Kitchen Essentials

The last few days have been pretty boring standard recipes (tacos last night, spaghetti and meatballs the night before last), so instead of recipes, I decided to post my favorite kitche items. These are the things I could not cook without. Of course I need my stove and oven, but besides that, here are the things I use on a very regular basis.

1. Racheal Ray pots and pans- I got myself the hard anodized steel set. They have a silicone rubber grip on the handles and a nonstick surface. They are easy just the right weight for me, heavy enough to cook the food evenly, but not too heavy where I cannot pick them up. Clean up is a breeze with these with the awesome nonstick surface. I also like that I don't have to use too much oil, which means lower fat cooking!

Here is a picture of the pots.....and here is a photo of Rachael Rays saute pan that I hope to add to my collection soon.

One quick thing to remember about these pots...they are oven safe up to 400F, however the silicone handles do hold heat...so you will still need to use an oven mitt!

2. Hand blender- I use this for SO much! Since I have a picky eater husband, I use it to grind stuff up to add to recipes so he won't always know what is in the dish. He likes smooth thin spaghetti sauce, I like mine a little chunkier, so I put 1 can of regular sauce and 1 can of diced tomatoes that I have ground with the hand blender. I use it to grind nuts to make bread crumbs for lower carb dishes. It is so versatile. You can use it as a whisk also.

3. Food scale- This is a great tool for those on a "diet." I have been doing Weight Watchers for over 5 years now. One major change I made was monitoring my portions, and it made a HUGE difference (I have lost over 50 pounds!). We use this to measure pasta so we can use portion control. I also will portion out meats for meals before I freeze them using this scale.

4. Kitchenaid mixer- This is the perfect machine for so many things. You can of course mix together cake mixes, cookie mixes, breads (I used it to make a pizza dough the other day and it came out better than any other I have made), but if you buy the attachments you will have a very versatile machine. I recently purchased the food grinder attachement. This can be used to grind veggies, bread into breadcrumbs, meats, etc. This can be a real money saver. If you have some stale bread, you can use that to make breadcrumbs and save yourself a trip to the store to get some....and lets face it, bread is less expensive than breadcrumbs. We wanted to add some ground veal to our meatballs, but ground veal is SO pricey! So we bought some tougher cut of veal and put it through the grinder. Saved us a lot!

Other attachements that are available- ice cream maker (you can make a lower fat ice cream using fat free half and half or even just milk at a way lower cost), pasta maker, can opener, citrus juicer, slicer/shredder.

5. A good knife set- We have yet to get one of these, I am still in the process of researching to figure out what knives we want. We got a Henckels paring knife free from BBnB for registering for a Henckels knife set. It is so sharp and is the best knife we have ever used! We use it well beyond what it was intended for! Definitley worth an investment.

More to come in the future as I try out new recipes...