Can you guess what it is yet?

One of the advantages of having a tiny kitchen is that I’m much less tempted to fill it with useless gadgets. Pretty much everything that has a place in my kitchen is something I use on a regular basis. In fact, last year, when Ailsa and Roland gave me my beautiful KitchenAid food processor for my birthday, David Herbert, the food editor at the magazine I work on, gave me some very good advice. He told me not to keep it in its box, to make sure it had a prominent place in my kitchen. And he was absolutely right. By having it out on a work surface means I use it much more than I think I would have done had it been tucked away somewhere.

However, having said all that, there is one thing in my kitchen that I have never used and probably never will. But I will never ever get rid of it and will always love it. And it is this beautiful wooden baguette slicer that my mum bought me in a brocante in France, near where she lives. There was a time when every French restaurant had one of these, but I think you’d have to search pretty hard to find one nowadays. However, it is such a thing of beauty (and history) to me that I can’t imagine ever being without it.

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