If you'd like a completely amateur point of view, I agree with Phil & KYH on all of their points. If you want to look around for high-end cookware at something like a discount, in addition to the suggestions they made, you might want to take a look at www. cookwarenmore.com. That advertises itself as an All-Clad outlet, selling seconds. I've bought some stuff from them, and I couldn't figure out why they were "seconds." The prices are lower than the regular All-Clad prices, which means they're only high, not extortionate. (And every once in a while they run sales.) They also carry other brands.
If you plan to go the All-Clad route, or to similar brands, I'd recommend stainless steel. Unlike the clad stuff, it happily goes in a dishwasher. About 10 years ago, I went out and splurged on bunch of high-end cookware, and now have to wash more dishes by hand than I'd ever have thought about before the "upgrade."
Every cook (even us amateurs) has favorite pans, and they're not even all of the same material. So buying one at a time is usually best designed to give you what you would want over time. Soups, stocks, and other stuff you do in a big pan don't require a heavy-duty pan, so you can go with lighter, less costly stuff there. Like KYH (I've been away for a while; it's Kyle, isn't it? I couldn't confirm from an earlier post) I think you'd want at least one cast iron skillet and dutch oven, and you'll need to look around a bit to decide what size. I do a lot of cooking for 1, and then a lot of entertaining, so I have two groups of sizes.
On putting hot glass into cold water, don't. Any material will shatter if it is subjected to a sufficiently extreme temperature change. Back in the days when Thermos bottles were more common than today, mothers always warned their offspring to warm the bottle with hot water before putting coffee, tea, etc. in them. I once saw a nice pre-Civil War glass bowl turned into two nice pre-Civil War half bowls when hot gravy was poured into it without it having been warmed first. "Tempered" glass is just less likely to shatter, not impossible to shatter. In fact, a few weeks ago, I let a cast iron griddle get hotter than I was aware, and it cracked when I poured oil onto it. (That was the damnedest thing I ever saw; I had thought cast iron was invulnerable.)  |