Ooh, ooh - me! me! I’m sorry that it doesn’t work for you, but I love these things. I’ve got two, my old one and a new one. If you don’t want yours anymore (and ever find it again), I’d buy it off you. I mean, don’t go to great lengths looking for it or anything, but if you happen upon it and want to get rid of it, I’m your gal.
I didn’t buy them - they were gifts - but I’ve got two smaller food processors. One’s a one cup dealie, the other’s a small two/three-ish cup one that came in a blender/food processor twofer. Both were wedding presents. I don’t use either - if I have stuff to cut up or cheese to grate, I use my knife or cheese grater. Lots less to clean and easier to pull out, too. I’ve thought about getting a full on food processor, but I think it’d be the same fate - I’d just never use it. So it’s not worth it for me to purchase one.
Any tool made out of hard cheap plastic–guaranteed that the blade will go dull quickly and the instrument will break with any force.
Pizza stone–they begin to stink unless kept spotless. I ditched it and went with 2 18 x 18" porcelain tiles wrapped together in extra thick alum foil. That worked well. However, I now just use a preheated cookie sheet and the oven at 550, then broil the top for about a minute. The thin metal transfers heat qucikly to the dough, making a crisp crust, and it reheats quickly, too, for the next pizza to come. (This is for homemade pizza, not frozen or leftover.)
Someone bought us a George Foreman grill several years ago, and I did try it, but with a handful of ravenous teenagers to feed, it took forever to cook enough burger/chops/whatever to feed them all. Now that it’s pretty much down to the old man and me for a lot of meals, maybe I should look into it again.
I don’t understand the pizza stone hate - I keep mine in the oven all the time so it evens the heat out. Works great. Cooks Illustrated recommended it. Keep it clean? Why? Just knock the solid bits off with the spatula, the thing gets heated all the time.
Rice Cooker. It’s too hot and if you cook the rice for as long as the recipe book (that comes with it) calls for, your rice will be burnt to a crisp on the bottom. And mushy and sticky on top. It does not cut off automatically, which sort of defeats the purpose, IMO, of inventing an appliance specifically for a single function. If it doesn’t have a timer and cut itself off when the rice is ready and I still have to stand there and monitor to make sure it doesn’t burn, then why not just cook my rice in a friggin’ saucepan with a nice tight lid? Waste of money.
I also hate my waffle iron because my waffles do not come out crisp. I hate soggy waffles. This particular waffle iron makes square waffles. That’s bad, because the heating element is in the center and the corners of the waffles do not brown or crisp at all. That should be the best part. I’m currently shopping for a high-quality round waffle iron, but I don’t want to spend the money unless I can turn out a couple batches of perfect crispy golden brown waffles.
BTW, I love my Foreman grill, my bread maker, my blender, my coffee grinder, and my toaster oven. I use the mandolin slicer to make onion rings, but for most other slicing jobs, a sharp knife will do. I threw away my garlic press years ago. Completely pointless and difficult to clean.
Oh, you need a good fuzzy logic rice cooker. Does its own thing, knows when it’s done (you don’t have to tell it anything, it just knows), keeps rice warm as long as you want it. One of my favorite appliances.
Also, get a better waffle iron, 'cause I love that too, although I don’t use it very often.
Dumping boiling water over my hand is not my idea of fun. Colanders have all sorts of uses, not just for pasta. I can’t imagine rinsing vegetables through cloth, for one. I hate those puny zesters, but they’ll never take away my Micro-Plane grater, which doubles as a zester when it’s not grating Parmesan. Zesting a lemon or orange with a knife is fine if you’re only doing one or two, but at Christmas-cookie time it’s a different story.
For me, rice cookers are a waste of money. I do just fine with a pot, and it comes out perfectly every time.
My rice cooker is golden and I wouldn’t trade it for the world! It makes my rice perfect every time, light and fluffy. But it has an auto-shutoff timer and it keeps the rice warm afterwards, too.
I am shocked at people who don’t use a colander for their pasta. Your hand? A cloth? Great way to get burned! Anyway I have one of those pots now that has a colander self-contained so I just lift it out. And I have a sieve to wash fruit in, too.
The pizza stone is a fine buy, but it takes a long time to get it up to heat. What I’ve been using for the last year or so (and which I used yesterday) is a cast-iron pizza pan. A simple cast iron pan works fine, too, except the ridges are a little high and can be a little bit of a pain to work with. The way I work it is to heat it on the stovetop for like 10 minutes to a very high temp, then throw the pizza dough on, top it, let it cook over high heat for about 1-2 minutes, then finish in a preaheated oven under the broiler or in a very hot oven. You can can actually get that beautiful brown-black flecking on the underside of pizza. I haven’t been able to get quite that degree of browning from a pizza stone.
I have the griddle top from our old Jenn-Air grill. Cast iron and coated, it works great on the gas grill and I’m sure it would work equally well in the oven for pizza.
Foreman Grill – I’ll weigh in with the others. It’s kind of a cool press, but damned if I’m going to clean it after cooking meats and shit on it. I gave mine away a long time ago, but I guess if I had it, I’d probably use it for bachelor-style dagwood sandwiches. Shit. I guess I wish I still had mine.
So, better guess, also mentioned earlier – electric coffee maker. People when I was starting out were always trying to buy me shit, and couldn’t fathom how to live without one. Fuck that shit, give me some hot water and a press pot. I could kill the next electric coffee maker I see, which means now, since I’m housesitting, so I’ll see you alls later.
Props to Chefguy – rice is better made with a good pot and some fire. And I eat it every day.
I don’t even know how to describe this gadget. It’s a plastic funnel with a snap-on lid on the wide end and a grinding crank on the other. I though it would have been useful for grinding sesame seeds or something, but it could barely grind water. I never did find a use for it. I have no idea what its intended use is, as the only label on it at the store was the price tag.
Colander is a good one. I have a super-nice SS one, but I never, ever use it. Add to that my springform pan, 20qt stock pot. How often do you make stock? Once per annum, if you demi-glace it? How often does a bachelor make a cheesecake? Never? But it’s nice to have. I’m hung up on the utility thing, I guess, more than the PUA poon thang.
I have both a toaster oven, and a toaster. The toaster gets used, the toaster oven does not. Why? Because I have had toaster ovens catch fire on me twice (luckily I have a kitchen fire extinguisher, it was required for the first fire - the second one I was able to blow out the fire). I kept them clean (the first toaster oven was ruined by its fire), so I have no idea why the first toaster oven went up in flames - the second time wasn’t as drastic, but still odd - some wax paper on a tray in the oven (holding the food to toast) ignored the laws of physics and caught fire, even without touching anything that would ignite it.
Hence, bagels and toast in the toaster, pizza in the microwave, and the toaster oven is just there for decoration…
When I first moved in with MrWhatsit, he had this weird chopping jar thing. It was a small glass jar with a lid that had a hole in it through which a little plunger fit. The plunger had an X-shaped blade at the end of it. The idea was that you put a food in it that you wanted to chop, closed the lid, and then plunge plunge plunge, you chopped it all up.
I’ve been pretty good at avoiding most gadgets. My tiny tiny kitchen prevents that. Probably the most pointless was an electric can opener. It was one of those small ones that you put on the can and then it moves around it. It was slow, and it stopped working after about a month.
One thing that is a total uni-tasker and most people will see as pointless but I still love is my Pizzazz. Yes, I could just use the oven, but this thing cooks frozen pizza perfectly in half the time.
