f13.net

I was inspired by Sky.  Things that take up space in my kitchen and offend me with their supposed functionality:

Giant Red Rubber Spoon with Measuring Marks
First off, you're rubber.  Second, you're enormous.  Third, I have steel measuring spoons.

Holiday Silicone Spatula/Spoon Thing
You're too thick to be a rubber spatula, which I have a couple of already.  You're too shallow to be a spoon.  Why do you exist?

Plastic Scoops
I know I must have used you guys for something once, but now you live in the drawer and my canisters all have scoops inside them.  The fuck?

Enormous Kebab Skewers
I just don't make kebabs, and if I did they would not be eighteen inches long.

Steel Spatula with Rounded Edge
How are you going to scrape anything when you have a round edge?

Twelve-inch Roll of Aluminum Foil
My cooking sheets are all larger than you.

Mixer with Badly-Placed Trigger
Thanks, now I have gingerbread house frosting all over my kitchen.

A Breadmaker. I used it once and realized that "homemade" bread sucks ass for making sandwiches. I'll stick to the local bakery thanks.

A Crockpot. I want to use it, but all the slowcooker recipes I find are for ribs or chili or BBQ, which I can't really eat all the time due to the health content.

A tiny cheese grater. It's like the size of a notecard. Seriously, what purpose could this serve that my larger one can't?

A Food Processor. I like chopping by hand. I thought I might need one, but I've yet to use it.

Sounds to me like all of this could be fixed with a well placed woman (specifically, in the kitchen).

And yes, my wife uses most of those things for some reason or another, but she also knows how to make more than 2 or 3 meals (unlike myself). The crockpot is awesome for all kinds of stuff (pasta, chili, etc) - just get a good cookbook for slow cookers. Breadmaker is also awesome, nothing like fresh cinnamon raisin bread or herby bread to go with your lasagna. Food processor is used for things like chopping nuts or blending stuff for soups.

I agree with Yegolev's post though, especially about the aluminum foil.

The wife wouldn't go for that.

/agree that food processor is overkill, but a few years back I purchased a Cuisinart chopper (less space/size than full food processor) and I still use it all the time.

Also, I love my grind & brew coffeemaker — just pour the beans in and press the button and presto, better coffee than you can get at Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts…

Gadgets I could lose:

* deep fryer
* crockpot
* microwave

I'll agree with that! I only use a microwave for popcorn and the crappy one I have is totally worthless and doesn't pop my popcorn worth crap! I don't eat leftovers so what else do I need a microwave for?

On the side of good kitchen gadgets, get one of these: Hot Water Dispenser (http://www.amazon.com/Zojirushi-CD-LCC30-3-0-Liter-Electric-Dispensing/dp/B00009K3TE)

The herb slicer. Second attempt. First was an awful half-clamshell design that food would get stuck in and I could never get clean. This one is smaller, like a little roller with a handle. So not as much food will get stuck and I will still never get it clean. I'm betting on the knife.

Mini food processor. Got this a few years ago. Maybe I just don't understand it's usage. It's like a cup capacity, I made pesto in it once. Anything else turned into mush. Mush I couldn't clean out. The knife won this battle.

I'm tempted to put silicone basters on here. I've had one a year now and I like my old brush-style better. Yes, I have to spend more time trying to clean it, it never gets as clean as I want (I'm a kitchen clean freak I think), so I end up throwing them out and buying new ones. Works for wooden spoons, too, they're all cheap. Got two new silicone basters for xmas, I'll give them a shot.

Plastic pasta spork. I love this device, it's just cheap and poorly made. Starch sticks to the malformed extruded edges and is a bitch to clean off. My metal version sucks, too. Hmmm...need a silicone one mebbe.

Parallel wire rack. You fail. You are cheap and will be banished once I get my grid racks.

On Yeg's 12" foil. Another reason I hate cooking at my mother's house. She doesn't grasp the foil thing. There is only one kind of foil. The Reynold's Heavy Duty WIDE foil. Reynolds actually made a super-heavy version of this stuff I haven't seen but once. That stuff could be used to build houses in Africa. Great stuff.

Microwave is actually good for veggies now that they come in steamer packs. I use it for emergency veggies and rice. You have to be intimately familiar with your unit, though, or it will be mushy nastiness. I also warm plates in it because my apartment is an icebox.

Thawing meat.  Melting butter.  Steaming veggies.  All without dirtying any pots or pans.  It's  :drill:.

My most useless kitchen gadget: rice cooker.  I have a perfectly good pot for that.

We have a little steamer thingy (http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Stainless-Steel-Expandable-Vegetable-Steamer/dp/B00004UE8F) that sits in a pot of water to steam veggies - we don't do frozen veggies (we have a garden and get organic veggie delivery to boot) so I don't what those steam pack thingies are - but if I was a bachelor I probably won't even use those. :P

I don't think you are suppose to thaw meat in the microwave? Or melt butter (if you are using it for baking)? Who knows, I've always been in the camp that things done in the microwave are sub-par somehow.  :oh_i_see:

Here's the benefit of a microwave oven: it's fast.  Even for things like sweet potatoes that you probably want to put in the real oven anyway, if you microwave them for ten-fifteen minutes first, they bake much faster.  If you don't reheat things then you lose some of the utility but you can reheat things using conventional tactics as well, so we're back to the speed thing.  Faster at: warming old coffee, melting butter, thawing meat, boiling/steaming vegetables, baking potatoes.

