I’m also going to be using Instagram to take and post photos of things I see during my walks, meals I eat during the day, and other stuff having to do with food and health. You can join me there, too, and maybe we can get a little sightseeing community going. I’m listed under kitchensojourn.

As a nerd, I tend to place a great importance on things. It comes from spending my formative years with +1 swords of slaying and 1-up mushrooms. That being said, I don’t place a lot of importance on prefect kitchen gear. I use what what works for me, and that’s it. And strangely, I don’t often go inventing a need for new kitchen gadgets. Maybe it’s because my kitchen is pretty small. Maybe it’s because most of meals are cooked within 40 minutes on a weeknight, so I don’t see the benefit of multiple stock pots or slow cookers. And maybe my relatively competent knife skills means I don’t need a food processor (though sometimes I think it would be nice).

Knife

I’ve talked some about knives before, but I want to reiterate: Start with a couple good knives. You don’t need to go all out, but take the money you’d spend on a full set at a place like Target and buy a good chef’s knife and a reasonably good pairing knife from Amazon or a kitchen supply store. If you go the Amazon route, be sure you try them out someplace first. You don’t want to be stuck with something that doesn’t fit your hand or is too heavy or too light. Go with a knife that feels solid. One that has a good heft to it—not enough to tire you out, but enough so you can use the weight to help with your cutting. On the pairing knife, you can probably go cheap, but again, it’s nice to work with something that feels good in your hand. Figure about $40 for the two of them, and for fuck’s sake stay away from anything branded by a Food Network star. You’ll end up paying an extra $15 for a name and fake flame paint job.

Pots and Pans

The more I cook, the more I rely on just a few pots and pans. You really don’t need a lot of them, and be wary of anything sold to an exact specification. Single-egg poaching pots, for example. When my wife and I were looking to get some new pots and pans to replace the menagerie of mis-matched, plastic-handled rejects we’d collected over the years, we turned to Amazon.com. I was able to find a fantastic steel set by Cuisinart for just over $100. One of the large skillets had some cosmetic flaws, but it still cooks perfectly, and the set has exactly what’s important: thick, heavy bottoms to absorb and distribute heat evenly (and to stay hot when you add things to it), tight-fitting lids, and metal handles so they can go from range to oven without missing a beat. The set I bought includes the following

• 8” skillet with sloped sides
• 10” skillet with sloped sides
• ½ quart sauce pan
• 3 quart sauce pan
• A large sauté pan
• 8 quart stock pot

I get the most use out of the 10” skillet, the 3-quart sauce pan, and the sauté pan. I break out the stock pot about once a week. The only other pan I really need is a non-stick skillet for cooking eggs. Without making butter soup, there’s really no way to cook anything but scrambled eggs without a non-stick surface. (Yes, I could go with cast-iron or research and go through the steps necessary to season my steel, but I’m a busy man, as I’m sure you’re a busy person, and I’d rather cook and eat than bake cast iron in my oven). I’d also recommend looking for pots and pans that have a curved edge (like the photo above). It allows easy pouring from one pot to another without any liquid clinging to the side and dripping all over the stove. About the only other things I can recommend in the cookware department are a couple earthenware casserole dishes and a ceramic roasting pan. They’re perfect for long, slow cooking in the oven, and the materials, again, absorb a lot of heat and disperse it evenly and slowly. I like round casseroles (1 large, 1 medium) because they don’t suffer from hot spots in the corners.

A word about aluminium: aluminium is a reactive metal. Cook too much acidic food in it, and it’ll go funky on you. Your food will, too. So if you do aluminium, make sure it’s anodized.

Other tools

I have an old-style box cheese grater. It works just fine. I also have a couple wooden spoons, a couple silicone spoons (one slotted) and a couple spatulas (one wooden, one silicone). I’d recommend a can opener, but it seems most people in the first world come equipped with one. I’ll assume you have that covered. You’ll also need a vegetable peeler. I use the old-fashioned kind with the knife-shaped end. I use it to de-eye potatoes. Works great. What else? I have a few large Pyrex bowls that are great for mixing batters or making salads. They’re heavy, though, and I don’t use the microwave that much. If I had it to do again, I might buy some cheap steel bowls. They’d be easier to manage. Finally, you’ll want to get a set of measuring spoons, a set of measuring cups and a splatter shield. Yes, it’s necessary. It saves an amazing amount of cleanup.

