MSN Shopping, September 28th, 2007
Food Prep Gadgets
One summer of my misspent youth, I worked as a galley slave at an island inn off the New England coast, beginning each day with a peeler in hand and an inexhaustible supply of potatoes. Even at the time, this seemed disappointingly low-tech, but then why would you need a fancy gadget when you had a kid you were paying $150/week plus room and board? Still, the inescapable fact is that, unless everything you eat is frozen or take-out, some slicing, shredding, peeling, bruising, chopping, crushing and other culinary violence is required. Enter the food processor (just a Vegematic with a college education), the mandolin, food mill, citrus squeezer, cherry-pitter, garlic press, lemon zester, melon baller, oyster shucker, salad spinner and a host of other tools designed to perform a single, onerous task more efficiently and often, more elegantly. Once you’ve prepped your ingredients, weigh them with one of the latest kitchen scales that calculate calories and nutritional information. And yes, you can also find a hand-cranked apple/potato peeler, but unless you're up to your eyes in pies and fries, that's just probably overkill.
Cooking Gadgets
Before the discovery of fire, it must have taken a fair bit of chewing to get through Sunday dinner. Even afterward, recipes were still on the basic side, mostly amounting to "spear, singe, spit, sear and swallow." The development of stoves allowed for an increasing degree of control and subtlety in cooking, culminating in today's Viking ranges so beloved by foodies and spacious enough to serve as a home for the typical Cro-Magnon man and his family.
But technology hasn't stopped there. In fact, there are more devices designed for a particular style of cooking on the market today than your grandmother had pots and pans. The first pressure cooker was invented in France in 1681. While it substantially reduced cooking times, it was unfortunately prone to exploding and democratically distributing lethal shards of hot steel among all members of the kitchen staff irrespective of class or position. Today's are safer by magnitude, though many are needlessly wary.
Electric rice cookers, which double as vegetable steamers, keep your basmati fluffy while deep fat fryers keep your tempura shrimp and fried clams crispy. Too cold to barbeque? Fire up one of the ubiquitous new generation of indoor grills (Need cooking advice? Ask a World Heavyweight Champion boxer.) And the once humble crock-pot your mom used to make her famously unpleasant Tuna Surprise has been reborn as the high-tech slow cooker.
Specialty Gadgets
Granted, most gadgets by their nature are designed to perform just one function well. It's more difficult to defend yourself with an electric can opener than with the manual variety and you'll be hard-pressed to find another use for an egg topper. (Hybrid gadgets like the egg and muffin toaster are the exceptions to the rule.) However, I think therein lies the charm for the more eclectic sorts of kitchen helpers. Take the bread machine, for example. You might think, with today's abundance of bakery-fresh artisan breads, a bread machine would be as useful as a crème brulee torch in an oxygen tent. But, if you can't immediately appreciate the appeal of a bread machine, chances are you never owned an Easy-Bake Oven or Thingmaker Creepy Crawler set as a kid and never experience the thrill of turning goop into — well, whatever.
Similarly, it's not hard to find fresh gourmet pastas in any grocery store, but until you've turned the crank on a pasta maker, you'll never know the almost prurient pleasure of watching it erupt with delicate ribbons of starch. And then to dry it, you drape it over the back of every chair in your house like some culinary Christo. But I digress. Let's just say Ben and Jerry don't deserve to have all the fun. Get your own damn ice cream maker.
Cleaning Gadgets
Cooking is a messy job and, with servants so hard to come by and keep these days, the task of cleaning up usually falls on the chef. Thankfully, advances in technology formerly only imagined by the creators of The Jetsons have led to robotic marvels like the Roomba vacuum and the Scooba floor mop — arguably the greatest victories over domestic drudgery since the dishwasher. They’re effective, fun to watch and endlessly entertaining to your pets.
Though requiring more active participation on your part, the steam mop cleans up those minor disasters much faster and more thoroughly than a Senate ethics investigation — and without using toxic chemicals. You can also save yourself a few strolls to the garbage can with a trash compactor. The newest models are much more streamlined and refined than their ancestors and no longer sound like earth moving equipment.
Storage Solutions
Of course every extra gadget you buy needs somewhere to go when the work is done. Since they tend to eat up counter space and other prime kitchen real estate, it’s worth re-thinking where and how you stash your stuff. Fortunately, you can stop well short of a kitchen remodel by exploring a few creative alternatives in the way of pantry and drawer organizers, pot and stemware racks and kitchen carts. Beyond that, I’ve found a couple of handy innovations in kitchen waste management. Separating the trash from recyclables doesn’t have to have you marching all over the house. Look into one of the pull-out recycling bin/trash can combos. And a wall-mounted plastic bag holder makes it easy to re-use your grocery bags for trash — feed them into the top and pull them from the bottom as needed. (That also offers an answer to the “Paper or plastic?” question. ) Granted, none of this stuff is as sexy as a fully-automated espresso machine or 1-minte drink chiller, but then neither is a cluttered kitchen.
