This post is inspired by the look we got at Mark Bittman's real kitchen recently in the New York Times. Bittman's videos for the times are shot in a big lovely video kitchen, but his home kitchen looked pretty typical of what I have seen of spaces in NYC.

Most of have what we think are kitchens that are inferior in some way. We think we need more counter space, more cabinet space, more burners, more BTUs, more blades, etc. Some of you living in studio or other tiny urban spaces may indeed need a number of these things, but most of us already have as much as need, often more.

I got to thinking about what I really love the most in my kitchen, what I use the most, what is the most versatile, etc. You know what I love most in my kitchen? My toaster oven. It heats, it browns, it toasts, it is truly the bomb. I think I would ditch a lot of stuff before I ditched the toaster oven. Next I think I would pick a knife and cutting board. The knife should keep an edge and an 8" French knife will do a lot of things. Pair it with a great paring knife and you can do most anything. The only other must is a bread knife. (A few other knifes are nice, but in no way critical.) The cutting board is important - I have 4, all of them plastic and actually relatively small. The one I use the most is about the size of a sheet of typing paper. Plastic? Yep, goes right in the dishwasher and gets sanitized after every use. Carbon steel vegetable peelers. Not stainless which appear to all be made in the dull peeler factory, but old crummy looking carbon steel. Mine are at least ten years old and still sharp.

My pots and pans are ratty and cheap. I still love Teflon and would rather replace a modest Teflon skillet every year and have it work really well than buy an expensive uncoated one that everything sticks to. (Cast iron, feh, too much work to keep clean and seasoned - and too heavy.) The rest is just stuff, some old cast aluminum I probably got from my mom or Aunt Ruth. Someone once gave me an All-Clad wok skillet - it took me a decade to get it seasoned, but it's o.k. now.

I like having good baking sheets and silpat mats that fit them. You never have baking parchment when you need it and I've had my silpat mats for a decade and they still look pretty good. Heavy baking sheets are a must. You can get the half sheets and quarter sheets at commercial stores that fit in a home oven and will last you forever if you take care of them and keep them clean. (Cleaning is easy if you use your silpats!) The most important thing to remember with heavy aluminum baking sheets is to never put water on them when they are hot. Let them cool for a few minutes before washing them and they will never warp. Otherwise, warp city and then they are no good.

My stove is a crappy Fridgidaire gas range. Gas is nice, but my old electric stove got hotter and the best stove I ever owned was an electric range with two dual ring burners and a convection oven. The best microwave I ever owned was a Montgomery Ward brand that had microwave, convection, and combination settings. Man, I miss that one.

I like my Kitchen-Aid mixer, 20 years old and still ticking. But could I live without it, yep. I am partial to my Kitchen-Aid hand mixer, which can make chocolate chip cookie dough with out burning up. Oh, and my Kitchen-Aid blender is the best blender I have ever owned. (Getting sick of the Kitchen-Aid ad yet? Sorry, but they make stuff that works and lasts.) My food processor? I use it twice a year, maybe three times - could probably borrow the neighbors when I need it.

I need very few gadgets. The only odd thing I have that is quite useful is a canning funnel. Can't live without it in canning season. A whisk, some measuring cups and spoons, a couple of heat resistant rubber scrappers. Pretty low key.

Oh, what a beautiful morning - hey that might make a good song lyric.   You can have it - gratis!  Glorious November morning along the front range.  The wind of the weekend has blown the brown cloud away for awhile and the views of the mountains are stunning.  It is so clear you can see individual snow fields on Long's Peak and the snow covered peaks of the back ranges.  

Fall is well and truly here in northern Colorado.  The frost is on the pumpkin as one of America's poets once said.  We have long since pulled the tomato vines and put the green tomatoes in the basement for slow ripening.  I was hoping that some might make it until Thanksgiving, so that I might serve the last of the home growns as part of the repast, but no such luck.  I wound up using the last of them this weekend in a homemade marinara sauce.  Lots of onion, some garlic, some bell pepper and some sausage from my pig.  The pig is running out as well, but more is on order from John Long, my venerable pork grower out on the plains east of town.  I also ordered a share of an organic lamb from Grant's Farm up in Wellington and that will arrive Saturday next.

The last of the homemade marinara got me thinking about pre-made pasta sauces, something I don't use a lot, but do keep in the pantry for when I need a quick meal at home.  After much experimentation, I think the best value is actually the Hunt's brand in the can.  It can be hard to find at some stores.  Because of it's low price [it is about one-third the price of the 'gourmet' brands] most stores hide it along the bottom shelf, well below eye level.  I like the four cheese variety the best and with some judicious additions, it makes a quite passable gravy.  

