Tools I Reach for When I Cook

We cook with Lodge skillets, an Instant Pot, and a bread machine. Those three belong in the story of how we eat at home. The Lodge and Instant Pot links below are the kind we cook with. The bread machine is the one I actually use: a Zojirushi BB-PDC20.

A Lodge skillet is the pan I reach for when I want something to get hot and stay hot. We use a lot of Lodge cast iron in this kitchen. It's not fancy. It just works, and it holds up in a house that cooks almost every night.

The Instant Pot is how a one-pot meal or a leftover often gets done when energy is short. It can cook rice, or a bigger pot that becomes lunch tomorrow, while I sit down. After a stroke, that matters. I don't always have the energy to stand over a pot, and I wrote about that in Cooking When Energy Is Short.

The bread machine is a daily habit. I bake a loaf of fresh bread every day in a Zojirushi BB-PDC20, on course 1 with a medium crust. The machine is set to a timer, along with the coffee, and the house smells amazing in the morning. The recipe is The Daily Loaf. You set it the night before, and you wake up to a kitchen that's already doing something useful. That is one of the ordinary rhythms that makes a full house feel like a house.

This is a short list on purpose: the tools we actually use, not a catalog of gadgets. You don't need these exact items to eat well. Eating well, as I wrote in What I Mean by Eating Well at Home, is everyday work. Shopping, cooking, sitting down together, and using what we bought.

If you want the food itself, start with the Recipes.

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