Setup Part 2: The Kitchen Utensils and Tools You Will Need

So yesterday we covered The Kitchen and Appliances. Today we are doing cookware.

I'm not going to bother with stuff like chopsticks and forks and spoons since I will assume you have those, but you should have the following in your kitchen cookware collection:

1. 1 large stainless steel soup/stock pot. It doesn't have to be a thick one,  but make sure it comes with a cover and good solid handles
2. 1 kuali/wok with the metal spatula (if you are using gas stove) OR
3. 1 frying pan, non-stick with wooden or plastic spatula. (Don't bother buying expensive ones, just get a decently priced one and change it when it gets scratched.
4. 1 small saucepan. I suspect you already have one for your Maggie Mee cooking
5. 1 stainless steel colander. For draining pasta, vegetables and generally separating wet stuff from dry stuff.

That's all the pots you really need for your stove range really.

If you've taken my advice and invested in an oven, you should also have the following: 

1. 2 baking trays or cake tins (I keep more than 2, but then I bake too)
2. Ovenproof glass/ceramic dish/bowl (These are often also usable on stovetops. Handy for pies and casseroles and roasting, even. You can also use them to cook rice in your microwave)
3. Aluminum foil
4. Oven mittens or cloths (because you don't want to burn your hands)

You will also need these for working at the counter:

1. 1 wooden chopping board for cooked meats and bread, preferably with grooves on the side to catch the meat juices when you cut the cooked meat.
2. 1 set plastic chopping boards, the thin foldable ones are good for vegetables and raw meat, and aredisposable when they get too old. And they are cheap. Try to keep the boards for raw and cooked materials separate, for hygiene reasons.
3. 1 Chinese cleaver or large kitchen knife. Don't bother with buying those large blocks of 6 knives in a set. You'll never really use more than 1 or 2 of them anyway. Instead invest in the best cleaver you can afford and learn to use it well. You can do almost everything with it, from butchering chicken to slicing garlic.
4. 1 small knife. I said almost everything. But sometimes cutting an apple with a cleaver is overkill. Slicing watermelon from the rind with a cleaver is... hard.
5. 1 serrated knife. Because slicing bread with a cleaver ruins the bread. Serrated knives can also be used to cut through bones in cooked chicken, or semi-frozen meat.
6. 1 peeler. For peeling potatoes, carrots and stuff. They cost about RM 2-5, save you a lot of trouble and last forever until you lose them mysteriously. I like the Y peelers best. 
7. Knife sharpener. Keep your knives sharp at all times. I sharpen mine at least once a week, or almost every time before I use them. I can never abide people who try to cut things with a blunt knife, then complain it's tiresome and buy a food processor. If your knife presses the tomato down when you're slicing it, it's blunt. Go sharpen it. A blunt knife is more dangerous to the owner than a sharp one, because foolish people then try to cut harder and cut themselves. With my sharp knives I can dice an onion completely in less than a minute, a task I have seen other people take 15 minutes to do with their silly blunt knives.
8. Potato masher. It may seem silly to own one of these to just mash potatoes, but it does it so well it's worth forking out the RM 5-10. And you do use it for more than mashing potatoes. Such as mashing tomatoes. And pureeing. Basically, reducing plant matter into their mushy versions.
   
9. 1 soup ladle. For ladling soups and sauces. Tablespoons bite for that purpose.
10. 1 large mixing bowl. Plastic, glass, ceramic, it doesn't matter. What's important is that it's big and has high sides. Sometimes this can be the same item as your ovenproof dish.

And that should be most of the equipment you need for your kitchen. None of these things are very exotic, your local supermarket will probably have them.

Setup Part 1: The Kitchen and Appliances

I am an ardent fan of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. It's a cooking show where the celebrity chef goes around "fixing" failing restaurants. Anyway, a line an italian chef from a successful restaurant said stuck in my head:

You don't have to have a big kitchen to cook good food.

I can vouch for the trueness of this phrase. You really don't need an expensive kitchen filled up with the latest gadgets and expensive cookware. It's nice, but it's not needed. I spent almost a year in a tiny flat that had no kitchen whatsoever, just a miserable aluminum sink. 

And I still managed to churn out some pretty respectable food with nothing but an electric hotplate, an induction cooker, a microwave and a small oven. 

Anyway, to be able to cook you need to have the following appliances in your kitchen:

BASIC MUST HAVES

1) Stove

You really really need one. Obviously. Most houses come with gas stoves. Even those that don't come built in with one can get a standalone one at your local hypermarket for RM100 or so. A gas tank will cost you RM 50 and each fill of gas is around RM25-30. And they will last you a long long time. 

If you're not keen on gas stoves you can opt for a hotplate/induction cooker combination like I did. Just keep in mind that for hotplates,  your electricity bills might shoot up somewhat and it's hard to use a kuali/wok with them. It's also harder to control the heat as plate stays hot long after you turn it off. 

