Gadgets for my kitchen

Tomorrow I am going to head out for a little shopping. I hope to purchase one of the following tools for my kitchen.

Pasta wheel-good for cutting noodles, sealing ravioli and decorative edges on pastries.

A pastry scraper or board knife-this would help in cutting dough and cleaning up my work surface.

A ravioli stamp would really be cool.

And then how about a deluxe pasta machine with many attachments for lasagna and other noodle types?

What kitchen would be complete without a few cookbooks? I have asquired several really useful books in the last 6 weeks, since starting my blog. Here are the ones I own.

The Complete Italian Cookbook or the Cook’s Encyclopedia of Italian Cooking by Carla Capalbo

The first and second books are one in the same, only the green one is a smaller paperback version. Same recipes and all that but I like having two since they are different sizes. They are loaded with pictures and how-to’s for so many things.

Italian Cuisine by Tony May

This one is the cover of the newest edition but I have a first edition from 1990. This is not really a cookbook as much as a reference book for Italian cuisine. Inside this little text is a ton of information and history of the foods of Italy and the preparations involved. This was written for culinary students so anyone with an intermediate level of cooking skills would be able to easily follow this book. It also contains definitions of Italian cooking terms, extrememly helpful for me!These last two are both enjoyable with stories accompanying the recipes. Lydia has a cooking show on PBS, which I have never seen, and has written numerous cookbooks.

Carol Lawrence is an actress/singer and grew up in an Italian-American family. This book is full of comfort food from her childhood.