Читать книгу Bad Cook - Esther Walker - Страница 17

The novice cook will often find herself held back from making certain things because she hasn’t got the right gear. But, on visiting a cookery department, it is easy to get totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pastel-coloured dishes and silicon utensils – it’s like Barbara Cartland has exploded – and come away empty-handed.

You can, of course, use whatever you like when you are cooking. If you want to cook in high heels, using only lilac-coloured implements while wearing a flowery apron that’s your business. But that’s not what most cooks do. Most cooks wear shitty old aprons and wipe-clean shoes and cook with a range of dented, industrial kitchenwear that looks like it started life in a prison.

Like me. Some people have gardening clothes, I have cooking clothes – ratty old T-shirts and ancient jeans. And I must, must have Capital FM on somewhere.

Here are some things that I couldn’t cook without, that I rely on and use every day and now have many multiples of, so that even if two or three are in the dishwasher I still have at least one to hand. They are all functional and ugly and that’s the way I like them.

1 A timer. Back in the days when I thought cooking was easy, I never timed anything. I had been encouraged to believe, through the casual watching of cookery shows, that timers were unnecessary – for wimps and cowards – and the thing to do was intuit using some innate power when things were ready. As a result, everything I cooked was underdone, or charred and alight. Now I time everything, even pasta, because you can just stick the flipping thing on and then wander off and really relax into another task rather than glancing at the clock every three minutes and then losing track and letting your pasta boil dry.

2 A plastic chopping board that will go in the dishwasher. I refused to use a plastic chopping board for ages because – and this is how shallow I am – I thought they didn’t look very nice. But then I came to a point when I thought that if I had to wash up one more wooden board and breathe in the old garlic-and-onion fumes coming off it I thought I might be sick. So now I have about eight plastic boards, which I boil the shit out of in the dishwasher and which are thus always fragrant.

3 Stainless steel mixing bowls. These are light and unbreakable and hygienic and easy to clean. I have three but would like more.

4 A Victorinox paring knife. Once you are doing a lot of cooking you can purchase for yourself at vast expense a cook’s knife from Global or Sabatier but in the meantime, a fantastic multipurpose knife is a little one with serrated edges from Victorinox – the same people who do Swiss Army Knives. They cost about £15 from John Lewis and I have four. The only knife with which to slice tomatoes, but it has many more uses than that. After buying one you will quickly find yourself roaring ‘Where’s my little knife?!’

5 A set of scales. Vital if you ever want to make a cake but just generally very useful if you are starting out and want/need to follow recipes very carefully. Quite quickly you learn how much 50g of butter is or 500g of bananas – but at the start, if in doubt, measure it out. The slimmest, lightest electronic scales are best, especially if you don’t have a lot of counter space, rather than those ridiculous old-fashioned ones with weights on one side and a bowl on the other. Who’s got a foot square in their kitchen to lose to a whopping great set of scales? Not me. And my kitchen is fucking huge.