"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients." 

~Julia Child

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Celebrity chefs have lines of everything from pasta & olive oil to coffee to cookbooks and the obvious, kitchen goods/gadgets. This cutting board from Chef Curtis Stone is gorgeous (and so is Curtis), but I often wonder with cool gadgets like this if I would really use them. They are fab pieces to put in the kitchen and great conversation starters, but I may look at this as something that would be too much hassle to clean vs. a regular cutting board.

This board is so lovely though, I may just add it (and Curtis) to my Christmas list.

I am notorious for killing my herbs. In the past two years, I've bought herbs three different times. For a while, they seem to flourish and grow. Then, all of a sudden they die. I've kept them on my patio, where they have baked in the harsh Arizona sunshine. I've kept them inside near a window where they have died from I don't know what! I blame it on Arizona and the crazy conditions, but I don't know if that's totally true. 

I've recently found these pots and wonder if they could help my brownthumb become a greenthumb! The site says that they allow air to circulate. Does this help the plant? I definitely need some desert gardening lessons!

I collect coffee mugs, each one is different. I was thinking of building a shelving unit of some sort that I could hang on the dining room wall as an art piece with all the mugs, each in it's own little cubby. This one from CB2 is perfect, though I would probably need about 6 of them.

Every celebrity chef under the sun now has a cookbook. I usually have to dig through all the celebrity chef cookbooks at the store to get to the really good, relatively unknown cookbooks, buried behind them. 

In this recent Wall Street Journal article, it is mentioned that celebrity chefs write their cookbooks as if they are cooking in their restaurant kitchen. Too many steps, too much use of expensive equipment, too many ingredients. I want the cookbook from the chef who writes as if cooking in his restaurant kitchen. 

Janky low-quality cookbooks are a dime a dozen. When I pick up a Thomas Keller
or David Chang
cookbook, I expect a level of quality. It's not a cookbook I will most likely cook from every night for dinner, but I'm buying their incredible experience in the kitchen, in recipe form. 

I'm still planning on getting TK's new book and I already bought Momofuku. If you don't like these books and the recipes they offer, don't buy them. Personally though, I think that's your loss.