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A very interesting question. Of course, I wouldn't call a kitchen perfect unless it had a professional gas range, and a professional oven. As for other stuff, a big kitchen, with lots of work areas is of course important, but when it comes to other equipment, more expensive isn't always better.

I do believe that everyone needs a good set of knives, a decent butcher's block, and a good set of pots and pans, but when it comes to a lot of the other kitchen accessories (especially the expensive ones) a lot of them are massive uni-taskers, and uni-taskers by and large are evil.

Unless I have like twelve mangoes a day, why would I need a mango corer? A good knife can do that job perfectly.

I don't own many cookbooks, but a real good one if you're into Italian food and Sopranos is The Sopranos Family Cookbook: As Compiled by Artie Bucco.

For those of you that followed Sopranos, I'm sure you agree that the series was not only about mafia, psychology and curse, but also about food! In this book, you will find some interviews with the characters and, most important, a lot of recipes ranging from tomato sauce to zeppole. The book also includes beautiful photos from the episodes.

After having read about kitchen porn, I started to wonder how the perfect kitchen looks like. Does it include an expensive and massive kitchen stove, or is it enough with a normal kitchen setup with a few solid tools (like some really good knifes for example)?

What's your opinion?

Hi!

As you may have noticed, we're trying to add a lot of recipes to Béchamel (in addition to all the recipes we hope that you'll be adding), but because there's so many different dishes out there, we'd like to know what kinds of recipes you'd like to see here.

Are there any cuisines that you're especially interested in?

Also, are you mostly interested in entrées, or do you want to see a lot of side dishes, desserts, dips, breads, or something else?

Now we've done away with the invitations, and anyone can register.

Right now there's no automatic way to do it, however, we still have plenty of room to go around, so if you want invitations to give out to friends etc., that's no problem.

How many do you want? :)

Is there any way to invite others?

I've been reading some very interesting books about food recently, and I'm hungry for more (drumsnare).

The most recent book I've read is The Omnivores' Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Very interesting book about where we get our food from. I'm also planning to read In Defense of Food, also by Pollan.

Another interesting pair of interesting books are CookWise and BakeWise, both by Shirley O. Corriher. They really get in to the technicalities of cooking and explain why we do certain things, like punching down dough, and how things work. They also feature some great recipes. In that category, there's of course Harold McGee's classic On Food and Cooking. That's still on my list though.

What interesting books about food have you been reading recently?