My heroic friend Jim offered to cook dinner the other night and then forgot to shop or to cook. The adorable Dora took it badly. This post is so that Jim will never get caught out again.
My recipe for when I don’t know what to cook or I don’t have time to think about it is simple. Bacon, onion, tomato, cheese and pasta.
It doesn’t matter what kind of bacon. If it is fatty, then drain most of the fat off. If it is guanciale, pancetta or smoked pancetta, sauté it in oil. If I have used all the solids from some canned tomatoes, I’ll use the leftover juice. If I have fresh tomatoes, of course I’ll use those. Onions can be plain old onions, chopped, or scallions sliced, or shallots chopped. The pasta can be anything I have around, although something with a hole in it works best. Cheese? What have you got? It will be different with different cheeses.
For two people:
- 3.5 ounces or 100 g of bacon, guanciale, or pancetta diced
- 1 onion or 2 scallions 0r 3 shallots chopped up
- 1 tablespoon (cucchiaio) of good olive oil
- tomatoes– about 1/2 tin of canned ones, or two big fresh ones– both of those diced– or a cup of the tomato juices
- a pinch of red pepper (peperoncino) flakes
- from 130 to 200 grams dry of pasta depending on appetites
- 3 ounces or so of cheese grated, coarse or fine depending on how hard it is
Start a lot of water boiling in a big pot for the pasta.
Heat a large frying pan and put in the oil, then the bacon, etc. and the onion, etc. Sauté it until the onion is soft. You will need to drain off part of the fat if you used British or US bacon. Add the tomatoes, chopped or about one cup of the juice. Add the red pepper. Simmer this while you throw first a small handful of salt and then the pasta into the boiling water. Assuming the pasta takes about ten minutes to cook almost al dente, the sauce ought to be ready when the pasta is.
Drain the pasta well, and toss it into the frying pan and let it simmer briefly– about 1 or 2 minutes maximum. Sprinkle the cheese over it, and stir it in. Ladle the finished pasta into shallow soup bowls and drink some red wine.
This really is pasta presto.
Go take a nap.
May 10th, 2007
It’s hard to say who the beginner is in that article. The writer mentions college graduates and others setting up a kitchen for the first time, but don’t they come in all the variety of the population? The list of purchases assumes a sort of meat-and-two-veg kind of menu. There are many who won’t fit that restrictive fare, some beginners aren’t on their first kitchen, but having to set up a new kitchen on a restricted budget. I won’t pick holes in it for that, except to say that someone from an ethnicity other than urban-suburban USA would not be served with that list.
That said, a restaurant supply shop is a wonderful resource for a beginner or an accomplished cook, if they’ll let you in. Just don’t go nuts and buy a lot of stuff because it fascinates you and you didn’t even know it existed.
Let’s look at the items. I am in general agreement with many of them. I agree that stainless steel bowls are a best buy– I said that when I did a post on equipping a kitchen, and I agree that cheap ones are just fine. The important thing is that they aren’t plastic and they won’t break under stress.
The tongs referred to must be the pincer type, which I won’t have in the kitchen because they are not accurate enough. Mine aren’t expensive, but they look more like scissors and have a handle like scissors. They open really wide and don’t rely on “spring” but on you, for pressure. You can pick up jars and lids from boiling water with them, in case you need to sterilize something. That may be rare, but it happens, so why not buy the tongs that allow it? I can also slip one side into a hot chicken and pick it up with my tongs, which I couldn’t with pincers.
Knives also don’t have to be expensive, but they do need to fit your hand. If a knife doesn’t fit your hand, you will have accidents. If it doesn’t take a decent edge you will have accidents. I speak as one who although experienced has in the past three years had a couple of knife accidents, one of which took me to the emergency room. OK, buy the cheap knife, but then take it immediately to someone for sharpening so that you can keep it up yourself. That first edge is never successful at home to a beginner. Yes to paring knife or knives and at least one serrated edge one to use for tomatoes and bread. That can be a good-sized steak knife. I would also add kitchen scissors– good sturdy ones that cut some bones as well as packaging materials.
I guess a sheet pan is a decent choice, although I don’t have one because a broiler pan that comes with most stoves is pretty much the same thing. I do have, instead, a flat cookie sheet that I use as a peel to put things in and take things out of the oven. I couldn’t do that with a sheet pan.
He sneaked a cutting board into the sheet pan paragraph, and I really disagree with his recommendation. People seem really confused about cutting boards ever since the US government reported on bacteria growth on them, first incorrectly and then correctly. Plastic cutting boards are the ones that grow bacteria. They develop cuts in the surface in which bacteria grow. Wooden boards kill those bacteria. I have one nylon cutting board and I am careful to use it only for fruits and veg. He is wrong, because he should not only prefer a wooden board, but insist on it if it is to be the only board.
Including a mandoline is ludicrous. I have two. I love them. They are not for beginners. They are certainly not for people who don’t have money. $25 is one eighth of this budget for something that, with practice, allows you to make pretty cuts in large quantities. That’s nuts.
I don’t like his style of vegetable peeler, but I can use one if that’s what there is. A plastic colander with big holes is what I drain pasta in, but a metal one, as he has chosen, would allow one to use it also for steaming things over a pan of hot water. Thing is, I am not a beginner, so I have the other equipment to do that, but I would come down firmly for a metal colander in the beginner kitchen.