Unnecessary but really nice to have? An immersion blender. It makes pureeing soups the easiest thing in the world.

How much do I spend?

The kitchen gadget scale has two poles, very far apart: on one end you have ridiculously cheap items that are pretty much disposable, and the other end is real heirloom stuff that’ll last generations. I can see a good argument for both, but I fall somewhere in the middle. The really cheap stuff often feels too lightweight and chintzy. Also, cheap pans usually don’t have enough material to retain heat, so they don’t cook very well. If you’re going to spend money, put into knives and pans. If you’re going to save money, save it on things like sheet pans and graters. Those kinds of things can be found at restaurant supply stores very inexpensively, and aren’t asked to do the kinds of things that will immediately show poor quality.

Given some thought, I don’t think Mr. Wells is a bad person. I don’t know him. But little these days galls me more than people who complain about situations of their own doing, particularly when it has to do with hours in the day.

I understand people work. I understand people have long commutes and can’t get home until 7 pm. When I was in those circumstances, I looked to change them as quickly as I could, changed jobs and moved. Now my commute’s about 25 minutes, and dinner is served by 6:30 at the latest.

So what’s the key to all this? I know how to cook, I’m aware of my limitations, and I know enough to plan ahead. Oh, and I put cooking first.

On every weekend todo list, there are at least three items:

• Laundry
• Menu plan
• Groceries

I don’t need to air my dirty laundry here (ha!), but I do want to talk about menu planning and buying groceries. Planning a week’s menu (or nearly a week) is crucial if you want to be able to cook dinner for your family every night. If you’re one of those people who must stop by the market every evening to grab the freshest and most interesting ingredients, then you’ve picked shopping over cooking, and there’s little I can do to help.

But let’s say you want to fix that. Let’s say you want to be able to sit down every night and enjoy a moderately unhurried meal with your family. Then you have to be mindful of your time.

For me, a typical menu (with variations) might look like this:

Sunday: roast chicken (or pork roast, or beef roast) with potatoes, carrots and other vegetables

Sundays are wonderful because they’re unrushed, and a long-cooked, roasted entrée is ideal. It doesn’t require a lot of monitoring. Just salt the meat and vegetables, pre-heat the oven (yes, in that order), stick everything into a casserole or roasting pan, and cover it in foil. When the oven’s hot, slide the pan onto the middle rack, set the timer and walk away. Now you can play with the kids. Or check email, or write a blog post or read a magazine. Whatever.

The rest of my week might look like this:

Monday: Chicken tacos (or pulled pork sandwiches or beef and broccoli stir fry)

Tuesday: – (I teach Tuesday nights, so my wife and the kids have to fend for themselves)

Wednesday: Pan-seared steak, Brussels sprouts, simple salad (This might also be a chicken frittata, depending on how large the original bird. I might also do vegetable beef soup, if there’s any beef roast left. The pork is always gone by now because pork is delicious)

Thursday: Steak sandwiches (maybe this night I’ll do the stir fry with the left-over steak. Again, vegetable beef soup is an option here, as is another egg dish)

Friday: Maybe curried lentils with rice, or potato and leek soup. Friday is usually a quick, low-prep meal made with staples from the cupboard. It’s been a while since we shopped, and the week is long. Sometimes we’ll order a pizza.

Saturday: We just figure it out. (Again, there’s no strict timetable on Saturdays, so we have a lot more flexibility to, for example, go to the market, look at what’s fresh and then compare that against what we feel like eating. Saturdays are also good for experiments.)

And that’s it. The next week might be some variation on the above or something completely different. Spinach artichoke dip, or a simple supper of brie,  bread and grapes. Even when we had purchased a CSA share and picked up our vegetables on Wednesday, the plan was the same: survey what we have and make a menu plan accordingly. Wednesday nights we often had nothing but fresh vegetables with homemade dressing, or something like wilted spinach with grilled onions and salami. Simple, delicious.

I stake my claim on time

For me, the hours between 5 and 7 are pretty sacred. That’s the time I spend going home, cooking, and eating with the people I love most in the world. I know I’m not going to have time to figure out what I’m going to cook, and I’m not going to have time to shop. I understand these limitations and work around them. I also know my strengths: I have fair knife skills, so I can do prep work fairly quickly. If I didn’t have good knife skills, I might buy vegetables already diced, or spend some time on a Sunday dicing vegetables and parsing them into freezer bags.

