Kitchen Collection

Ken and I take a lot of pleasure from food and wine. We both enjoy cooking, although we each enjoy different aspects of the process. Planning and anticipating are almost as important to the enjoyment of a meal as is the eating. Food shopping is a feast in itself. I even enjoy putting away the groceries when we get them home from the market, reviewing the take like I imagine a museum curator does with new acquisitions, carefully ensuring that each item goes in the right place, safe from harm and readied for the show.

We've spent more than twenty years assembling our cooking tools, trying out certain styles and settling on those that work well for what we like to do. One characteristic of cooking tools that I think is important is that their appearance shouldn't distract from the food. I like glass, wood, stainless steel, plain white earthenware (although some color has crept into our collection).

Not everything matches, not much is new, and it's all pretty basic, but it all works together.

All this is to announce a new series here at wcs: The Kitchen Collection. Here's the first installment:

Nested Pyrex bowls. Theses babies are nearly sixty years old. Ken's mom received them as a wedding present back in the late '40s and has since passed them on to us. At least one of them gets used every day in our house; each is just the right size for something or other.

These bowls are heavy and hardy. They are great in the microwave. They're also the most colorful of our kitchen tools.