CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cooking Tips for a Calm Kitchen

Finally, we finish our quest to calm our minds with food in my favorite place: the kitchen. Kitchens have always been a place of comfort and calm to me, from my days as a child when my multigenerational family cooked healthy and mouthwatering food to enjoy together, to my time in medical school, when my love for Julia Child led to my devouring every episode of The French Chef on PBS. Now one of the greatest joys I experience as a nutritional psychiatrist is seeing my patients who don’t have a strong connection with cooking learn to love the kitchen as much as I do, coming to see it as a place where they can both nourish their body and calm their mind.

If you’re intimidated by the prospect of cooking meals from scratch rather than heating up prepared meals, here are some tips for cooking equipment and techniques.

What basic equipment should every cook have in their kitchen?

I must confess I love everything in the kitchen, from the food itself to each tool and utensil I use. It’s my playground and my canvas, and it brings me joy and a sense of calm. It’s my happy place.

I only began cooking later in life. When I was growing up, in a multigenerational South Asian family, my beloved late grandmother, aunts, older cousins, and mom always took care of the meals. Of course, I assisted in the kitchen, learning to shell fresh peas or picking stones and debris out of trays of dried lentils before they were cooked. But since I was never in charge of the main parts of the meal, when I began cooking, I learned to assess what worked best for me through trial and error. After figuring some things out on my own, I went to culinary school to refine my knowledge, adding classical cooking training to my skills.

While peeking into a kitchen store is enough to let you know that there is an almost unlimited range of kitchen tools and gadgets, the fundamental tools are fairly simple. Here is a list of the basics you’ll need, along with a few specialized favorites.

A pot and a pan, with lids, along with a rimmed sheet pan. A good-quality 4–6-quart pot, a 10-inch frying pan, and a cast-iron skillet will be the workhorses of your kitchen. In the pot, you can simmer or boil lentils, beans, and legumes; make soups and curries; and steam your favorite veggies. The frying pan is for cooking eggs, a tofu scramble, or a colorful, fiber-rich stir-fry. The sheet pan is perfect for baking salmon or roasting vegetables.

A chef’s knife. Find a knife you are comfortable with. Most trained chefs are taught to use an 8- or 10-inch chef’s knife for all tasks (I prefer an 8-inch knife), but using a large knife to cut small ingredients takes practice, and many home cooks prefer to have a range of smaller paring knives. Either way, keep your knife sharpened, as blunt knives can more easily slip and lead to dangerous cuts. As long as you can keep them sharp, there’s nothing wrong with using less expensive knives as you develop your own preferences for the style or size, and then you can go for a higher-quality blade that will last a lifetime.

A vegetable peeler. Having a peeler on hand is key. If you compost, save those peels for your garden or local composting site. While I prefer to peel certain vegetables and fruits—like carrots and mangoes—always leave the peels on if the recipe gives you the option, as they carry a high concentration of fiber and polyphenols.

A zester. Citrus is an amazing natural, delicious flavor booster and is rich in antioxidants. Adding lemon, lime, or orange zest to a salad, soup, smoothie, or even tea is an inexpensive, brain-healthy way to amp up flavor. Keep sliced citrus for your water bottle, too. If you juice a lemon or lime but don’t use all of the peel, you can always freeze the peel to zest later.

A cutting board. I love a high-quality wood cutting board, but there are also great sustainable options made from recycled and repurposed materials. While I don’t mind a cheap knife to start you off, I don’t recommend a cheap plastic cutting board. Spending a bit more on a wooden board, or a BPA-free synthetic board, is best, as toxins can leach into your food from a cheap plastic board. One of the things drilled into us in culinary school was good food-safety practices. If you prepare meat and seafood, you should always wash your board with detergent and hot water after using it, and you should flip it over before you chop another food to avoid cross contamination.

A bench scraper. During my early days studying at the Culinary Institute of America, I was introduced to an unfamiliar tool that became one of my kitchen all-stars. A bench scraper is a simple sheet of stiff metal with a handle on one side. Though it’s traditionally used by bakers when making dough, a bench scraper can be used to scoop up chopped veggies or anything else from your cutting board, making it easy to transfer them to a pot or salad bowl.

A set of smaller stainless-steel or glass bowls for meal prep and mise en place, and larger bowls for serving food. “Mise en place” is a phrase from French cuisine that means “everything in its place.” This is one of the most important concepts I learned in culinary school. Before you start combining ingredients in a dish, take the time to wash, chop, and prep each ingredient and place it in its own small bowl. Then, once the heat is on, everything is ready at your fingertips, leaving you free to make sure you’re cooking things properly.

Sustainable dishwashing sponges and a good-quality dish soap. I buy sustainable sponges, which I wash in soap and hot water every night and allow to air dry. I recycle these regularly.

Are there any easy techniques you learned in your culinary training that you think every home cook should know?

Get comfortable experimenting with different spices and spice blends to make your food both flavorful and healthy. It’s an unfortunate myth that healthy food can’t be delicious, and basic spices can really liven up a meal and provide anxiety-busting benefits.

Learn to blanch and shock vegetables so you retain their flavor and nutrient value. For instance, if I were cooking purple sprouting broccoli, I would give it a quick 3–4-minute immersion in boiling salted water and then plunge it into an ice bath. This process stops the cooking instantly so the vegetable retains its color and nutrients and doesn’t become soggy.

Peel ginger with the back of a spoon; a knife or peeler is often not suitable for ginger’s irregular, knobby shape. Peeled ginger can be frozen for later use. The clean peels can be steeped into a flavorful tea.

If you need to cut dark chocolate, use a serrated knife. It will chop more easily, and the knife is much less likely to slip.