Occasionally, we eat out at a restaurant and, occasionally, it’s one of those open kitchen restaurants where there’s no wall between us (the diners) and the chefs – we’ve got a full view of all our food being prepared as we order.
One thing I always notice about these kitchens is that despite the number of stoves and ovens they’ve got running, there’s not a single oven mitt in the whole place. Yet, at home, we’ve got draws overflowing with them.
Chefs use tea towels instead of oven mitts because the tea towel has more than one use – cleaning up spills, drying surfaces and hands, making sure other surfaces don’t burn. As an oven mitt, a tea towel is also more versatile because it can be shaped into whatever shape it needs to be to wrap around specialty pots/pan handles and it can accommodate any size or shape of hand.
Art supplies are a bit like oven mitts. Each art store dangles a ‘special’ or ‘deal’ in front of an artist saying, ‘what you really need now is this specialty tool’. But, perhaps, like in kitchens, what we need is to go for a constrained set of tools that can be used in different ways.