There are a lot places online where you can go to find free recipes. But not all of them are good - and I know this from  personal experience. A recipe looks great so you start cooking - and then the instructions don’t match up to the ingredients. Like the time when I was making a lava cake and the instructions said to “add the water” but water wasn’t listed in the ingredients.

Even though many home cooks have wonderful recipes, they don’t always know how to write them properly. So for the sake of my kitchen sanity, I only go to the sites where I have a proven success rate. Here are my top choices.

• Epicurous.com - I also watch their TV show.

• Food Network - There was a time when I was addicted to this network. I still watch it, just not obsessively.

• Leite’s Culinary - David Leite is a successful food writer. This is his blog.

Do you have any favorite cooking websites or blogs to share? I’m always looking for new ideas.

Now that this blog is a little older, it is starting to take shape. I’ve been offering you some ideas for the kitchen. If you notice, I tend to focus on seasonal cooking. That’s how I cook at home. It’s a habit I picked up on when I lived in Germany. I choose the freshest ingredients available.

I have fond memories of strawberry season. That is perhaps my favorite time. That, and when the tomatoes come out in late summer.

But, I digress. The real point of this blog post is to tell you that in addition to sharing with you my cooking recipes, insights, and tips I’ll be reviewing cooking equipment. Mainly, I’ll be talking about the things in my own kitchen that I absolutely can’t do without.

I’ll leave you today with a list of kitchen utensils I can’t do without. You can use this as a baseline to stock your own kitchen. As you gain comfort in the kitchen, no doubt you’ll have your own list of essential items. Most of these tools may not even be on your list, but it’s a good place to start.

•  wire whisk
• chef’s knife
• knife sharpener
• kitchen shears
• OXO good grips kitchen tongs
• my hands
• a sturdy wooden spoon

You can make almost anything if you have these items. For me, it is important to learn how to do things such as make bread without a fancy machine. After you know the basic techniques you can move on and learn how to use the fancy gadgets.

I personally don’t really use a lot of equipment. I prefer to keep it simple. My kitchen has almost everything - a blender, a mixer, a food processor, ice cream machine… but I really do prefer to keep my tools as simple as possible. Since I have a hard time getting the lid onto my food processor, I don’t save any time at all using it.