These are great for baking and for keeping roasts moist. Either opt for the new silicon brushes which are easy to keep clean or buy a handful of the cheapest ones you can find and toss them after you use them.

Invest in one with a metal tube and rubber bulb. The plastic ones tend to melt. A baster can suck up the juices to baste a roast better than a spoon.

A thin 100-percent-cotton mesh cloth, cheesecloth comes in handy for bundling up herbs (as in a bouquet garni, which is French for a bunch of herbs) straining liquids and wrapping rolled meats. When you go to use it, realize that it’s been folded over several times so make sure you unfold it all the way.

Get at least three cutting boards—one big one for carving cooked roasts, whole chickens and such, and two smaller ones. Make sure the big one has a well around the edge for catching the meat juices that accumulate when you’re carving a roast, a chicken or turkey. Designate one of the small ones for cutting up raw meat, poultry and fish and nothing else. Use the other one for chopping vegetables, slicing bread or cooked food like a grilled chicken breast. (Having two chopping boards limits the chance of cross contamination of food.) Get them in different colors so your can remember which is which. If you can’t afford two, be sure to wash the one thoroughly after cutting up raw meats, poultry and chicken. Wood is a good bet, but there are also fiberboard, plastic and polyethylene boards that all seem to do well. Cheaper ones will warp after a while. Hint: put a towel under the board (especially a plastic one) to keep it from sliding on the counter.

Unless a recipe demands it, don’t mince garlic; put it through a garlic press instead. The lever kind pictured at left is the most popular, but the cheaper ones can clog easier, especially if you don’t peel the garlic clove. An alternative uses a tube with a perforated screw cap and a thumbscrew to force the garlic through the cap. Either kind is easier than mincing.

Most food processors come with a grating attachment, but when you only need a quarter cup of something grated, it’s hardly worth it to haul out the processor. So, get a box grater. It has four sides—three of them have different-size holes: small for citrus zest and fresh ginger; medium for hard cheese (such as Parmesan) and chocolate; and large for softer cheeses (cheddar and mozzarella), potatoes, and carrots. The fourth side has a slicing blade to make thin uniform slices. Also get one of those cheese graters with the flip handle and a crank on the side for grating fresh cheese at the table.

This is the easiest and quickest way to remove fat and grease from hot liquids like gravies, soups and stocks. Get a four-cup, heat resistant glass one. It looks like a tall measuring cup, but has a spout that comes out of near the bottom of the cup. Since grease rises to the top, it makes it easy to pour off the good stuff and leave the fat behind.

A mandoline (also spelled mandolin) takes its name from the stringed musical instrument. It is a manually operated vegetable slicer. Most come with adjustable blades that can slice, julienne, and even waffle-cut vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions and tomatoes to varying thicknesses. A mandoline can be expensive, but when you need to do a lot of slicing, it is invaluable.

Measuring cups basically come in dry and liquid versions. Liquid measuring cups are usually made of clear glass or plastic and have lines on the outside so you can see when you have the amount you need. Dry measuring cups can be made of plastic, glass or even stainless steel and come in nested sets of ¼, 1/3, ½, and l cup sizes. It’s easy to fill them to the top, and then level the contents off with the flat edge of a knife.

Measuring spoons come in sizes from 1/8 teaspoon up to one tablespoon. They usually come in sets and sometimes are held nested together by a ring.

A bowl-shape vessel (the mortar) that holds ingredients to be crushed by a club-shape utensil (the pestle). It’s used to mash and mix together dry ingredients like herbs and spices. Actually, it’s easier to wipe out your coffee bean grinder and use it to grind the spices.

Mixing bowls can come alone or in sets with three or four of them nested together. The best have sloping sides for easier mixing. A well-equipped kitchen has a variety of sizes to tackle any job.

A grease- and heat-resistant paper, it’s used to line baking pans, to wrap foods in packets for baking, or to make disposable pastry bags. Parchment paper helps to avoid the problem of burnt cookie bottoms.