I’m in general agreement with cast aluminum as a beginner pot, but I would recommend skipping the mandoline and spending part of the money on a couple of flat, professional kitchen aluminum lids. I have one medium one and it does a lot of work, since it will cover anything smaller than itself. I’ll try to show one soon. The handle on the lid is a flat U shape and allows it to be opened with the tines of a cooking fork– a good thing when you get busy. I also think everybody needs one sort of big pot for soup, pasta, the occasional chili binge for your friends, the rare lobster feast, cooking corn on the cob. Something he bought may fulfill that need, but it wasn’t clear to me. From the picture, I don’t think he bought anything the right size. After all, you can cook something small in something big, if pressed, but you can’t cook something big in a small pot. Pasta must have lots of water, but I see nothing that would accommodate pasta for even three people.
A cheap non-stick frying pan is a curse on mankind. Get a good heavy frying pan without the coating and learn to watch what you are frying, or get a cast iron frying pan and season it. I have a large frying pan with a non-stick surface that cost €65 new, and that, my friends, is over $80. It started to lose its coating after two years, even though I religiously approached it with nothing harder than wood or silicone. That stuff is not stable enough and all those pans are going to end up in landfills. And where does all that coating go? At least part of it is vaporizing into your food.
You know, if you read my earlier article on kitchen stuff, that I love the heat resistant silicone spatulas. Wooden spoons are basic. You need both. You need a spatula with which you can lift things out, too, such as pancakes or hamburgers. A skimmer is nice, but a big slotted spoon will also do. (n.b. do beginners make gnocchi?) A whisk is essential, if only because you look so cheffy when you have it in your hand.
Food processors are very nice to have, but practice using knives is both cheaper and more basic. The size he suggests would be fairly useless for me, and the things I use it for are not beginner things, but advanced things that I did by hand before I was injured. Nice as it might be, if your budget is $200 I’d skip it. A salad spinner of any size isn’t a basic, but a nicety. A clean dish towel does the same thing. I agree with the Microplane grater for hard things. It is new technology that wipes out the old. You still need a plain old grater for softer things– and many of those also have a slicer included.
A coffee and spice grinder? Take part of the mandoline and food processor money and buy a Turkish coffee grinder which does a great job and looks good. One of the things beginner kitchens often lack is electric outlets, and this operation doesn’t need to be electrified.
I don’t see a blender with a vase as belonging in this list at all, unless the beginner is a devotee of frozen Margaritas. I would say that buying one of the stick-blenders-on-steroids is more to the point. With a motor at 350 watts and up, it comes with a stick blender attachment, a mixer attachment, dough hooks and a mini-chopper. It takes one electrical outlet and does 100 things. Especially for a beginner, it is an investment that outweighs the other electrical appliances mentioned in the NY Times list.
I agree with a stone for sharpening knives. I bought a new one last week for €1.80. You do need to practice, but you won’t be as ruinous to your knives with a stone as an electric sharpener often is in the hands of the ignorant. More decent knives have been ruined with those than cutting on those horrible glass cutting boards.
They also sell long-wearing kitchen towels in supply stores. They have a loop that allows you to attach them to your apron or jeans. They are a very good buy.
The things he dismisses, that I do not, fit in this list.
A wok. I am perhaps spoiled because I have a giant pasta burner that heats my wok, but it is the shape of the wok that I find important even for things that aren’t stir fried. The round shape allows you do use a small amount of oil in the bottom and pull things up onto the wall of the wok when they are done, allowing them to drain of the oil. A wok is ideal for curries, too, in which pastes are fried in oil. Is it a beginner’s necessity? No, but then a salad spinner isn’t, either.
A boning knife is your best friend when trying to cook refined cuts of meat and fish on a budget. You can learn to do the butchering work that costs real money every time you want to make something a bit deluxe, without paying the deluxe price, and this goes on for years and adds up. It can be used for other knife jobs, too, but won’t replace a chef’s knife. Am I a butcher? No, but I can play one on my blog. I can bone cheap cuts and end up with a fancy meal as well as a delicious soup from the bones. (Or spare ribs.)
Copper pots and pans– well, sure, a beginner probably isn’t doing the kind of cooking copper is so great at. On the other hand, once you have some money and some experience, copper is one of the best investments you can make. Maintenance is a snip with a squeezed-out lemon and some salt, copper is better at surround-heat than anything else, and it is beautiful. In the end isn’t beauty in your kitchen worth something? The one above is just representative, and is not as beautiful as a used copper pot, either. Just pick steel interiors rather than tin. How much cooking would I feel like doing if I had to work forever with beat-up junk, which many of the beginner’s items surely will be after some years? To me it is a mistake to discount it as the writer has done, and I would instead have said copper is what you will deserve when you’ve developed some kitchen skills that outlive your junk.
I still have some of the things I started out with decades ago. Some look really beat up, yes, but they’ve served in the war against hunger and have been my valued allies. I can look at these things, tools that have lived in the city, at a farm, have traveled around the USA and expatriated to Italy, and I know what works and lasts. Believe me, anything that wasn’t worth kitchen space got tossed years back in one of my 36 moves. I hope that every new graduate who reads that article will have a couple of items that will last the race alongside him and more than anything, I hope that the new cooks will keep on cooking and controlling what goes into their bodies and not start eating out when they get some dough.
Mr. Bittman, who wrote the New York Times article, eats out and around for a living. What and how he cooks should be of interest. I salute him for this effort, but I don’t totally agree.
The images above are from Amazon.com and are strictly for reference.
May 10th, 2007
