I know we already have an item on bread machines [and I think I saw one
on food dehydrators]...  

But I'd like to start an item on other food gadgets/machines/things-to-help-
us-cook-and/or-eat item.

So what kind of gizmos or gadgets wouldn't you live without??  

205 responses total.

 I saw an infomercial for a pasta machine. It's really neat! Just dump in
the ingredients, turn it on, and 2 minutes later, PASTA...

The only thing that really bugs me is that it was invented by Ron Popeil.

Back during Marriage #1, I had a pasta machine.  Used it about three times.
It was one of those hand cranked ones, and as I remember, the consistency
of the dough was absolutely critical to success (and it was very hard to
obtain a proper consistency).  Even so, the idea of making one's own
spaghetti and lasagna was awfully neat (and fun).
 
Two of my current favorite most-needed gadgets are a can opener and a
garlic press.

I have a pasta machine.  It's a set of attachments to my Cuisinart.  I
make pasta in it about 6 or 8 times a year.  It extrudes about 5 different
types of noodles.

The crockpot, unless we turn vegetarian -- about once a month it provides
the first cooking of pot roast, and about twice a year it makes carcass
soup.

"carcass soup"?  Sounds yummy...

She has such a way with words. ;-)

Appliances in the order they'd be thrown overboard if the
wagon was overloaded and we needed to cross the wide Missouri:
 1. The hand-held mixer
 2. The toaster
 3. The electric drip coffee maker
 4. The heavy duty Kitchen Aid mixer
 5. The bread machine (sniffles heard)
 6. The Cuisinart (hysterical sobs)

ah, but would you through the appliances overboard *first* or *last*
when you needed to lighten the wagon to cross the wide Missouri?

these days my favorite kitchen gadget is a big strainer.  no moving
parts, easy to clean, useful in practically every meal (eg.: for
washing beans, draining pasta, washing salad ingredients, squeezing
the liquid out of newly thawed frozen spinach, etc.) and it's reasonably
minimalistic.


Gratuitous Food Tip That Doesn't Belong In This Item: A great way to
beat the lines at Kroger's is to go there when everyone else is busy
mobbing the shopping malls to finish up their Christmas shopping.

Hey - I noticed the tip at the end of response #7 and realized it's
that time of the year again.

I just inherited a pasta maker.  Haven't had a chance to use it though.

Coolness!  Please keep us posted!

Hmmm, could be part of the makings of a party ....

We also have a hand-crank pasta maker, and never used it after
the first few times.  We recently got an electric one (yes, the
Popiel machine) and it's first-rate.  We use it all the time.

I couldn't live without our juice extracters.  The citrus one
we've had forever and it just keeps going and going...  The
other one we use for making apple juice, carrot juice, grape
juice, etc.  Washing and preparing the fruits and veggies
beforehand is time-consuming, and cleaning the thing is a
nightmare, but it's all worth it.

We have one of those hand-crank devices that cores, peels and
spiral slices an apple in ten seconds.  The kids love it more
than the adults.  I prefer the two-dollar metal gizmo you
press down on the apple and it cores it and slices it into
a dozen segments.  Works on pears, too.

For $40 at Williams-Sonoma I picked up a big stainless steel pot
with a steamer insert and a pasta cooking insert.  The latter
is basically a stainless-steel colander made to fit inside the
big pot.  You cook the pasta in it and then lift the whole thing
out to drain when al dente perfection has been achieved.  It's
the best (and curiously satisfying) method for cooking pasta
I know of.

Michael, I bought that same pot about six months ago.  I love it.
I also paid about fifteen dollars more. ;-(

I've wondered if extruded pasta comes out with anything near the same
texture as that made by rollers and cutters.  Whenever I've watched demos
the raw pasta looked somewhat gummy and fused. I have an Atlas hand-crank
pasta machine I seldom use because I no longer have a wide enough lip on
the kitchen counter to clamp it securely in place.  So instead I've
been trying different imported dry pastas.  All cooked in this great
stainless steel pasta pot.

Well, my mom used to make pasta by forming a kind of 
volcanic atoll out of flour and breaking some egges into        
the middle of it.  Then she'd hand-knead the mess, adding
more flour as required, until it reached the desired
consistency.  Then she'd roll it into a flat sheet with
a special thin rolling pin, and put the flat sheet on
her "guitar," as she called it - a wooden frame with
about fifty steel wires stretched across it - and press
in down through with the rolling pin.  She'd hang the
resulting pasta on a rack to dry, or just toss it straight
into the boiling water.  (Ravioli and tortellini were
a whole different process.)  The pasta produced by our 
machine tastes very much like what la mia mama used to
serve us.  

