Moving around every few months means we are subject to a lot of different kitchens, and not all are created equally. When we cook – and that’s what we do for most meals – we focus on vegetables and fish, with a healthy admixture of bread, cheese, wine, and chocolate. We also love baking, though that’s sometimes hard to manage on the road. (And many countries offer better bread than we could make anyway!) And we love trying to recreate local foods we’ve tried in restaurants. Here is our list of the kitchen essentials, the equipment we require in any temporary home. We have made do with less, but it ain’t pretty.
Kitchen Essentials
Here’s what we need to make most of our meals. Nearly everything that is not on this list we have found ways to work around, and we have often cooked in kitchens which have not much more than the below. In addition to these larger items, we do carry a few portable kitchen basics with us to make sure we can make most of our favourite meals. We refer to both lists regularly in our recipes. In case you are nomadic like us and don’t have a lot of gear, we list anything beside these kitchen essentials in individual recipes.
- two burners but not necessarily an oven (one of our first British flats did not have one)
- two pots with lids, one large enough for soup
- two frying pans, one larger and one smaller
- knife: they are almost never sharp enough, so be careful!
- cutting board
- wooden or other cooking spoon
- a few mixing bowls
- plates, dishes, cups, silverware
- containers for storage (we usually carry some with us)
- vegetable peeler (about 50% of the flats in which we have lived have one, so we bring our own)
That’s it. Now let’s get cooking!
To make sure you don’t miss a single moment of meandering, minimalist, magic, sign up for our fortnightly newsletter!
Dear John and Laurel,
I also stopped eating octopus (after watching My Octopus Teacher). There was a theory put forth not so long ago that octopuses evolved from alien life that hitched a ride to planet Earth on an asteroid. The only problem with this theory is that octopuses share a common genetic structure with the rest of life on the planet, so they probably evolved here. I think the evolutionary biologist who advanced this theory was busy watching TikTok on his phone during class.
Best,
Grant
A couple of moral philosophers we know say eating octopus is indefensible. But they’re moral philosophers, so, to be taken only as seriously as you take evolutionary biologists…