Empty Inkwell

A few nights ago, I was brows­ing through my new Rival Slow-Cooker cook­book (yes—I bought a cook­book solely devoted to Crock-pot recipes—I have that much faith in them). As I was skim­ming the pages, decid­ing what recipes I wanted to pick up ingre­di­ents for at the store, I came across a recipe for stuffed chicken. It looked good and sounded deli­cious, so I started to read the ingredients/cooking direc­tions, and saw that it called for a meat ten­der­izer to flat­ten the chicken. It noted that the back of a skil­let would also work if you didn’t have a meat ten­der­izer. I was so pleased with the fact that I not only knew what a meat ten­der­izer was, but that I even had one.

My meat ten­der­izer (that I have yet to use) got me think­ing about all those ran­dom kitchen gad­gets—the ones that get used on extremely rare occa­sions (or some­times not at all), but for one rea­son or another, you feel the need to have them. So I sur­veyed my own ran­dom kitchen gadgets.

I can hon­estly say that I don’t even know what some of the items in my uten­sil drawer are. I’m not the great­est cook—nor am I very adven­tur­ous in the kitchen—so while I can’t say that all of the attention-deprived uten­sils in my drawer can be clas­si­fied as “ran­dom”, here are a few of the yet-to-be-used gad­gets (that I was able to iden­tify) tucked away in my kitchen, wait­ing for their day to cook, cut, bake, or do what­ever they’re meant to do (I don’t know why, but ever since Toy Story, I feel the need to per­son­ify any and every non-living thing—and/or refer to them as a “he” or “she”. Is that weird?).

Meat Ten­der­izer
Zester
Cit­rus Peeler
Egg Sep­a­ra­tor (two of them—and I don’t eat eggs)
Melon Baller
Egg Holder (I think, but I really don’t know what the point is?)
A mea­sur­ing cup-looking thing with a hole in it (not a fun­nel, but I have one of those, too. maybe it’s a mini-funnel?)
Sur­pris­ingly, I don’t have a gar­lic press.
But I do have every type and size of spoon and spat­ula imag­in­able: slot­ted spoons, plas­tic spoons, wooden spoons, rub­ber spat­u­las, spat­u­las with holes, spoons with holes, spoons with short han­dles, spoons with long han­dles… that’s not an exhausted list, but I think you get the idea. (And I always go for the same one or two… favorites, I guess. Is that also weird?)

So what’s the point? Can’t say I really have one. Nor can I say that I’m against hav­ing all these semi-useless gad­gets. Actu­ally, if I had to pick a side, I’m pro-random gad­get. I’m a sucker for “sets”, or things that gen­er­ally seem to go together. And I guess hav­ing a drawer-full of uten­sils (used or not), com­pletes my lit­tle kitchen set. (Weird, again.) And in defense of some of these lonely items… how often can you really use them? I mean, are you really mak­ing fancy fruit sal­ads so often that you need your trusty melon baller on a weekly basis? Prob­a­bly not, but when you need it—it’s nice to have, right?

Am I alone? Or are your draw­ers full of this stuff, too? Do you use them? Do you have any ran­dom gad­gets that I didn’t mention?

Crazy me, I know…
From my kitchen to yours: happy cook­ing and good night.