The Setting: My Kitchen

Last post, I gave you a peek at who I am.

You already know what MasterClass is (Right? If you don’t, go to MasterClass.com and check them out – I can’t possibly rave about them more!)

But I realized we’re still missing a key player in this venture: My Kitchen.

Since none of this is possible without my kitchen, my favorite room in the house, I thought I’d give a little tour.

It’s been an eight-year project in the making and it’s still very much a work in progress. Little by little, my endless list of kitchen-wants filter in. And by that, I mean I wait for my birthday and Christmas where my husband surprises me with items off of that list because yes, when I say list, I mean there really is a detailed list of cooking items I want. Or I hunt down my mother’s amazing kitchen items she keeps brand new in the box like it’s for a museum. They call out to me for years until finally, my mother realizes she’ll never touch them and hands them over.

Since we don’t have money to throw at a grand professional kitchen, I have a mixture of quality when it comes to my tools.

For instance, I have a gorgeous five pot set of flame-colored Le Creuset pots and an additional Le Creuset dutch oven in Caribbean blue. I have a big Boos cutting board. A Blendtec blender. A Samsung french door refrigerator that finally gives me almost enough room for everything I need. William-Sonoma plates and silverware sets. Three Kitchen Aid mixers. My marble rolling pin and board that I wouldn’t make a pie without.

But I also have items such as this two slot toaster my grandmother bought second-hand at a Goodwill store. She used it for about five years. Then she gave it to me – eight years ago. We use that crappy, on-its-last-legs toaster until we can afford the Breville die-cast four slot toaster of my dreams. It broke twice, but I didn’t have the money for that Breville yet, so I managed to fix it each time so we didn’t need to waste money on yet another low-quality toaster while we wait.

My counters aren’t marble, quartz, or granite. My cabinets are cheap and old. The walls haven’t been painted in at least ten years, since before we owned the house. But these aren’t the tools I work with, so they haven’t gotten first priority. That means my kitchen isn’t the stunning, professional kitchens you see on Pinterest or famous chefs’. But it works and it houses so many of my favorite possessions, and it’ll get me through making all of the MasterClass recipes just fine.

A note: I am a firm believer that if you’re going to have quality anything, please make it be your set of cookware and your knives. I learned this the hard way.

In my family, a pot was a pot. A pan was a pan. Brand names didn’t matter. The make didn’t matter. Does it hold water? Does it handle heat? Then it’ll work.  So when I got married and people gave me their used cast-offs, I used them. My array was mostly from yard sales and goodwills and that was just fine.

Except I couldn’t cook the way the recipes told me I should. My food refused to turn out like the pretty pictures, even when I had followed every single step perfectly. The amount of time I spent crying over burnt pancakes, still raw in the middle…ugh. Then my husband bought me a real set of cookware: the exact same I watched Gordon Ramsay use each week on MasterChef. The next day, my family wanted pancakes. I dreaded it but decided to go ahead and test out these new pans.

Not only were those pancakes not burnt, but they were also perfectly golden and cooked completely through. Nearly flawless. I had used the same recipe. The same temperature on the same stove. The same spatula. Everything was exactly the same except those pans. My relationship with cooking completely changed that day.

So if you’re just starting out, skip all the pretty, shiny things and go right for the cookware, then follow it up with a good set of sharp knives. I’m still saving up for my dream knives: Zwilling, Wustof, or one day, perhaps Thomas Keller’s Japanese line.

What are your dream kitchen items? Let me know in the comments below!