[Sca-cooks] Pots and Pans

[smcclune at earthlink.net]

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Levesque <patrick.levesque at elf.mcgill.ca>

Well, we often talk about knives and our favourites brands here, but what
about pots and pans?
<<<

Well, I'm very fond of my Le Creuset set.  A local store put the whole set on sale while I was engaged (for what is now a ridiculously low price -- $149 for three sauce pots, a stewpot and two skillets), so I put in on layaway and paid it off a bit at a time.  That way, I had it when I got married.

That was 19 years ago (next week), and I haven't regretted it since.   Though I did manage to drop and break the stewpot (cracked a big chunk out of the side, darn it!), and of course by then they weren't making that color (the plain red, not the burnt-looking red) any more.  I caught a good sale and replaced it with the next size up pot in white, but I was never really happy about that.  I ended up haunting eBay for a couple of years, and finally scored a replacement in the right color.  I've picked up a few stray pieces here and there, but for the most part, the basic set serves me well for everyday use.

Sadly, neither of my grandmothers had any decent cast iron to leave me.  (Like the bread gene, the cast-iron gene seemes to have skipped my family.  I've never had any to cook with, and wouldn't know how to use it if I did.)   Instead, I got a couple of pieces of my paternal grandmother's Saladmaster (heavy aluminum stuff), which works reasonably well as long as the food is non-acidic, but which does nasty things with spaghetti sauce.

All of my event-sized cookware is cheap and nasty, the kind that burns stuff on the bottom no matter what it is or how often you stir it.  Now that the husband-unit is employed again, I plan to save up and purchase a couple of large restaurant-quality stockpots. :)

Arwen
Outlands