You probably don’t have time to do all the things you’d like during the day. Many people don’t. However, if you find yourself complaining about the things you wish you had time for, and you haven’t given up all you can to make those few things happen for you, then I’ll claim you’ve picked bitching over action.

Mr. Wells asked how do working parents do it? For me, the answer is pretty simple: I choose to do it. I don’t talk about it, I don’t fret about it, I just make it happen. Evening after evening, meal after meal. I don’t go to the gym, and I don’t watch a lot of television. But I don’t complain about either of those facts. They exist because I cook dinner every night, and I’m happiest that way.

A: One good knife is the best thing to have in your kitchen. Start with a good chef’s knife that’s sized to fit your body. I use an eight-inch Anolon chef’s knife almost exclusively. I like its weight and balance, and it was pretty inexpensive, too. I think I got mine for about $20 during a post-Christmas sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond. If you want to add a second, go with a good pairing knife for small-scale work. A third? I’d suggest a small, thin fillet knife, especially if you cook a lot of fish.

Spend a little money, too. I know you can probably get a whole knife set (including wooden holding block!) for not much more than the cost of a single chef’s knife, but please don’t do that. Just go with the chef’s knife. Seriously.

I wouldn’t suggest sharpening knives on your own. Some people probably get pleasure buying a whetstone and oil and going through the meticulous ritual of sharpening, but that’s jut not for me. I don’t have the time or interest to devote to that learning curve, and the guy down at the local hardware store has a much greater chance of getting a good edge on the knife than I do.

Alton Brown recommends sharpening your knives every year or so, and honing several times a month. I value his opinions when it comes to food and cooking gadgets.

And it is so important to use sharp knives! Imagine how your face or legs feel after using a dull razor. Not the best feeling is it? Now translate that feeling to your kitchen. Your whole body is involved when you’re really cutting, and life is easier if you have a sharp knife. Which reminds me, I really should get mine sharpened.

As for technique? I can think of no better resource than Jacques Pépin. It seems full runs of his series, More Fast Food My Way are available via KQED’s Web page. Just watching him work with a knife is amazing.  If you search through the archives, you can probably find several where he talks specifically about various knife techniques.

Also, Saveur has an excellent section on techniques. Check out the various knife techniques on their site. They’re not the most comprehensive (no step-by-step illustrations, for example), but they seem to cover the basics at least.

Finally, practice. Carrots are cheap and plentiful and packed with beta-Carotene.  Slice them, cook them up as carrots vichy, and enjoy.

Nathan Myhrvold, cookbook author

Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoftie and founder of an invention company called Intellectual Ventures, is also really interested in food, so much so that he’s writing a monster cookbook (currently ~1500 pages) about the science of cooking.

In another discovery of culinary heat transfer physics, Dr. Myhrvold said the bulbous shape and black color of Weber grills were wrong. To achieve an even cooking temperature across the cooking grate, the inside of the grill should be vertical and shiny to reflect the heat. That can be fixed by adding an aluminum insert to the grill. “So we have directions for that,” Dr. Myhrvold said.

You may remember reading about Myhrvold and IV in Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on the nature of invention last year.

Two things: I’m not sure we need another cookbook on the science of cooking, especially one already over the 1,500 page mark. Harold McGee already wrote the amazing On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. If you’ve read any of it, you know Alton Brown owes much of his success to McGee’s work. Indeed, any cook worth his salt should send a thank-you note to McGee some time today.

More concerning is Myhrvold’s mistake. In examining hardware, he forgot about cooking. The Weber grill is masterfully designed because it allows for very specific heat regulation and air circulation. When grilling, you don’t want even heat distribution. The things you’re cooking should and will cook at different rates.

Picture this: the bulbous Weber with coals piled on one side in the bottom. Near that edge, the food is very close to the heat, perfect for quick grilling vegetables or searing thin meat cuts. On the other side, you’d have a relatively cool temperature, perfect for slow-cooking ribs or pork loin.

The review doesn’t call Myhrvold on his mistakes, which go beyond the beloved Weber:

Confit doesn’t impart a unique flavor, it’s a method of preservation

The book sounds audacious, and I’m sure will include some interesting bits of knowledge for those operating at the bleeding edge of food and cooking. But to claim something’s just wrong without proper context is just sloppy cooking. Journalism, too.