Where's the sriracha?

First of all I just want to say I'm no chef. I enjoy cooking a lot, but if you asked me what I could make I couldn't tell you. Living alone for the last 5 years, I've made an assortment of things, some were good, many were bad. There are only a handful of dishes that I can honestly remember what I put in them and that is more likely due to several failed attempts that were ingrained into my memory. What I did have though, was a collection of ingredients and tools with which I used to cook with.

One thing I've definitely taken for granted is living above a Loblaws. It allowed me to get anything I was missing at any given time. All I had to do was put on some pants and run down to the store to get it. Now getting dressed is the least of my worries.

Due to Ina traveling a lot for work and not doing a lot of cooking, she is missing a lot of things that I've taken for granted over the years. I never thought to add these items to our gift registry because I just assumed she already had it. She lives like a bachelor who rarely ate at home and went out a lot. The state of her kitchen is similar to my days prior to when I stopped playing World of Warcraft.

For example, we don't have a butcher's knife. I'm talking about the bread-n-butter big chef knife, the one that when you walk into any chinese family's kitchen and yell "DAO!", that's the knife they hand you. Most cooking shows you will see (especially chinese ones), the chef uses one knife for everything -- for cutting vegetables, slicing meat, fileting a fish, mincing garlic, even using it to lift ingredients from the cutting board (we'll get to that later) into your mixing bowl or wok/pot. We don't have one.

Another item I was surprised we didn't have was a decent sized cutting board. A few nights ago Ina and I were cooking together and I had to chop up some broccoli so I asked her for the cutting board. She handed me a plastic board the size of a regular sheet of paper. It had a wide groove "moat" all around the edge which made the actually chopping area about the size of an index card. I appreciate that the groove helps catch juices and blood, but at this size, that should be the least of your worries. Okay, I'm exaggerating but you get the point. Back at my old place we had two cutting boards and the smaller one is about 3 times the size of this one.

By the title of my post, I'm sure you know what's next.. SRIRACHA! My brother and I discovered sriracha about 2 years ago.. and by discover I mean we cooked with it, put it on everything including hot dogs and burgers, all meats really, pastas, etc.

Other missing staple ingredients: general herbs (bay leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary), butter (not even alternatives!), ketchup, corn starch, fresh garlic.