Pick up one of these gizmos that’s alternately called a chopper or a “bench knife.” It's a flat piece of metal with a hand hold on one side opposite a straight edge. It's great for scraping up chopped vegetables. And pastry too.

The pepper mill is one of those must buy things. Fresh ground pepper is more flavorful than the kind you buy already ground. Get a sturdy one with steel grinding teeth. The plastic ones tend to break apart after a while and the pieces are hard to tell from the ground pepper. Pair it with a salt mill and some coarse salt and you’ll really make a gourmet statement.

When you decide to start baking, get one, but a real simple one. The old fashioned hardwood rolling pin that grandma used to make her pies and threaten grandpa with—the one with the handles on either side—works just fine.

This looks like a ladle with wire mesh. When you get into doing stews and soups, it’s great for skimming off the scum that comes to the surface when you simmer meat.

Get two thin, flexible metal spatulas with broad blades—one slotted—for flipping fried foods and such, and one for picking up pizza slices. Get one with a narrower, slotted blade for more general uses like lifting the corners of something to see if it’s done underneath. Get a plastic one if you have any non-stick fry pans you want to save. Get a couple of narrow-bladed plastic spatulas/scrapers for mixing, stirring and folding batters. And, if you’re into baking cakes, get a dog-leg or offset spatula. It makes it easier to ice the cake.

Get several different sizes of wooden spoons—from short ones that you’ll use to stir things in saucepans to long handled ones you’ll need for soups and stews. Also, you’ll need wooden spoons if you’re stirring anything in a non-stick pan so you don’t scratch the coating. You’ll also need a large slotted spoon and several ladles. Get one with a broad shallow bowl and one with a narrower, deeper bowl. Which one you use will depend on what you’re ladling.

The basic strainer is a colander, which looks like a bowl full of holes on legs. It comes in both metal and plastic and is a must for draining pasta, potatoes, vegetables or anything cooked in water that you don’t want to save. Then there’s a chinois, which is shaped like a cone and comes with a wooden pestle for pushing the food through. The granddaddy of all strainers is a food mill. It comes with several disks with different size holes and is operated with a hand crank.

An instant-read meat thermometer allows a near-instant measurement of doneness. At $6-$7 each, you can afford to buy a few since most cooks at sometime forget to take the thermometer out before putting the roast back in the oven. A regular meat thermometer is good if you want to stick it in at the beginning of cooking and watch the temperature climb slowly. You can get a basic one with a dial for under $10. If you can afford it ($30-$40), get a battery operated digital one that comes preprogrammed with the best temperature for the degrees of doneness for a variety of meats. An oven thermometer (around $10) can come in handy if you don’t trust your oven or want to use your covered grill to slow-cook some ribs. Another useful thermometer to add when your repertoire improves is a candy and deep fat thermometer ($12-$15). You’ll need one if you want to try to deep fry a turkey.

The second most important measurement in cooking after temperature is time. Get a simple wind-up cooking timer or consider using a stopwatch. The kind you can hang around your neck is easy to use.

They aren’t just for grilling outdoors. Get two sets of good, restaurant-style tongs in different sizes and use them for things like turning or lifting roasts, mixing salads, turning over foods being browned, etc. You’ll find a lot of uses for them.

Some people prefer a paring knife. But get a vegetable peeler. It’s perfect for potatoes, carrots and even some fruits and will remove just the peel, not half of the object being peeled. Some are built like knives with the peeler being an extension of the handle and others resemble a safety razor. Pick whichever is more comfortable for you.

What with electric mixers, food processors and blenders there’s not much use for whisks anymore. But if you’re whipping a sauce, fluffing an egg white or making whipped cream, they can’t be beat. Get one or two in different sizes.

The side of your basic box grater with the small holes does a pretty good job at removing zest, but the new microplane zesters are fantastic. They make it easy to remove just the zest—the colored portion of the skin of a citrus fruit which contains the flavorful oils—while leaving behind the white part, which is bitter.