As for foil, I was recently turned on to parchment paper.  It's great for cookies and things that might stick to foil, but I'm sure I don't want to line a pan with it when broiling fish or somesuch.

I have a hot-water dispenser (http://www.amazon.com/InSinkErator-Instant-Dispenser-Stainless-Chrome/dp/B000H7416U/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1198784967&sr=1-11) and it is indeed awesome. [edit] Because it is even FASTER than a microwave!

Please to explain to me how butter melted in the microwave is different from butter melted in a pot.   :awesome_for_real:

Of course, I wouldn't try to grill a steak or bake a pie in a microwave, but I wouldn't make pancakes in a casserole dish either.

All of your gadgets are useful. Well, the breadmaker not so much (although sometimes I use mine for making dough).

Chili is healthy if you're willing to deviate at all from a cowboy's recipe.

Tiny cheese graters are great for zesting a lemon or grating nutmeg.

Food processor, oh how I love thee. Mine gets used all the time - get the slicer attachment and you're making your own cold cuts! It cuts butter into flour, saving tens of minutes making biscuit dough! It grates all my summer's zucchinis! Tapenade! Salsa! There will be times when you have only one hour to prep and complete ten different dishes for an ill-planned party, and you will hug your cuisinart.

Edit: oh rite I have useless things too.

Squeezy-orange juicer thingy. The juice squirts into my eye, and the orange remains only half-juiced. Give me a wooden reamer any day, thankyouverymuch.

And my electric grill really sucks ass since it lacks the btus to actually grill, it just burns all the delicious drippings into the inside of the drip tray. Fuck that noise. My cast-iron grill pan kicks ass.

Other things that I don't use often but LOVE having for just-in-case: a good waffle iron, a slow cooker, fondue pots, and a butane torch.

Melted butter is fine. My wife tries to get butter to that soft room temperature butter needs to be at for cookies by microwaving it. It doesn't work!

It's because she's a fucking amateur. Melt part way, then whip the cold into the melted and it's all softened and room temp. How can you people have grown up in the 80s without knowing how to use a fucking microwave?

Butternut squash goes quick in the microwave, too. Also, as Yeg alluded to, try baking a potato sometime without one.  I'll be eating mine in 10-15 minutes, see you in an hour and a half.

Our most useless device is our George Foreman grill knock-off.  It gets too damn greasy/ messy and shoots all of that grease-laden smoke around our house, so it doesn't get used but once in a blue moon.

Other than that, our 'most useless' device is our blender.  An old '70s 'Harvest Gold' model someone bought for us in a garage sale.  It leaks all over the damn place and the top doesn't fit quite right.  If I didn't like Pina Coladas so damn much in the summer I'd toss the fucker.

It's the only way to make oven fries with creamy interiors. Cut first, microwave with a lid to steam for 5 minutes, then drain off the water, spritz with cooking spray and hit with a dash of Lawry's (or bacon salt, I'd surmise). Toss and bake until browned. The insides will not be mealy and nasty.

I nuke cut small red potatoes for a bit before baking them into garlic rosemary potatoes. Same reason as VL just gave for the fries, makes the interior nice and creamy. I had a thing for rosemary this year.

(http://www.canadasportbike.com/forum/image.php?u=896&dateline=1083866855)

That's why I do the baking and she does the cooking 'round here. I was born in '80 but my mom was/is one of those health nut ppl so she never used a microwave (everything from scratch, cooked over a raw fire with a stick!) - my wife has no excuse.

25 seconds or so on 40% power on our microwave turns super cold butter to nice and soft very nicely, no mixing required!

Now if I could just find a use for all this softened butter...

The how-to-microwave tanget is unexpected and useful.  I melt butter in the microwave FAST.  It's about speed, so I nuke on HIGH for about nine to eleven seconds for 1/8 to 1/4 stick, then whip it up with a fork.

Krispy Kreme donut, HIGH for eight seconds.

Moon Pie, HIGH for maybe ten seconds.  Just watch it and when it triples in size, open the door.

I don't care what anyone says, steaming vegetables in the microwave kicks the ass of a stovetop steamer.

You can make mashed potatoes in the microwave by cubing your potatoes into a bowl and putting about 1/4 inch of water in the bottom.  Nuke for... uh... I forget, but probably twelve minutes.  That's almost how long it takes to nuke a potato in the skin, though, so maybe only six or eight minutes.

Back to the bothersome tools:

Microwave Bacon Tray
You were almost incredibly useful and you made delicious bacon fast.  Unfortunately you were unpossible to clean properly and you cracked.

Potholder Trivets
These bastards came in the collapsible bowl set but I forgot all about them.  Tried them tonight and, yes, they did work as potholders but I had the quandary of how to put the hot dish on the trivets I had my hands inside.  Good thing I have Corian countertops.  Also, why do you have magnets?  For hanging on the fridge?  More like for sticking to the interior of the microwave and disturbing my delicate grip on a hot dish.

Yegolev's pretty spot on, but all I could think of was:

It's not for the kitchen, you put that on the table so you can demonstrate to your foodie friends that this is a real block of parmesan, and let them self-grate.


Takes ten seconds in the microwave, plus it melts evenly and you can stop it at the pliable but not liquid stage.

Anyway microwaves are plenty useful for defrosting and pie warming.



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article2748804.ece