Kitchen Word Search

This theme opens the cupboards: tools like the WHISK, the LADLE and the COLANDER, machines like the TOASTER, the BLENDER and the MICROWAVE, and the food that comes out of them, from PANCAKE and OMELET to SOUP and SALAD.

The kitchen has more short words than most themes. CUP, MUG, JUG, POT, PAN, WOK and JAR are all three letters, and on Easy and Medium they are the hardest to find, because any three letters in a row could be one of them. The J in JUG and JAR and the K in WOK are the letters to scan for first.

The kitchen also has a lot of words built from smaller ones, and a board never holds both halves of such a pair. PAN hides in SAUCEPAN and PANTRY, CUP in CUPBOARD, POT in TEAPOT, BREAD in BREADBOARD, so when one of the long words is on the list, its short partner won't be. That rule is what keeps every word in the grid exactly once.

CHOPSTICKS and DISHWASHER are ten letters, too long for Easy, and turn up from Medium up. For a longer hunt, try Hard, where the tools can hang upside down and backwards from any direction.