A number of the new whole grain pastas are good.  I'm not quite sure which is the best nutritionally, but the multi-grain with flax seed from Barilla is tasty and has a nice texture when cooked.  The Kroger brand of whole wheat penne tastes good too.  

Last night I made a new recipe, the sausage and barley stuffed apples from this week's NYTimes.  I didn't have chorizo, so I used some John Long breakfast sausage in place of it.  The result was pretty tasty.  I love barley and am sad that it is such an underutilized product.  About the only thing you see it in commercially is beef and barley soup.  I think it makes a great side dish.  This recipe was kind of a barley pilaf with sausage that was placed on top of the halved granny smith apples, then baked for about an hour.  

Ah - happy day. Obama has won the election. I actually stayed up late watching TV so I could see it. I was impressed by both the acceptance and concession speeches I saw last night. I'm no McCain fan, but he hit all the right notes in his speech as far as I am concerned. Obama made me feel even better about voting for him. He seems to have a sense of gravitas, more than I had observed before.  I think the next four years will be quite a change from the last, a change I am ready for.

I'm going to talk about music this time.  My main interest is jazz, but lately I've been listening to a lot of New Orleans music (of course most of it is rooted in jazz, but some has other roots as well).  My secondary interest is in classical music.  As I said in my initial post, I like a wide variety of classical music.  I find baroque music to be good for writing and composers like Bach to be great for reading.  I have a special fondness for Arvo Part and John Adams, both 20th c. composers, one Estonian (Part) and one American (Adams).  Adams was the subject of a recent profile in the New Yorker that talked about his early influences and life in the bay area.  Part, I don't know much about, but I just got a copy of Tabula Rasa and am still exploring it, though my initial impressions are favorable.

All of this is leading to talking about our recent experience at an eighth blackbird concert here in Fort Collins.  I was quite excited to go given all the good press I had read about the group.  They are known for energetic performances of modern music and have even won a Grammy award.  But I have to admit to being sort of disappointed.  (My caveat - we left at the intermission and I heard it got better in the second half.)  The performers were technically proficient, but I got the impression of music as intellectual exercise and my preference is for more lyricism and melody.  One piece started with one note, then two notes, then three notes, etc. until they got to all 64 notes, then it went backwards to the original note.  Interesting as an exercise, but it didn't grab me as a piece I enjoyed for its emotion.  Maybe I just don't have the right mind set for that kind of thing.  But I'm glad we got out to see what it was about.  This was the second concert in the five-pack that we bought in the Lincoln Center series.  The first was a combined performance of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Blind Boys of Alabama, a concert that I enjoyed a lot.  We'll have to see how the third performance grabs us.

As I prepare this post it becomes obvious that it is time to introduce my family.  My wife is Nora, who works at Colorado State University like I do.  She works for the VP Student Affairs office, so between the both of us, we have both ends of the university pretty well covered.  Holding down the fort at home are Sophie, the grey cat, Hania the brindle fat cat, Romy the black rescue mutt with the corkscrew tail, and the newest addition, Wilson, the grey tuxedo kitten.  

Today we tried to go down to campus to see Barack Obama who was rallying the troops in Northern Colorado.  By the time we got to the end of the line we were at least a mile and a half from the gate where you got into to where the rally was being held.  From what we could hear on the car radio on the way home, lots of people must have not gotten in, because of the length of the line.  A quick look at the local paper's website says that 50,000 were in attendance, a number that doesn't seem farfetched to me based on the line that I saw.  Listening to the speech on the radio after we got back to the car, it seemed to be a pretty standard stump speech, nothing that I hadn't heard before, but it would have been nice to see him in person seeing as how it looks like he might be our next president.

Bad luck on the way home.  We had parked at the north end of town and ridden our bikes on in to campus.  Riding home, Nora approached the train tracks at too sharp an angle and took a pretty nasty spill.  Not as bad as this summer when she chipped her elbow and broke a rib, but bad enough.  

Looking over the list in the previous post and then my book shelves, I think I have to add one more to the list, Clifford Wright's Mediterranean Feast. I think it is one of the best cookbooks to read as well as cook out of. There are quite a few cookbooks that are fun to read, but I'm not sure about cooking out of them. One of my favorites is Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, by George and Berthe Herter. The Herters ran a Minnesota sporting goods store and mail-order business in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They never lacked for an opinion about anything. The book is a delight to dip into and in a future post, I'll put up a nugget or two from it so you can get an idea of its tenor.

