by H. Snowborne

Created on: April 16, 2010   Last Updated: April 21, 2010

Growing up in my mother's kitchen, I watched her make all kinds of intricate dishes that combined different flavours and textures, and usually involved techniques you could now only learn in culinary school.  Though the dishes always took time and careful preparation, most of them were prepared with few gadgets and the bare minimum of useful tools:  good knives and kitchen shears, kept sharp; the iconic box cheese grater; a reliable hand mixer with an aerating blade; and a simple, hand-cranked pasta maker.  The old kind, the one with a vise that allowed you to attach it to a work surface so it would stay steady when you threw your body weight behind it to make the ribbons of fine dough even thinner that you could imagine. 

Anything that needed to be done in the kitchen was done with these few implements:  if they failed to do the trick, my mother made her own solutions for specific purposes.  One year she decided she'd figure out how to make fine cannoli pastry tubes from scratch, so she devised a recipe for the dough and shaped forming tubes from thin sheets of stainless steel.  They could be made wider or thinner depending on her whim, and they could withstand the heat of the hot oil they'd be immersed in so that the pastry would cook to a perfect, paper thin crispness.  When the pastry itself cooled, the tubes could easily be removed with a squeeze.  The delicate pastry shells emerged perfectly cooked, and the metal tubes could be easily washed and put away until they were needed again.  She should have patented those things, they were ingenious and they worked well. 

My own kitchen is different today.  I haven't reached my mother's level of skill but when I was growing up I looked forward to exploring other cuisines besides the one I was raised with.  I loved to experiment and learn different techniques, to "stretch" my own skills as I learned.  There's a different energy to the cooking I do-I want to spend more time enjoying the food I make with other people when I prepare it, so even the most complex preparation has to be streamlined and easy.  All the tools I use have to be reliable and flexible, things I can reach for again and again and know they'll do exactly what's needed, with little fuss.  They've also got to be reasonably priced, just in case I have to replace them for any reason.  Things wear out or disappear all the time in a working kitchen.  Most importantly,

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