Daily Dose of English 93
Kitchenware
Daily Dose of English 93
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about kitchenware, continuing our chat about various wares, We're going to go into kitchenware today because that's something that I like to talk about and I doubt that you're really going to learn words like kitchenware in other places. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's also pretty useful vocabulary, especially if you like to cook. You can eat, oh, because kitchenware, by the way, is stuff that you use in the kitchen. So things that help you to cook and to make delicious, yummy food, or beverages, or whatever you do in the kitchen. And you can't say, like we started with talking about with software yesterday, when you put like a word in front of the where, it usually means like things to do that thing with. So like, I think I mentioned gym wear, kitchen wear, like you could say like bath wear. A lot of these words we don't really use, but like it would be understood to say like things that are useful for the bath. However, we don't really use those words. Like for the stuff for the bathroom, we would say like toiletries. But you can create new words by adding where to it if you want to. sort of generalize a word like that, right? If you need to come up with something quickly, people will generally understand what you're trying to say with thing wear. Swimwear is another one. Swimwear, stuff that you, that's not, I don't think it's swimwear, W-E-A-R. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's stuff that you wear swimming. So that's different than like stuff that you use to do something with, because that's W-A-R-E, like kitchenware is W-A-R-E as well. This English is so confusing, I feel, but you know what? We're going to get on with it. Kitchenware is stuff that you buy in, or that you buy, god, stuff that you use in the kitchen. So things like pots and pans and ladles and Chopsticks, scales, we'll get into a lot of these words that I can think of in a second. But first, I want to talk a little bit about where you might buy this kind of thing because, well, whatever. You can often find kitchenware supply stores in various cities, especially in, well, I guess anywhere, right? Because people always need stuff in their kitchen. So what am I saying? Yeah, you can usually find good kitchen supply stores. And they often will sell all kinds of kitchenware, diningware, stuff to eat, like plates and knives and things like that, and then some fancier stuff. You can sometimes find specific kitchenware stores for restaurants where you can buy enormous pots. You can find things for Asian cooking or other different cooking styles around the world. And so there's a lot of different options. But the main reason that I thought that I wanted to do this episode actually is because of a specific kitchen supply store that I remember because I used to go there with my family growing up every so often, very occasionally. called Kitchen Kaboodle. And the name of that is a sort of weird play on words that I think is kind of fun. So Kitchen Caboodle is a kitchenware store, and the play on words comes from kit and caboodle. So kit and caboodle, if you say it quickly, is a pretty old phrase. It's a little more common in the South of the US, which is basically saying all of the stuff, right? The whole kit and caboodle that you need to do something. Right? So if you bring all of your tools and everything ready to do a job, you might have brought the whole kit and caboodle. And the word caboodle has kind of stuck around. It's again, pretty rare, but it can kind of refer to like a bunch of stuff. It's the short version of a centralist saying kit and caboodle. Um, in this case, the word kit is referring to like the equipment you need. Um, and like the outfit maybe as well, you have the whole kit and caboodle ready to work. And so that sounds sort of like Kitchen Kaboodle. The name Kitchen Kaboodle makes you think of Kit and Kaboodle, but they sell kitchen stuff. So yada, yada, yada, that's the joke. And it kind of makes sense. And I always thought it was a fun name. I didn't learn where the phrase came from for a long time, because Kit and Kaboodle is such a rare phrase that I didn't really pick up on it. Um, but yeah, it's a fun store. I don't, I don't think, I think many of their locations have shut down at this point, um, because they weren't doing really well, but, uh, maybe you can still find them. I don't know. Um, but anyways, let's get onto talking about specific kitchenware. because good kitchenware can make cooking so much better. I've been cooking for many, many years and I know that having, first off, having a good space to cook in is very important. Cooking in a tiny space is very, very frustrating and difficult. And so having enough space to cook is important. And then having nice things to cook with, or at least useful things. They don't always have to be expensive, but you usually wanna have nice tools or else many things in the kitchen can be a pain. So I think we'll start with a utensil or a tool that I use all the time in the kitchen, which are tongs. Tongs are the sort of grabby things. You use them to grab stuff. They're an extension of your hand in a way. And you can grab hot things. You can grab cold things. You can grab things that are deep in a bucket. They're very, very useful for cooking because they don't burn, right? If you want to like reach your hand into a pan and flip over a hot piece of chicken or something, you can't do that with your bare hands. And so tongs help you to do that a lot more easily without burning yourself and while still maintaining control. And so I like to have a nice pair of tongs. Another thing that I use all the time is a nice carbon steel pan, a frying pan. There's lots of different kinds of frying pans, but the main three are, no, main four are nonstick, which usually uses some kind of chemical or Teflon to make sure that, to make things not stick to them. Then there's stainless steel, which is just, well, made of stainless steel. Those typically can have food stick to them a lot more, but they're very, very useful and versatile. You can also have cast iron pans, which are made out of iron, right? And they're cast is the way that they're made. And those are really nice. They hold a lot of heat, but they do take a little bit of care. But then they last for decades, even last forever. They're unbreakable. And then there's also carbon steel pans, which I just briefly mentioned a second ago. Carbon steel is similar to a cast iron, but it's a different chemical process and they're made differently. But carbon steel can be some of the nicest cookware that you use because if you take care of it, it can be very, very nonstick. So can cast iron as well, honestly. But carbon steel is a little bit nicer. It's a little bit lighter. and it's a great all-round pan. I use my carbon steel pan very often and it's pretty, I only really have three pans and I mostly use my carbon steel one and then occasionally my non-stick if I want to. There are some health, potential health problems with non-stick pans but they are relatively minor and since I avoid using it excessively, it's probably fine. Um, then going into a pots, which are also really useful. Um, it's nice to have. A smaller pot of sort of a medium pot. And then I like having a humongous, uh, what you might call a stock pot. A stock pot is what you use for making stock, which is like animal, um, bones in water with like a time. Wow, that was not well explained. Stock or broth is like the base of a soup. It's all that soupiness. And those are usually really large pots, because you have to cook them for a long time. So it's nice to make a huge batch, yada, yada, yada. And my stock pot is really nice for making soups, or stewing things, or cooking things for a long time, that sort of thing. Wow, I do not have much time in this episode. I can't talk about much more kitchenware. because there's just not enough time. Other pieces of kitchenware that I think I can mention in this last minute or so is something like a ladle. That's the big old spoon that you use to serve soup. Having a nice ladle is great if you like eating soup. Having a good spatula, a couple of good ones is nice. I like to have a metal spatula that I can use for like scraping things if I need to be a little aggressive, like to scrape off of a, let's say a, a piece of meat or something like that. But then also having some rubber spatulas is so useful because that way you can get everything out of something, you can serve with it. There's a lot of different uses for a rubber spatula. I use my rubber spatula probably every single day. It's so useful. Um, but anyways, uh, that's all that I actually have time for in this episode. I hope that it wasn't too short and kind of weird to have me talking about just random kitchen elements, but that's kitchenware, I guess. Um, if you want to learn more, definitely look up some cooking videos. There's a lot of really good stuff on, on, um, English YouTube about cooking, that you can learn some fantastic words. But I hope that you enjoyed this episode and learned a couple of new things, maybe here or there. And let me know down in the comments what you use in your kitchen for kitchenware. But anyways, I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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