The new Art of Eating came yesterday and the lead article was about what cookbooks Edward Behr would keep if he were forced to reduce his stash to seven or so. That got me to thinking about the same question - which seven or ten or so would I keep if were up to me to weed out. I don't have as many cookbooks as people might imagine, my having been to culinary school and been a chef and a teacher for all these years. I have more than even I might want since I am unable to give up the autographed ones like my three Alice Waters autographed cookbooks and my autographed Paul Prudhomme and a few others. But beyond that I'm not sure what I would keep. Cookbooks are like so much else, they are subject to fashion and over the course of the three decades that I have been cooking professionally, I have seen so much stuff come and go. When I quit the restaurant to go to graduate school, I loaded up nearly all the cookbooks I had at the time (5 or 6 wine boxes full) and sold them to my successor for about $100. It wasn't a great sum even then (the early 1990s), but I was happy to part with them and move on. The only one from that era that I probably should have kept was the Freddy Girardet.

I get quite a few culinary texts at work and I think I have two of them on the shelves there. Otherwise, I have an Eastern European cookbook* and a baking text or two and a Native American cookbook**, Healey's Art of the Cake, [these are three I really like though I don't dip into them very often] and a few other odds and ends on my shelves at work. But as to what I would keep if I had to really pare down:

Mastering the Art of French Pastry by Bruce Healey

some kind of real general American cookbook like a Better Homes and Gardens (a smidge better than Betty Crocker I think. I have a 1975 Joy of Cooking, but use it less and less as time goes by. I can't throw it out because it has a recipe for whale meat in it.)

The Saucier's Apprentice by Sokolov

La Repertoire de Cuisine by Saulnier

Preserving by Oded Schwartz

The Heritage of Southern Cooking by Camille Glenn

How to Bake by Nick Malgieri

Martha Stewart's Hors d'ouevres Handbook.

I've got some others I like, but I really could live without them. I have a number of Diana Kennedy Mexican cookbooks, but I cook Mexican at home about never. I have Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking 1 & 2, but haven't cracked them in years, maybe a decade. There are a few charcuterie titles I'd likely keep, mostly as a reference, but I think that's it.

As I look at the short list of keepers, I see two are baking, two are sauce, one is various preserving techniques and the last is an old southern favorite. The baking books are important because baking is precise. I always tell people it is a science first and an art second. At home I mostly cook without recipes, so don't really delve into cookbooks much. I keep selected recipes that I have accumulated over the years in a binder at home, and consult it more than any cookbook. There are some things where I want the consistency of the product, like the short ribs mentioned in the previous post, and my hummus recipe where I want it to taste the same every time, but other wise I cook with what I have, what is fresh at the market, or what needs to be eaten up. (As my sister says, 'we're Millers, we don't eat things, we eat things up.")

I know I'll get some grief for listing a Martha Stewart title, but pretty, flavorful, and not super-complicated finger food recipes are harder than you would imagine to come by. Plus she has great presentation ideas.

*East European Cookbook edited by Carolyn Ball

** Native American Cooking by Lois Ellen Frank

Welcome to the KansasCornDodger blog. This blog will mostly be about food, but I'm sure music and things I'm reading will creep in. Politics will likely creep in from time to time, especially if McCain and Palin manage to somehow steal this election.

Right now I'm enjoying cooking foods with fall flavors like the braised short ribs and oven roasted potatoes I made for dinner last night. Most of the periodicals I read relate to food. Right now I subscribe to the Art of Eating, Saveur, Gastronomica, and the Journal of Food, Culture and Society. Outside of food writing, I read the New Yorker and have been a subscriber for many years. I catch the NY Times on line and try and get the Wednesday food section pretty thoroughly read every week. I am also a wine fan, though not a cork dork anymore and drink pretty much all over the wine spectrum. This summer I drank quite a bit of un-oaked Sauvignon Blanc, but red wine season is just around the corner.

I usually listen to music as I write, mostly jazz and classical, but other things creep in. Jazz piano trio is my favorite, but I like solo jazz piano and combo work like the Modern Jazz Quartet. Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson are favorites as are Keith Jarrett and Paul Bley. I also like classical music ranging from Mozart, Bach and Telemann to Arvo Part and John Adams. I am also currently listening to a lot of New Orleans music in the Preservation Hall and Dirty Dozen Brass Band veins. Chet Baker is playing as I type this.

Mysteries are my main form of fun with fiction and currently I am reading lots of Scandinavian writers like Henning Mankell and Arnuldur Indriosan. Ken Bruen and Ian Rankin are also favorites of mine. I usually have a non-fiction going too, right now I'm reading a book on the immediate post-Russian Revolution era in Europe, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism and A History of Venice by Norwich.

I'll try and keep you up to date with what I'm doing and post some pictures as I become more adept.