I MADE a list of small kitchen gifts that I would be happy to receive on Christmas morning. List making is a holiday tradition in our household. It is the only way you have a chance of getting what you want.

If you leave gift selection up to the intuition of your gift givers, you are gonna be surprised, and not always happily.

This is especially true when dealing with your offspring. Dropping hints to them usually doesn't help. Writing down specifics does. List making also helps to keep things in the proper price range. That would be cheap and cheaper.

For instance, at the top of my list was an instant-read thermometer, an item that costs a little less than $10. It is sold at kitchen-supply stores and department stores.

I have even found it in some supermarkets, in the gadget aisle.

This device resembles a pencil with a point on its bottom and a temperature gauge on its top, where the eraser would be. Its mission is simple. When the pointed end is thrust into something, the gauge instantly tells the temperature of that something. This is valuable information when you want to know the answer to that persistent supper-time question, "Is it done yet?"

When I go out in the back yard to cook something on the barbecue grill, the instant-read thermometer goes with me. I use it even when I am grilling something as simple as hamburgers. By now I am pretty confident that I can tell, just by looking at the color of its skin, whether a burger is ready to come off the fire.

But I become supremely confident when I jab the instant-read thermometer in the middle of that burger and the needle reads 160 degrees. It also is a big help when you are grilling in the dark. That happens a lot in the winter.

In addition to being inexpensive and practical, the instant-read thermometer is also portable. That means you can carry it all around the kitchen. It also means it frequently gets lost. I ask for a new one almost every Christmas, because my old ones are missing in action.

The other day when I was enjoying a fancy lunch of Dover sole and grilled duck at the Grille 700 restaurant in the Marriott Waterfront hotel, I noticed that the hotel's executive chef, Graham Weber, had an instant-read thermometer attached to the sleeve of his white chef's coat.

This both reassured me and made me jealous. The reassurance came from knowing that big-time chefs rely on the same simple device that I use in my back yard. The jealousy stemmed from the fact that Weber's coat had a specially designed compartment on the sleeve to hold the thermometer. Because I keep losing my thermometers, I wanted a coat like that. Apparently, you have to be a chef to get one.

Regularly taking the "temps" of dishes is required by Marriott, Weber explained to me. "It becomes a habit. So they have even designed a chef's coat that has a thermometer patch."

He said that members of the hotel's staff of 77 cooks and eight chefs are constantly taking the temperatures of the food they prepare. The Dover sole, for instance, Weber had served at lunch was 130 degrees, he said, the roast duck, another course of the luncheon, was 125. Sauces and soups are heated to 165 degrees, he said.

Weber also mentioned another inexpensive device I could put on my holiday wish list, a pair of spring-loaded tongs. Tongs let you move pieces of meat or fish around a cooking surface without piercing them, and having the juices run out, he said. Every cook at the hotel has his or her own tongs, he said, adding that they are marked with tape to identify them and prevent quarrels or "tong wars" over ownership.

Finally after going to a highfalutin lunch in Washington last week, I added a simple item to my list.

The lunch, whipped up Michel Richard at his Georgetown restaurant, Citronelle, was celebrating the publication of A Return To Cooking, an art-studded cookbook written by his friend and fellow French chef Eric Ripert of New York's Le Bernardin restaurant.

It was fancy French food at its finest as Richard prepared five dishes pulled from Ripert's book. The first course was croque-monsieur. I expected ham and Swiss cheese on toast. Instead I was presented with toasted triangles of golden bread stuffed with smoked salmon and tuna rather than ham. Moreover, in the middle of the plate was a mound of sour cream and caviar that the triangles of salmon and tuna were dipped in.

Next came a portobello mushroom and eggplant tart, sprinkled with -- what else? -- truffles. This was followed by some perfect, but barely cooked shrimp -- three minutes in an oven -- swimming with bok choy in a coriander broth, which I felt I should eat with a runcible spoon.

For the meat course, perfect medallions of peppered venison surrounded a salad made of endive, watercress, juniper berries , walnuts and beets. The venison was so good it almost made me want to go out and sit in a deer stand and hunt for seconds.

Dessert was chocolate ravioli filled with pastry cream and topped with a bittersweet chocolate sauce. Each course was accompanied by wines so rare that, according to Mark Slater, the restaurant's sommelier, you can't find them in liquor stores. (But if you ever spot a bottle of Lewis Cellars Napa Valley 2000 Syrah in your neighborhood dispensary, please give me call. It is nectar!)

The French may or may not know how to live, but they certainly know how to lunch.

Dizzy with pleasure, I made my way over to Ripert to ask him where a fledging kitchen cook might start if he wanted to make dishes such as these.

Ripert, the chef at the four-star restaurant, did not hesitate to answer. Every chef, he said, must begin with one very sharp knife.