COOKSTUFF
FINDS
Toasty Spice
When recipes call for toasted or roasted spices, we normally pull out a small skillet for the job. One hazard of the task: Spices, especially whole seeds, sometimes pop and hop as they warm up. You can cover the skillet to keep the seeds from escaping, but then you risk missing that crucial moment when the spices go from warm and toasty to scorched and burned. Of course, these days, for every kitchen problem there is a kitchen tool. This spice roasting basket lets you toast right over a gas flame or heating element, keeps hopping seeds in their place and allows you to watch for the moment of toast.
$12 at most Williams-Sonoma locations.
Last Straw
The straw mats some of us acquired in our college days saw us through a lot of our first dinner parties. But straw mats can be for grown-ups with mortgages too. These straw place mats, for instance, are elegant and durable, with barely a trace of the old mats you left behind years ago.
$25 each at Windows, Pasadena.
Singular Cup
It seems that Brooklyn artist Claire Weisberg can’t make the same cup twice. Each pair of her ceramic cups and saucers has slightly different pattern and color configurations--maybe blue dots and stripes or just bronze diamonds. The shades in her palette, however, are surprisingly harmonious, so a mismatched set of her work isn’t mismatched at all.
$40 per cup and saucer at Freehand, Los Angeles.
Towel, Please
It’s an efficient kitchen towel, absorbent and useful, but we especially like its looks. Above its blue border are embroidered crab, lobster and starfish--and not cutesy smiling sea creatures either, just tasteful signs of the sea.
Available by special order for $34 from Room With a View, Santa Monica.
COOKBOOK WATCH
A lot of the food in Helen Witty’s “The Good Stuff Cookbook” (Workman, $24.95) is stuff sold in jars at gourmet shops and upscale markets. So why make it yourself? For one thing, you’re almost always paying more for the packaging than for the product. Taste is another consideration; you can make your chile-garlic paste exactly as hot as you like it. Witty, best-known for her now out-of-print “Fancy Pantry,” also describes “the pleasure in the process”--in other words, do it because you can.
