Kitchen tools. Essential.

Just don’t put them in the dishwasher, and they’ll last forever. Seriously. Knives, wooden spoons, measuring cups – all need to be washed by hand.

And they’ll last pretty much forever. This photo reminds me that I need a couple of smaller measuring cups. I have the metal ones for dry ingredients, but these glass ones are indispensable for a lot of cooking. The retro look of them doesn’t hurt, either.

But you have to wash them by hand. If you put them in the dishwasher after a while all of the lettering just rubs off. You can still see it, but if you’re like me (as in, your eyesight isn’t what it used to be) pretty soon it’ll be too hard to read the measurements. And then you’ll make a mistake. Not that I would know, or anything.

My current 4-cup measure is too big, except for large amounts. My current 2-cup measure is from my mom, and it’s Tupperware, which is fine… But plastic gets trashed in a kitchen pretty quickly and I do like the glass – if for no other reason than it’s easy to see what’s in there and how much is in there.

Kitchens deserve good tools. Heck, everyone deserves good tools and thankfully these measuring cups aren’t very expensive. I’m sure you could find a super-pricey set on some website, somewhere, but these are just fine. Preferable, in fact.

And it’s darn hard to break them, too. It’s possible, but not easy.