Kitchen Gadgets

There’s a kitchen gadget meme floating around, one of those long lists of items where you bold if you use the gadget, italicize it if you don’t, strikethrough gadgets you got rid of, color blue if it broke, color red if it started a fire, change font to Wingdings if you don’t know what the gadget is…

It got me thinking about gadgets I have loved and lost.

My bread machine comes to find first. When I lived in Boston I started baking my own bread–it was tasty, cheap, and therapeutic. Then I moved to a horrible spider-infested basement apartment in Maryland with no kitchen. It came with a sink, an electric burner, and an electric griddle. Maybe a microwave unless I bought that. J, being an awesome then-boyfriend, got me a bread machine.

That bread machine got a lot of use for years. If you’ve ever heard J or me joke about fish bread, that’s from the instruction manual for the timer section–it warned not to use the timer if you were making bread with perishable ingredients like milk, eggs, or fish. I never did find a fish bread recipe.

The bread machine evenually entered an old age where the kneading part worked and the baking part didn’t, which made the whole come home to hot fresh bread thing not work any more. So it’s no longer with us.

Then there’s the garlic press, which one day simply snapped as if I had suddenly been given super strength. We haven’t replaced it, even though we use a lot of garlic. Chopping isn’t difficult, and knives are easier to clean than the garlic press was. Maybe if we replaced it I could find out if I really do have a garlic-press-breaking superpower.

I also killed a vegetable peeler, but at least that one broke at a joint, and we have another one. Likewise the cheap popover pan that still works as long as you don’t turn it upside down and dislodge the no-longer-secured popover hole thingies.

I can’t really think of a kitchen gadget that I want and don’t have. Maybe that electric griddle from my old apartment. Mmm, pancakes.