Today I want to talk about kitchen tools that I reach for all the time but that I haven’t seen recommended in the usual 10-tools-you-need-in-your-kitchen listicles and TikToks. They are: the eighth-sheet tray, the lid stand, the KNORRHANE, and the USB fan.

If you, like me, often cook in a state of barely-contained panic, you know that anything you can do to reduce the stress of getting food on the table is worth throwing a few bucks at. The eighth-sheet tray and a lid stand are the best answers I’ve come up with yet to two problems that have vexed me since I made my first grilled cheese lo these many years, namely: where do you put your goddamn spatula when you’re not using it? And, separately, what do you do with a hot lid?

An eighth-sheet tray is exactly what it sounds like, a little baking sheet that’s 25% the size of a standard half-sheet tray (which is what I called a cookie tray growing up, but that’s apparently wrong: cookie trays only have a lip on one side). Barbecue restaurants and faux-down-home burger joints have been serving ribs and sides on them for years, you’ve definitely seen them.

Traditional spoon rests work fine if you are using exactly one spoon to stir exactly one pot. Beyond that, they fail. Ladles roll out of them; skimmers and spiders hang over the edge; you definitely can’t keep two separate utensils on them. But eighth-sheet trays are perfect. They hold big utensils entirely and keep liquids contained. They’re sturdy, so you can take them out to the grill, easy to clean, multipurpose (they’re supposed to be used for baking; they’re also good for organizing your kid’s Legos), and cheap—as little as $3 each on Webstaurantstore and less than $10 each anywhere else. I’ve got four of them. Buy one, you won’t regret it.

Once you’ve put down your tongs, you’ll need a place to put your pot lid when you want to let something simmer uncovered. I have two minimalist pot lid holders I bought years ago at MUJI that do the trick. The MUJI website doesn’t seem to have the exact thing anymore, but this cutting board stand is just as good and probably better because it’s wider at the base.

One of the things I reach for most often when I’m cooking on the stovetop these days is this flexible slotted spoon/spatula/spider thing I found at IKEA, and which they call KNORRHANE. It’s the right tool for a variety of jobs: fishing blanched vegetables or a poached egg out of water, lowering a delicate piece of fish into sauce, flipping a latke, evenly scattering sesame seeds over a sheet of dough. The material is rubbery enough that you can clean a bowl, but it’s not flimsy. IKEA kitchen stuff seems well made these days, especially for the price ($4).

A few summers ago I had a wood-pellet-burning pizza oven that never got hot enough, so I bought a little USB-rechargeable fan to stoke the flames. I got rid of the pizza oven but, inspired by something I saw Alton Brown do, I now use the fan all the time to speed up drying the surface of meat I’m going to sear. It also works to quickly dry wet green vegetables you’re going to saute or stir fry, especially when you didn’t do what I recommended three weeks ago and wash them the day you get home with them. Just set up the fan to blow over them while you’re getting everything else ready to go, flipping them a few times. I like this little Wall-E looking guy with flexible feet, which comes in an array of cheerful colors, but there are millions of options on Amazon, mostly from the kinds of electronics companies that picked their names with a random syllable generator. Like everything else on this list it’s multipurpose: I still use it to stoke the grill sometimes, and Isaac took it to summer camp this year.

By the way—I’m not making any affiliate revenue if you buy one of these.

Out of an abundance of potatoes I made a sort-of Spanish lentil soup this week. This NYT recipe has the flavors I was looking for, but it is also exactly the kind of restaurant-brained recipe that used to always twist me in knots when I was a younger and less confident home cook. The concept is straightforward enough: you cook down some leeks and other aromatics, you boil some potatoes, you boil your lentils; then tomatoes and spices (especially smoked paprika) round the whole thing off. But the author wants you to 1) first boil the lentils in a dutch oven, 2) saute the aromatics separately in a skillet, and 3) in yet a third pot, boil the potatoes before combining everything back into the lentil pot. Who’s doing your dishes, friend?!?

He also wants you to pin bay leaves to onions with cloves and let them bob around in the broth, which absolutely not.

What I did instead is to just saute the aromatics and then, briefly, the potatoes, then combine everything else and cook until the lentils are done and the potatoes are broken down. Is it a little less good than if everything had been cooked separately? Possibly. Is that a deal I will take if it means fewer dishes to wash? Every single time.

Between travel and Yom Kippur, I once again cooked less than usual. There was the aforementioned lentil soup and a very good, very rich Sunday-gravy style meat tomato sauce we used to carbo-load ahead of the Yom Kippur fast. (This is the opposite of most advice about fasting, which tells you to eat light the day before and maybe drink Gatorade, but it did the trick for me.) I made a batch of chicken salad for sandwiches throughout the week, mostly eaten with confit’d cherry tomatoes. I made a moist, lemony olive oil cake to bring to a friends’ house, and a batch of almond cookies. Oh, also a very good, tart lemon verbena frozen yogurt with herbs from our garden.

(As always, the recipes I’m linking are approximations and I can’t necessarily vouch for them.)

Another classic from the glory days of Twitter.

A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.

This week: Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of his dad Loudon Wainwright’s “One Man Guy.” Listen to it when no one is helping you with the dishes.

Send questions complaints etc. to [email protected]

Simmer Down is a weekly newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.