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Thanks to Cooking Enthusiast coupons, I'm no longer fishing out spaghetti from a boiling pot using tongs or forks. I no longer use my iron for my grilled cheese sandwiches and panini either. Not that I'd always lived in such culinary chaos. I did come from a home where cookies were baked on proper cookie sheets and not on the backs of oven-safe dishes wrapped in aluminum foil.
But as a young cook, I experimented a lot. When I left for college, our off-campus apartment didn't have all the proper kitchen tools, and my roommates and I didn't want to spend what little money we had sprucing up a kitchen that wasn't really ours. There were no online coupons back then, and real coupons barely dented our household expenses. So we all learned to improvise. We hoarded old newspapers and used them as pot holders. We toasted bread and made grilled sandwiches by putting the iron on top of bread slices wrapped in aluminum foil. Pans and pans were rendered non-stick by slathering enough oil or butter in them to horrify any health-conscious person.
After I struck out on my own, I kept my college habits. Unless I was in my parent's kitchen, I drained noodles though the same wire mesh I used to strain large quantities of tea leaves, stirred food around with a single wooden spoon, and owned only three pans. The spaghetti at my house always tasted faintly of Oolong, but other than that, I managed. This time it wasn't a matter of being penniless (as I had been in college), it was just a matter of being lazy. I didn't spend a lot of time cooking for other people, and only invited friends who were familiar with me and my crazy kitchen over.
Things got better after I got married. As a newly-wed, I was blessed with hand-me-downs and wedding gifts of all sorts of kitchen tools. My culinary skills improved considerably, as they are wont to do when one has the right tools for the job. For one thing, I stopped burning my hands through wadded-up newspaper.
But eventually, you learn more things, and you need more tools. Or you break the old ones you have. I learned that you simply can't properly skim soup with a spoon, and as I learned to bake, I found out that the best kinds of cookie sheets helped with the crispness and color of the cookie. I was still worried about the expenses of high-quality cookware and bakeware, though I drooled over the same and dreamed up dishes I would cook with new and improved tools.
When I discovered Cooking Enthusiast coupons, it was like a breath of fresh air. I could buy the tools I wanted, and not be too guilty about their cost. My kitchen is now well-stocked, although I still am still guilty of reaching for newspaper when I want an oven mitt.
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