Induction cookers on the other hand, require certain types of pots (mainly pots that have iron elements to work) which may be inconvenient at times. However, they have the upside of most of them being programmable with preset mode and timers. 

I find that hotplates are better for things like frying, but the induction cookers are better for boiling, stewing or anything that requires sustained heat and liquids over a period of time. So basically: 

Hotplate = frying stuff, omelettes, pancakes, bacon

Induction cooker = soups, stews, sauces, melted chocolate

Of course it's interchangeable, but I find the induction cooker heats up the frying pan too fast, and the hotplate pots of water too slow.

2) Oven

This is VERY important. The key to healthy cooking is having an oven, you can do a lot of things that are similar to frying without the frying with an oven. And with an oven you can do other fun stuff like baking cookies and pies and your own bread.

You don't have to invest in the large ones that cost thousands at the moment, especially if you're a young student/professional living in a shared house. A small electric oven, such as those available from large hypermarkets/electronic stores is more than sufficient. I myself use a 26L one (At least I think it is 26, it might be 20) that cost me about RM300 or so a few years ago. It's still going strong. I even made real roast duck with it the other day.

The main thing is you want in your oven is it to be a good size, (in this case, not too big for you so you don't waste electricity and time waiting for it to heat up) and that it comes with a timer. 

I can't stress the importance of the timer enough. It takes a lot of stress off cooking because you know that the the worst that can happen is that your overcook your food by X minutes, and you can never leave it on accidentally to melt into a heap of slag when you get back. (This coming from someone who set her mother's oven on fire once when making Yorkshire Pudding)

3) Refrigerator/Freezer

You'll probably have one of these already. I should just say it's worthwhile getting one with a properly-sized freezer compartment. Preferably with its own door. It really saves on the trouble later.

OPTIONALS

You don't really need these to run your lazy kitchen, but since we are lazy people we like our conveniences.

4) Microwave

It's not absolutely necessary to have one. In fact I'm not using one right now but I used to cook with one. And it is very handy. You can use microwaves for more than warming up food. 

It can double as a rice cooker if you have a microwave safe bowl (put the washed rice and water in it and the rice is cooked in about 20 minutes).

It's also a handy defroster, so invest in one with a defrost setting. It allows you to have a defrosted piece of meat in 10 minutes that normally would take you a couple of hours at the least.

Just NEVER EVER put a whole raw egg in the shell in it. Trust me on this one.

Oh and nothing metal in microwaves either, unless you want to see pretty sparks fly.

5) Toaster Oven

For making toast. It's also handy for reheating stuff up, and cooking small things like sausages that your oven is too big to waste heating up for.

6)  Food Processor 

I've managed quite happily without this to be honest, but my mum swears by it. Frankly I find cleaning the parts too much trouble for the type of cooking I do. But it is handy for stuff like pastry where you don't want to touch the stuff with your hand.

So that covers the appliances. In the next part I will talk about kitchen utensils and supplies.

Introduction: The Chronically Lazy Cook

It's 7.30pm and you've just left the office. The highway is jammed and you grumble as you pay the highway-robbing toll so you can crawl at 15kmph through the teeming mess of cars and daredevil bikes to get home.

Brake. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate.

By the time you reach home it's close to 9pm and there's nothing more you want than a nice comforting meal and bed.

But you're too tired to cook. So you settle for curling up in front of the TV with that bowl of Maggi Mee watching Gordon Ramsay cooking delicacies that make your mouth water. Or you eat dejectedly out of the polystyrene boxes and plastic bags of hawker food you brought back on the way home that got cold by the time you get there.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Cooking is not the simple act of preparing food to eat. Logically it does look like it, but what I realised after I grew up and moved away from a house full of foodies is that a living in a house that doesn't cook is a living in house without a heart. To paraphrase the the words of a relative: Cooking for the household makes the house a home.

At any rate, if you can't cook for yourself, you lose out on a lot. Cooking is an expression of creativity, and it's incredibly fun. People tend to not like it because they just don't know what they are doing. And when that happens they expend A LOT of effort to produce food that tastes horrible. Then they get disheartened and stop trying.

But like I said, it doesn't have to be that way.

So this blog is about cooking for people with very little time, experience or effort. It's about producing in good, simple, delicious (and occasionally healthy) home-cooked food in a life where other things like studies and careers tend to dominate. I am not a trained chef. I'm an engineer with a full-time job and a love for good food. I'm just someone who enjoys cooking who also happens to be lazy and thus invents ways to cheat at cooking and still get results.

So if I can work 44 hours a week, probably spend 8 hours a week commuting, and still cook on most weekdays (weekends are a give)... so can you.