I’ve got mini cocotte cooking on my mind…Do you remember your mother’s Le Creuset? You know, that cherry red industrial-weight dutch oven with impenetrable enamel interior that you could barely pick up? Translated, Le Creuset means “the cauldron.” No kidding. This absurdly heavy kitchen implement was downright dangerous with hot food sloshing around in it, and washing out baked-on stew risked breaking a wrist. Actually, maybe that’s why my mother never had one. But our well-traveled neighbor who I lived with one summer, Irene Sinclair, did. She was a gourmet cook, and in the 1970s in cosmopolitan Bethesda, Maryland, that meant that she cooked French food.
Since then I have always wanted a Le Creuset pot or pan, but the thrifty angel on my shoulder and the product’s intimidating weight never allowed me to cough up the cash to actually purchase one.
With prices of about $200 for a medium-sized pan, it is hard to justify. But today I was helplessly drawn into the Le Creuset Outlet Store in Silverthorne, Colorado. Even though I did not buy anything, I oohed and aahed at the new colors and the perfect downsized Le Creuset models that were everything that I now desire, but without the outlandish weight and high-end price tag. This line of Le Creuset is everything great without the weight — everything I’ve always wanted for tiny kitchen cooking, and it’s definitely not mother’s!
Not Mother’s Le Creuset – Light & Inexpensive
The petite ceramic containers with perfect tiny handles and lid with a black button top brought me back to warm and fuzzy doll house feelings from childhood… And the colors! To seem less like a drooling fool as I took pictures of the beautiful palette of pots and pans in front of me, I told the nice salesperson that I had a food blog and that I would be writing about this lovely new line of downsized cookware, which made perfect sense for our Food for the Ages maxim of “living large by cooking well in tiny kitchens.”
Photos courtesy of www.lecreuset.com.
Then he handed me a copy of The Le Creuset Mini Cocotte Cookbook and ushered me over to the darling mini cocotte selections in all their varied colors: Flame, Marseille, Cherry Red, Caribbean, Soleil, Palm…and the list of colors goes on from there…It was love at first sight. Do we ever get over wanting cute, tiny, perfectly colored cook pans that the dolls we once played with might have used? The lure of the tiny, individual, separate, perfect pot of food…was I feeling the kind of “tiny plates/tapas” vibe that has made Boulder, Colorado’s The Med Restaurant so incredibly successful year after year? Here I was, getting sucked into a new cult of cooking in the…mini round cocotte, mini oval cocotte, mini cast iron cocotte…heritage cocotte…heart-shaped cocotte…pumpkin shaped cocotte…
I rationalized that for about $65 I could purchase the cookbook and two of the mini round cocottes and cook tiny meals for two in these cute mini-dutch ovens, light to pick up and clean and filled with delicious food, and blog to my heart’s content. Think of the two-person meals I could cook up in these cutest of serving dishes. I might never use another piece of crockery.
Your mother’s Le Creuset was made for cooking big meals and leaving lots of leftovers for the big families that many of us grew up in during the ’60s and ’70s. But our time is now, living it up in our downsized space, preparing wonderful meals for the two of us. The miniaturized Le Creusets are the correctly sized vessels to cook them in, and epitomize today’s tiny kitchen cooking.
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