Re the W&S pasta cooker:  I bought ours a couple of years
ago.  The ones I see in their store now have heavier
handles and are more expensive, which I assume is the
one you have.  Anyway, great pasta-minds think more or
less alike is what this proves.

I make homemade noodles every holiday...just mix flour, eggs, a pinch of salt
and about 2 tsps of hot water...roll as thin as you can...lay on a towel 
covered table to dry (only until slightly brittle on edges), roll dough 
into a tight tube and thinly slice...voila...ready for cooking!  No 
fancy machines or ingredients...just good homemade noodles!

Last weekend, my sister bought me a salad spinner as an early gift for
Chanukah.  She showed me the important salad spinner feature to look for:
a hole in the top where water from the faucet can go into the salad spinner
and reach the stuff inside.  Now I'm all excited about making lots of salad.
This should make it easier to feed clean green stuff to my guinea pigs, too.
I'd been under the impression that salad spinners were expensive electronic
gadgets.  This one isn't: it cost less than $10, and you crank it manually,
no electronics involved.  Cool!

I'm steadily less and less impressed by my new Air Bake cookie sheets.
1) They don't have good edges, so it's hard to get a grip on them with a
   pot holder.  Also, cookies could easily drip off the edges.
2) They're not non-stick.  In fact, they behave like they have a "stick"
   coating: the opposite of non-stick.
3) I worry about putting sticky aluminum right next to foods, because
   aluminum may be associated with Alzheimer's.
4) They're non-standard sized, so they don't fit my oven very well.
5) Tried-and-true recipes are failing.  This might be part of the process
   of me adapting to a new oven, I'm not sure.  But stuff is needing to bake at
   a higher temperature for a much longer time than the recipe calls for, and
   even then it's coming out underbaked.


Does anybody out there have an oven thermometer I could borrow to check my
oven with?

I thought aluminum had been absolved?

the air-bake pans are good for things that would normally burn....shortbread,
lebkuechen, and the like...for the rest, they are no good....(at least that
what i've noticed...:)

Re 18: I think the aluminum question is still under debate.  Nobody knows what
causes Alzheimers.  Patients with Alzheimer's also tend to have a lot of
aluminum in their brains.  Evidence says that the aluminum in their brains
isn't the *cause* of Alzheimer's.  So presumably something else is both
causing Alzheimer's and also leaving aluminum in their brains.  But, 'til
someone figures out *what* causes Alzheimer's, I'm just as happy to stay away
from eating aluminum.

I got an Air Bake sheet not too long ago.  Haven't burned anything on it,
but it is a bit sticky.  For butter-laden cookies, no prob, but it definitely
needs lubricants for drier foods...I had to chisel a pizza off it!  Anybody
have recommendations for more general-purpose baking sheets?

Mrs. McPoz does pizza on a flat stone sheet about 1/2" thick.  Great crusts.

You can borrow my oven thermometer, Valerie.  Every apartment has had a
different oven temperature problem...  

I guess i am going to try and revitalize this item.  

My favorite is the crock pot  (pop in your meat right before worka nd then
dinner is ready when you get home!), the Kitchen Aide (sob) - how i yearn for
my own!!!!

Heh, one year I began a list of *useless* electric appliances.  I was
wondering how many perfectly good had appliances had been converted to
electricity.  Lets see, there was the electric vegetable peeler, the electric
can opener, the electric carving knife, the electric french fry cutter, the
electric mixer (the kind you use in a glass to mix up diet powders), the
electric frying pan, the electric toaster (yes kiddies, toast can be made
range-top with this cute little pyramid deally), the electric wok, the
electric deep fryer (3 sizes), the electric toaster-oven, the electric coffee
maker, the electric tea-kettle, the electric ice-tea maker, the electric
ice-cream maker, the electric juicer......

