The NY Times article on equipping a no-frills kitchen for under $200 is predictable but interesting. While there are points I would go about differently, Mark Bittman's success in keeping the cost under a spartan limit is pretty impressive, too. But he missed one thing. One BIG thing. And that's not surprising, at all.

The missing thing is the saibashi--cooking chopsticks. They're basically a longer version of normal chopsticks, except that they aren't elaborately coated or decorated. Usually made of wood or bamboo (mine are the latter), the saibashi is a wonderful all-purpose tool in any Japanese chef's kitchen. I use them for almost anything: mixing sauces, tossing salads, stirring noodles in boiling-hot water, stir-frying veggies, turning meat over a grill, transferring food from a pan to individual dishes, whisking eggs, picking up piping-hot tempura from the frying oil, scraping off cookie dough from a mixing bowl. And I didn't even have to try hard to come up with this list. In a pinch, when my pot holder has gone AWOL, I even use them to slide out the hot baking pan from the oven, though I suspect this isn't really their intended use. Without these four sets of saibashi, I won't survive a day in my kitchen.

And of course, Bittman wouldn't have included saibashi in his kitchen essentials, because he doesn't cook (I presume) like the Japanese. (Instead, he included stainless tongs.)

Just Hungry points out that a "no-frills" kitchen would vary culture to culture, and if one cooks differently from Bittman, her kitchen might look quite different from his. This is a point well taken, and (sort of quietly) reveals the unconscious ethnic bias in Bittman's article. I don't plan to be hysterical about his lack of social awareness or ethno-racial sensitivity (it's just a short article, after all), but it does make me feel a bit ambivalent, especially given the newspaper in which the article appears. In the same section (Dining and Wine), New York Times enjoys, celebrates and consumes the very diversity of food and cooking within the United States. Then why this apparent disregard of "other" cooking traditions in this specific article? I don't know the answer to this, but it is, at least, quite interesting to see how cultural differences manifest in assumptions about cooking and, thus, what one should have in one's kitchen.