copper lids would become really expensive. On the hunt to find an alternative, I finally found a new iteration that is affordable and incredibly useful.

Scent Your Home with Wood Smoke, and a Poem

Even in chilly climates and country settings, wood fires, the most ancient of heating methods, have begun to go out of favor due to health and environmental concerns. Still, a house that smells like wood smoke evokes primal memory and connection, as the poem below describes. Whether you live in city or country, it’s an easy feeling to…

Roasted Okra or Delicata Squash with Curry or Garam Masala

It’s the tail end of okra season, and I came across some beauties — tender, bright green, and not too big – on the very day I saw Kitchen Repertoire’s latest: Simple Dal with Roast Okra. Being both lazy and busy, I opted to make just the okra, which is dead-simple and totally delish, with some…

Clever Minimalist Pot and Utensil Hanging Systems

We spent a lot of time and thought devising a pot rack that would make our decades of pots easily accessible AND sleek-looking, rather than a weighty mass hanging above our kitchen island. So we were intrigued by two ideas found rummaging through Boffi‘s “Kitchenology“, pdfs of their latest offerings.

Holly Soloman’s Kitchen: “A Painting I Can Walk Into”

In the annals of kitchen design, art collector/dealer Holly Soloman‘s has to be one of the most out-there. The dazzling, mind-boggling riot of colored mosaic was created artist Dorren Gallo as an on-site installation in the eighties. Solomon said to the New York Times in 1984, “I don’t know how to find an egg in it. But for me…

Audrey Hepburn’s Fab Eco Garbage Can Liner (DIY)

This charming image of Audrey Hepburn in her kitchen shows how ecologically correct she was, or perhaps better put, the times she lived in were — pre plastic bag. Newspapers were folded into a neat origami bag to line garbage cans. EVERYONE did it in those days, and it worked well enough. We thought we’d check…

Fab Color-Tinted Plywood

As fans of plywood for its economical, elemental, very modern possibilities for stylish interiors, we are smitten with bright blue-stained plywood used in Vancouver’s Kin Kao Restaurant. Local Scott & Scott Architects choose plywood to use in tandem with readily available materials, including painted concrete, soaped beech, and galvanized metal. Their clever technique of using construction-grade…

Mortar and Pestles to Buy or DIY (and Ones Not To)

Recently, Jim Dillon asked me to recommend a good mortar and pestle. It is a fine request as they are incredibly useful, yet misunderstood tools. I’ve been mentally panning most of the mortars and pestles I see for year because of their ineffective —yet often beautiful — design. So here are some mortar and pestle basics,…

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