Kitchen Hardware

Essen Classes are based on the premise the freshest ingredients, combined with the best one knife and pan you can afford and solid cooking techniques, will put a quick and delicious meal on your table day after day.

Winter is definitely our major "pots and pan" season, when I receive the most questions about how to select cookware. Every pot and pan in your kitchen should do at least three things:

• Conduct heat evenly without hot or cold spots. Pans made of copper, aluminum and cast iron, at least 1/4- to 1/2-inch thick are the best heat conductors. If the heat conducting metal is sandwiched between other materials, the conductor needs to come up the sides of the pan, not be just a disc on the bottom.
• Protect your food from discoloring or developing off tastes. Stainless steel, enamel and tin work best here.
• Go from stove to oven thanks to heatproof handles. This is key to minimizing the number of pans you need to use and speeds cleanup. I also prefer those pans whose handles stay cool on the stovetop. Major convenience and fewer burns.

Yes, there's an overwhelming selection out there. Best thing is to shop live and actually touch and feel the cookware. This is a major investment, meant to last decades. Get out and handle some pots this week. You won't be sorry.

Happy Birthdays

Confession: I'm the mom of a 12 year old - for one day.

This isn't going to be one of those sappy entries about how time flies (which it does), it seems like only yesterday he was sleeping on our chest (it does and he still would), and how we have to make each day count (we should and we try). This is about cake.

Confession: I love food. I don't care much for cake.

Birthdays in our family are special days, but dessert was either grocery store cake or dessert at a restaurant. I reasoned that at a young age kids didn't know the difference and wouldn't value a really. good. cake. It helped that cake doesn't do much for me. "Why invest the time if the outcome won't be valued?" I reasoned without guilt. But this year I was about to have a 12 year old. Who really likes cake. And not that much else. It's never too late to begin a new tradition.

From this birthday forward, I'll ask my kids to choose their homemade birthday cake. They already pick their dinner, why not the cake? (For my daughter, this will be broadened to dessert as she's like me when it comes to cake.) It's one more piece to the traditions and history we've been creating since long before they were born.

I took his order the weekend before the big day - chocolate layer cake. With ice cream. I had been paging through a new cookbook from a fabulous bakery in San Francisco, Tartine and stumbled upon a recipe for Devil's Food Cake. Fast forward past baking the cakes, making the caramel twice as I burned it the first time, the ganache with so much left over I'm making truffles tomorrow and the toasted crumbs, a to-die-for new trick up my sleeve, and let's just say we've got a new tradition underway that will not fall by the way side. Yes, I invested some real time this week pulling it off. Yes, I may have been frustrated when I burned the caramel very late at night and hadn't a clue when I'd be able to make another batch. But the look on my son's face and the peaceful, happy silence filling the kitchen when everyone's devouring "the best cake they've ever had" makes it all worth every bite.