Why I wrote this
I once tried to cook pasta for eight people in a pot clearly meant for two, and watched in horror as starchy water boiled over onto my stovetop mid-dinner-party. It was a whole cleanup saga that delayed dessert by twenty minutes and made me look like I'd never cooked before. I compared a couple of stockpot sizes against my actual stovetop space, worried about buying something too bulky to store. This 11-quart stainless steel pot turned out to be the sweet spot, big enough for a full pasta boil without babysitting it, and it's become the pot I reach for on basically every big cooking night since.
