Go Go Gadget Kitchen!
Snoop around my kitchen and you’ll find drawers packed with cooking tchotchkes and cabinets of eclectic appliances. I might suffer from an unhealthy addiction to kitchen gadgets, but that won’t stop me from sharing some of my very favorites with y’all.
The Perfect Slice
I adore a great cobb or chef salad, and one key ingredient in both is a hard-boiled egg. But don’t just chop it up haphazardly or throw it in whole. Use a precise egg slicer to instantly turn that egg into uniform sheets of tasty protein. Often after slicing an egg horizontally, I’ll turn it and slice it again vertically in order to get mini-pieces to garnish a salad. You can even use these tools to slice mushrooms and strawberries. Chefs Catalog offers a sturdy stainless steel version for $16.99, but you can also find a plastic version with steel blades for prices under $5.
Freshly Squeezed
Do you ever make recipes that call for 1 TBSP of fresh lemon or lime juice? It’s not enough juice to justify pulling out your electric juicer, yet squeezing by hand is such a pain. Enter the hand juicer. Appropriately sized for oranges, lemons or limes, these handy juicers require, well, just your hands! Place half of a citrus fruit (cut-side down) in the juicer and close it tight to extract all the fresh stuff, without letting the seeds wiggle their way into your recipe. This is especially handy when squeezing a bag of limes for a pitcher of mojitos in the absence of an electric juicer. Sur La Table offers three different sizes of hand juicers at varying prices.
The Crown Jewel
One of my kitchen prep pet peeves is slicing veggies when making scalloped potatoes or zucchini au gratin. I once had to thinly slice eight large potatoes by hand for a Tortilla Espanola and the task seemed interminable. Never again. My mandoline tops my kitchen gadget list, hands down. This baby will cut your work in half and make it look professional too! Once you attach a fruit or vegetable to the safe “pusher”, simply slide it back and forth over the cutting blade and voila, you’ve got perfectly sliced anything. You can easily adjust the thickness of your slices, and even get fancy and create julienne strips, ridge cuts and french fries. Mandolines usually fold down for easy storage and are sold by various Shopping.com merchants for a range of price points.
