Affordable gifts for the kitchen

There are two ways to Christmas shop for a cook. You can drop a wad on a spectacular piece of equipment that will get used three or four times a year and sit in the pantry the rest of the time. Or you can convert a relatively small amount of money into a potful of tools that will get used on a daily basis. While I know that $500 home sous-vide machine is going to get a lot of oohs and aahs come Christmas morning, I can't help but wonder whether it's the convenience of having a lot of the small tools around that will be appreciated more in the long run.

With that in mind, I wandered over to the closest kitchen-supply store to see what I could find. These might not be the big-ticket blowout items that will be the centerpiece of your holiday gift-giving, but for very little money, you can certainly fill the stockings of cooks near and dear with essentials that will get used over and over and last a lifetime.

Here are more than a dozen of my favorites, all costing less than $10 (and most of them less than $5).

Metal bowl, $4.99: You simply can't have too many of these. Use them for mixing batters, tossing salads, whipping cream, making mayonnaise or marinating meat. They wash up easily and they're nearly indestructible. Ideally, you'll want the sturdiest ones you can find, but honestly, I've got a couple cheapies that I've been banging around for nearly 20 years and they haven't given up yet.

Fish spatula, $3.19: Maybe it's a little thing, but have you ever noticed how normal frying spatulas always seem a little clunky to handle? A fish spatula is built to work from an angle rather than head-on. It's also thinner and lighter, which makes it better suited for handling delicate filets (hence the name). But they're by no means only good for seafood; they work just as well with eggs, crepes or just about anything fragile that needs turning.

Bench knife, $1.49: This is a tool very few home cooks seem to have in their kits. But if you work with dough, you'll find it incredibly useful, whether it's for scraping a work surface clean, cutting a mass of bread dough in half, neatly dividing bar cookies or slicing up logs of cookie dough. I even sometimes use mine to transport chopped vegetables from the cutting board to the stovetop.