You know those gifts. The ones that come from someone you don’t know well and are often regifts that get passed around. They usually include food or are related to food and tend to collect dust and get thrown out (if they aren’t given away to someone else). But sometimes they can be really useful.
For example, we received one year from a friend of a friend a box labeled “Ice Cream Sundae shoppe” and it contained bowls, an Ice Cream scoop and small bottles of Fudge and caramel etc. The food was gross and the scoop was cheap and useless but the bowls were surprisingly nice. To this day I still use them.
Have you ever gotten one of these disposable gifts and found it to be good?
About twenty years ago or more, I got an ice cream maker from my sister. It’s a tiny thing that holds about a cup and a half. It’s made like those old slushy mugs. The drum, which you put in the freezer, is a two-walled affair with some liquid between the walls. It fits in a square plastic holder and the crank goes through the lid. I still use it several times a year, and the drum just lives in the freezer.
Many years ago I got a set of kitchen utensils from someone, inexpensive plastic things that got tossed pretty quickly except for one spoon/ladle that is absolutely perfect to use when I add dry ingredients to my stand mixer. It’s had a place in the kitchen drawer for about 25 years now.
When I retired my daughter gave me a cheesemaking kits. To this day, I make two kinds of cheese reguarly (about every two weeks): mozzarella and ricotta. I realize you didn’t mean literally cheesy, but that’s what this was.
Not cheesy at all, but she also gave me a book of soup recipes, which I use several times a year.
One year for either my birthday or Mother’s Day, I don’t recall which, my daughter gave me a gag package of really tacky stuff - cheap plastic jewelry, a unicorn key ring, a few other things I’ve forgotten, and a pink purse/tote bag thing with line drawings of skulls on it.
As tacky and ugly as the tote, it’s the perfect size for taking small knitting projects in the car when we have long road trips. It has a little pocket inside for scissors and small notions, and because it’s soft, I can cram a lot of yarn in it. And since it’s bright pink, I can always find it!
In kindergarden my daughter’s class had a Santa Shoppe where they could purchase gifts for their parents. She got me a coffe cup with “I Love My Dad” on it. Twenty five years later and I’m still using it.
I have a book of vegetable and fruit recipes I received as a white elephant gift. The gifter grabbed it from one of those 99 cent bins of remainder books, not looking through it at all, just thinking a fruit and veggie cookbook was kind of funny.
The thing is, the recipes in the book are great! And now that I have a vegetarian DIL, I have made several of them when she’s dining with me and she’s enjoyed them, too.
So yes, this is one cheesy gift I won’t be regifting – just handing down to the DIL one of these days.
My husband gave it to me as a joke. The sentiment was “you have everything for the kitchen you could possibly need, here is this ridiculous addition!”
But we use it all the time. It hard boils perfectly without me having to pay any attention to it. We used the poaching trays once and they were awful, but we hard boil eggs in it constantly.
Several times; often clothing. My most favorite pair of ugly socks had to have gone through several hands before I got them judging by the remaining tag from the store they had been purchased at. It had been closed for 7 or 8 years.