“Ugh, I hate cooking. It’s so much work.”
“I can’t make that, I don’t have a…”
Or my favorite: “Oh, you should buy a… they’re so great!”

As any millennial will tell you, our parents have blown their entire retirement on fancy gadgets that look amazing in the back of their cabinets. Never mind the countless replacements they’ve bought for those late-night “as seen on TV” future residents of the junk drawer.

Today, I—the professional chef—am here to tell you what’s worth buying and what’s just a fancy toy whose only real purpose is keeping capitalism alive.

As a chef, I’ve spent over two decades as an underpaid MacGyver, making gourmet masterpieces with whatever’s lying around. I’ve worked in numerous independently owned restaurants (ask your parents what a small business was) and in top-notch, state-of-the-art, internationally recognized hotels. At the end of the day, the expectation to produce quality meals is always the same: impossibly unattainable!

The important thing to remember is that you make the food, not the equipment.

“But Eric, you’ve been cooking for years!”
Yeah—and you should have been too. We all eat every day, unless you’re an insane billionaire who thinks anorexia—sorry, “fasting”—is somehow healthy. Must be why countries living in famine have such sexy citizens.

So what should you buy for your kitchen to help make this awful chore of feeding yourself more enjoyable? Well, Grandma wasn’t wrong about her tools. She may have been dramatic about how hard it was to make dinner, but that was just job security. In my kitchen, I cook with a few spatulas, wooden spoons, a pot for boiling, and some cast iron pans.

Cast iron pans?!
Yeah, those things every camping or van-life influencer uses to make an overly complicated boxed mac and cheese dinner over a campfire at a KOA. These pans are great—they’re sturdy, non-stick, heat evenly, and are usually low-cost (assuming you don’t spring for the enamel-coated ones, a.k.a. Le Creusets). They’re also easy to clean and don’t need special treatment—and yes, you can use soap on them. That old myth about avoiding soap came from the days when soap contained lye.

If you stick with this simple arsenal of kitchen tools, you’ll have a much easier time making a delicious meal. Simplicity is key to making your life easier and your food better. Less is more—or, as I prefer to say, less leads to more. When you’re not scrambling for tools, constantly cleaning gadgets, or struggling to stay organized, you have more time and space to enjoy the process.

For example, I’m making seitan tacos with cabbage slaw—they’ll be effing delicious and will only require a pan, a cutting board, a knife, and a spatula. Knives are an especially important tool worth your time, care, and investment—which is why I’ve got a whole post about them here.

Finally, let’s talk about shopping for kitchen tools and what to look for. I’m going to go against the grain and suggest that you shop at restaurant supply stores or look for restaurant-grade tools. Why? Two reasons: quality and price.

These items are built to handle hundreds of uses a day, which means they’ll last you (and your family) a lifetime. And they’re often cheaper, too, because restaurants operate on slim margins and don’t have the luxury of being influenced to spend more.

These tips are meant to make your cooking experience more convenient, because I’m here to help you want to cook. The easier and more enjoyable cooking becomes, the more often you’ll do it.

My wife and I started Farm Table Health to show people a path to a happy, healthy life through simple approaches to my favorite thing ever—food.