What got me was the sheer number of single-use gadgets that took space on your
counter, as opposed to the manual versions that fit nicely into a drawer. 
I think it was the vegetable peeler that set me off.  Anybody else spotted
new and unusually conversions to electricity?

   heck, you can make toast over a burner or a fire with a toasting
fork (my mother gathered a somewhat impressive collection of them when
we lived in england).  electric coffee grinders strike me as being
somewhat silly, even though coffee grinders themeselves are single-use
gadgets which don't exactly fit in drawers.

I've actually seen those electric mixers that you dip into a glass to mix up
diet powders, used to a useful purpose.  A busy mom whose kids I used to
babysit for, used to take a piece of food from the family's dinner, drop it
into a plastic glass, dip a hand-held blender into it, and voila -- instant
home cooked baby food.  This worked especially well with things like yams.

Ya, it could all be done by hand, but it did actually help make things easier
when dealing with a baby and a toddler underfoot.

For that matter, there are plenty of occasions when many of those electric
appliances are pretty reasonable.  I hate electric can openers, myself,
but people with arthritis can have trouble with hand-operated ones, just
as an example.

I use my immersion blender far more often than I use my Cuisinart.  If my
food processor broke tomorrow I wouldn't replace it. 

I would replace my bread machine, my Braun immersion blender, the coffee
maker, the toaster, the waffle maker, the microwave, and the crockpot.
Kitchen Aid mixers *never* die so what's to discuss.

My sister's pride & joy is a battery-powered pepper grinder - just press
the button, and...
I think it's the depth of decadence.

Re 29: I wanna have a kid, just so I have an excuse to go out and buy an
immersion blender.  Those are sooooo cool!


My mom once bought her parents one of those gizmos that scrambles an egg while
it's still inside its shell.  The idea was that you could then make hard
boiled scrambled eggs.  But it never worked very well: The egg would come
oozing out the hole where the scrambler had gone in, long before it solidified
enough to stay where it belonged.

Immersion blenders are inexpensive (my Braun was just under
$20) and worth it for soup preparation alone.  I'm also
fond of fruit-whipped summer drinks.  Anyhow, then you'll
already have it when any babies arrive and you'll be free
to buy other things like strollers and car seats and diapers
and toys and babysitters and Seuss books and so on. ;-)

Re #30:  we have a battery-powered pepper mill, a black one holding black
peppercorns.  They plan is to get a second (white one) for white peppercorns.

(Anyone have a couple-month-old baby that valerie could take care of for a
week?  It sounds like it would be a *VERY* educational experience for her...)

     I have no doubts that Valerie would be an excellent mother. I think she
>would handle it well, like she does everything else.

Yea, but cool household gadgets would drop down her priority list like
bricks off the Royal Gorge Bridge.

(Valerie did vast amounts of babysitting back when she was a teenager, so she
does actually have some idea about what parenthood would be like.)

(Jim, you're a sweet person!)

I see that since this item was alive, valerie became a parent twice 
over.

resp:31 Another Ron Popeil invention, which leads me to ask, re: 
resp:1 -- what the hell is wrong with Ron Popeil inventions?  I've 
seen the infomercial for the pasta/sausage maker, and I think it's 
pretty good.

For meat lovers, I think his Showtime Rotisserie looks pretty good.  I 
had a chance to look it over at Target, and I think it seems pretty 
handy for cooking small meats.  It's very small and compact, it 
doesn't use much energy, and you can steam veggies on top.  Seems like 
it would be a great addition to an apartment.

resp:24 For some reason, I never did get hooked on a crock pot, maybe 
because I don't like to add ingredients and come back later.  I like 
to cook fast and be done, so--

My pressure cooker (item:191) and my veggie/rice steamer are two *big* 
appliances I just cannot do without.  Pressure cooking is just the 
bomb, since it's so efficient.  I can cook small meats easily, such as 
a small whole chicken, a beef roast, or some cuts of pork.  Small 
whole chickens can go as low as 59 cents a pound on sale here, and 
it's easy for me to cook them down this way.  I can do chicken curry 
easy with the pressure cooker and the veggie/rice steamer.

I love juice, so I'd have to keep my Juiceman Jr. juicer, and my 
steamer juicer.  I use the latter when Concord grapes are in season, 
and then I go harvest them at my in-laws and my folks.

To pressure cook brown rice, add 1.3 cups water per cup rice, bring to 15
pounds, and turn off.  Wait about 20 minutes.  I have seen the steamer
juicers in use.  We use a squeezo or victoria gadget for raw juice.  Lucky
you to have family with grapes!

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