6 Tools That Make Cooking From Scratch a Breeze
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Do you fantasize about feeding your family healthy, homemade food you cooked from scratch? Well before you run out and fill your cart with all the latest and greatest kitchen gadgets for healthy, scratch cooking let me be the first to tell you… you don’t need much.
I have just a small handful of items that I pull out multiple times a week and truly feel like these items make cooking from scratch a million times easier for me, thus more attainable.
Don’t go crazy buying every appliance under the sun, but if an appliance will make cooking healthier and sticking to a healthy lifestyle more enjoyable and possible… THOSE are the appliances to invest in. You’ll get more than your money’s worth from those few.
So, here are my few must-have items for a simple, healthy kitchen.
Kitchen Aid Hand Blender
This simple appliance has been used in my kitchen most days that I have owned it. Whatever do I use it for?:
- Salad dressing
- Whipped cream
- Mayo
Let me give you a tiny tip… stop buying salad dressing from the store. Seriously, though. It takes me all of 1.5 minutes to whip up a simple five ingredient dressing. It’s healthy. I have everything in my pantry. It’s inexpensive. And it tastes GREAT.
Add the following to a mason jar:
1 cup olive oil + 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar + 1 T dijon mustard + 1 T maple syrup + 1t garlic…
BLEND with the hand blender to emulsify. Drizzle over salad.
Get it: Kitchen Aid 2-Speed Hand Blender on Amazon
Instant Pot
Would it blow your mind if I said that your Insant Pot could be one of the most energy efficient appliances you could plug into your kitchen!?
Think about it…
You don’t need to turn your oven on for hours to cook a whole chicken… you can throw it in COMPLETELY frozen, and in 1.5 hours (that includes the time it takes to build up pressure, cook the frozen chicken, and depressurize) you have a fall-off-the-bone chicken.
That has GOT to be saving energy somewhere…
Not to mention, pressure cookers are a really healthy way to cook your food. Pressure cookers will actually retain more of the nutrients in your food than if you were to cook it in other ways. As an added bonus, in some foods like beans you are better able to access the nutrients than you would if you cooked them in a pot.
I love my Instant Pot. While I was a classic enneagram 4 and resisted (hard), wanting to be so different than the herd of people running to Target to grab their own Instant Pot… my brother and sister-in-law ended up getting us one for Christmas a couple of years ago.
Thank you Jesus that they did.
This is a hard-working appliance in my kitchen, and one of the very few I give the honor of sitting out on the counter at all times.
Get it: Instant Pot on Amazon (ps: how many other items has over 165,000 five star reviews?!)
Bread Maker
Oh, how I wish that I was one of those women who enjoyed kneading sourdough dough for an hour wistfully while listening to classical music.
Uh uh.
Here’s the thing, the best “from scratch” bread recipe is the one you will actually make.
My family has a few food sensitivities, so it is all the more important that I get to have control over which ingredients I use in our bread. And while I am inspired by all the beautiful loaves of artisanal bread that friends posted on Facebook in 2020, I couldn’t quite get myself around to making that happen regularly.
Baking bread for me looks like throwing 5 ingredients in a bread pan, turning it on and 2 hours later my house smells like a bakery and I have a loaf of fresh bread.
Any questions?
But in all seriousness, if you don’t want to buy a new bread machine, I highly encourage you to look at local thrift stores. I have often gone into a thrift store and seen more than one bread maker.
People have the best intentions…
I bought my most recent bread maker for $25 on Facebook marketplace that was used only one time!
Get it: find it on Facebook marketplace or at a local thrift store.
If you can’t find one, or you really don’t want a second hand one, this one is the best!
Cast Iron Pans
We cook everything in our cast iron pans. We literally do not have any other type of pan in our house (beside a sheet pan…).
A few benefits of using cast iron:
- You could literally pass them down to your grandchildren. They are tough as nails
- They get better each time you cook with them by seasoning them through the cooking process.
- Every time you cook in the cast iron pan, a small amount of iron is absorbed into your food.
- Once the pan gets hot, it stays hot for a long while as they hold heat really well.
- They are inexpensive!
- Carrying the pan from the stove to the table will give you the forearm workout of your life.
With a large 12-inch skillet coming in at only $29.99, which will last you long enough to watch your unborn grandchild cooking dinner for their kids in it… I would say that’s a pretty good deal.
Get it: Lodge 3 Skillet Bundle at Amazon
Bonus: get one of these zero waste cast iron scrubbers.
Vitamix
Do not say a blender is a blender. That is just plain not true.
Let me tell you a quick story…
On my third date with my husband, he showed up at my door at 5am with two smoothies in hand for us to watch the sunrise on the beach (we lived on the east coast at the time, so this was possible).
As soon as I took a sip of that “smoothie”, I knew I loved him… NOT because of his unapparelled abilities to make a killer smoothie…
…but because I was doing all I could to not gag my way through this cold, chunky vegetable soup that this dear man called a smoothie. *I literally was chewing pieces of broccoli at 5am*
I now understand that it wasn’t HIS fault those smoothies were so atrocious… he had but a Sunbeam blender that you can buy at CVS for $10.
Now if that is what you can get at this current time, then any blender is better than no blender because smoothies are a great way to get lots of vitamin-rich produce into that body of yours. Smoothies are quick and easy and will save you money by keeping you from buying smoothies on the run.
But a powerful blender like the Vitamix will make the experience one in which you actually enjoy smoothies, giving you a better chance of actually sticking to it.
More things that I make in my Vitamix:
- nut butter
- almond or cashew milk
- vegan ice cream
- soups
- almond flour
- salad dressing
- apple sauce
- coffee grinder (I don’t do this personally… but I could!)
Vitamix blenders are built to last. We bought our Vitamix refurbished in 2011 and we still use it all the time and have not had to get it fixed once.
So while it may seem ridiculous to spend that kind of money on a blender, let me put it this way…
We bought the blender for $350. We have probably used our blender around 1800 times in the last 9 years. That comes out to about $0.20 a use. And it’s still going strong…
Get it: Vitamix at Amazon
A Great Set of Knives
We have a set of Wustof knives, and I love them dearly. It doesn’t really matter what you get, just get a set that you love and one that will inspire you to cook nutritious, delicious food for yourself and your family.
Now it’s your turn! What are the “cooking from scratch” items you cannot live without in your kitchen?
