Type A Mommy’s Top Five Essential Kitchen Tools

My good friend, and blogging buddy, Elizabeth from Type A Mommy, is my guest blogger today. This is my first time featuring a guest blogger, and also my first time being featured as a guest blogger on someone else’s blog (I wrote up a post for Type A Mommy, also posted this morning.) This is our second blogging buddy activity, hopefully the second of many.

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I like to cook.  I like to bake.  Needless to say, I spend a good bit of time in my kitchen.  Over the years, my collection of kitchen pots, pans, and gadgets has expanded from one strainer and two 10″ nonstick skillets that weren’t flat to a full array of Calphalon and Cuisinart cookware, my very own imitation Le Creuset dutch oven (by a brand called Tramontina), and more kitchen gadgets than I can count on four hands.  I like kitchen stuff.  I get into trouble when I go to Williams-Sonoma, because inevitably I spot something new that I covet.  I know not everyone is a huge cook, but that cooking at home is becoming more and more popular again as the economy goes into the toilet, so I thought I would share my top five kitchen tools.  The tools I could not live without for various reasons.  Enjoy!

1. Kitchen Aid stand mixer – I have the baby stand mixer, the smallest one.  It was given to my mother by my father for Christmas a few years before he passed away.  My mother loved her stand mixer, and used it every Christmas for cookie baking, but after my dad passed away, she baked and cooked less and less, so she passed the mixer on to me.  It’s now probably 8 years old, but it still works like a champ.  We used to joke in my family that to beat cookies, you had to have Dad’s go-go-gadget arm.  He could always beat the crap out of any dough, no matter how stiff, whereas my arm wimps out pretty fast, so my stand mixer does the heavy lifting for me.  Not only do I use it for baking sweets, but it’s awesome for making bread dough and pizza dough.  Definitely a worthwhile investment, and you don’t need the one with all the bells and whistles (although it’s been on my Christmas list for years!).

2. Williams-Sonoma cookie scoop – This is a newer addition to my kitchen, it joined us here on Mother’s Day when my husband gave it to me as a Mother’s Day gift.  I love this little tool.  It looks like a small ice cream scoop – it has a scraper on the inside of the bowl to scrape out your precious cookie dough, and it’s amazing – it really does give you evenly sized cookies.  So awesome!

3. Heatproof spatulas – I have like five of these things.  I use them for everything, from stirring a hot pan sauce to smoothing out cake batter in a cake pan.  These things are so handy.  Don’t get me wrong, I love wooden spoons, too, but the spatulas are a little more versatile, if you ask me.

4. Parchment paper – OK, this isn’t exactly a tool or gadget, but boy is it an essential.  I use parchment paper every time I use a cookie sheet.  Not only does it keep your cookie sheets cleaner and avoids getting sticky cookies royally stuck to your nice cookie sheets, but it helps those same sticky cookies stay in one piece.  I cool almost every cookie I make for about two minutes on the cookie sheet, which is covered in parchment paper, and the cookies release with ease when I transfer them to a rack to finish cooling.  My local grocery store, Publix, even makes their own generic, cheaper version of parchment paper, and it’s pretty awesome.  Parchment paper is my AMEX of baking – don’t bake without it.  It’s simple to use – lay a sheet of parchment on top of your cookie sheet, scoop your cookies out on top of the parchment and bake.

5. Williams-Sonoma garlic press -  I’m pretty good with a knife, but I’m not the world’s best mincer.  Actually, I’m kind of bad at it.  Especially with garlic.  So when I was in the market for a garlic press and spotted one at Williams-Sonomas that promised to either slice or mince garlic, I thought it was a super idea.  I brought it home and eagerly started using it.  Problem was, some of the grates that do the cutting broke.  I mentioned that to the salesperson on my next visit to Williams-Sonoma, and she encouraged me to bring it back, that it should not do that.  So I did just that – I brought my broken one back, with no receipt, and they gave me a brand new one, which is working perfectly now.  It’s so handy.  I use garlic a lot when I cook, and this tool is a great way to make sure that I can cut it up small enough.

So what’s your favorite kitchen tool or gadget?  What did I forget to put on this list?  Share your thoughts below with a comment!