Every time I hear about a Salad Shooter, I think of this Bloom County comic.
Phoot! Phoot! Phoot! 
Too bad my wife doesn’t post here. I can’t cook to save my life and my wife is an excellent cook, so not only do I buy these stupid things for her thinking I’m making her life easier, but since I can’t cook I have no idea how worthless they are until I find them at our next garage sale, unopened.
Making matters worse, she’s old school about kitchen gadgetry in general. She does almost all of her cooking with a single Global Chef Knife, (which I’m not allowed to touch anymore due to a DVD opening incident), and her Allcland pots and pans that I can’t use for popcorn.
The most recent one to receive the garage sale treatment was this.
Slap Chop, anyone? It’s never chopped anything cleanly for me. I hate it.
That’s one of the reasons I got it for my mom!
Our electric knife gets used once a year for the turkey. We could easily use a regular knife.
It’s pretty close to being a useless purchase. We won’t buy another one. I don’t mind the $18, it’s the wasted drawer space that bugs me.
And if the stone gets too cruddy, then it’s time for the oven’s self-cleaning cycle. Nothing’s living through that, and anything nasty gets turned to ash.
We have several around our house that see frequent use. I perfer hamburgers cooked on the Formman grill rather than a flat surface.
An electric can opener. My wife and I got one as a wedding gift and I think we’ve used it once or twice. It’s kind of pain to get the can and blade in position and for me it’s just quicker and simpler to use the manual opener.
Yup. I got a pizza stone in 1994, carried it with me from place to place as I’ve moved and always just plopped it into the bottom rack of each oven. It was a beige color when I got it. Now it’s black and slick as a well-seasoned iron pan. The instructions on the box when I got it expressly said not to ever use soap on it and if it needed to be washed to just use water and a nylon brush. I’ve never washed it, just scraped off when needed. I bake cookies on it, too. If nothing else, it really makes a difference in how evenly the oven box heats.
This has to be one of the sweetest and funniest posts ever.
I had a very VERY early iteration of the foreman grill. Had my first half burned half raw piece of meat on it. Tasty! How hard is it to have the plates heat evenly?
I think it was America’s Test Kitchen that said you really do need an electric knife for turkey carving and even if that’s all you ever use it for it was worth it.
What you do is put the colander on the serving bowl and let the water go into that. Prevents the pasta from coming into contact with a non-clean sink, and warms the serving bowl. Ta-da.
I can’t believe someone blasphemied rice cookers! :eek: You’ll pry my rice cooker out of my cold, dead hands. Perfect rice, every. single. time. A lot of times I will think that I haven’t put enough water in it, and I slowly open it when it’s done, fully expecting to find that it’s stuck like cement to the bottom and is a disaster, but yet, it’s never been not perfect. Love! And you can make other things in it, like risotto or rice pudding, or even pasta or potatoes! Plus, you can steam vegetables in the little basket on top! What’s not to like?
Place lid on pot. Place hands in oven mittens. Firmly grab pot. Take pot to sink. Move lid slightly off-place with non-dominant hand (the aceptable size varies with the size of the pasta, it’s smaller for spaghetti than for anything else I drain); place dominant thumb on edge of lid; place non-dominant hand on handle. Turn it against the side of the sink, so that the side helps support the weight (do it slightly to the side of you so you don’t give yourself an extra-hot bath if some water manages to jump).
And you don’t use colanders to do that, if you’re going to strain pasta off-pot you use a strainer! Colanders are used when what you really want to get is the liquid or when the solids are too small for a strainer. Or, in Middlebro’s words, “always use the right tool for the task”.
I don’t have anything against strainers and colanders in general terms, I used them all the time before going off to college and expect to use them again when my arms are too weak or my pulse too bad for my current techniques. If I was teaching a kid to cook, I’d teach them how to use strains and colanders.
I bought one of these at Target, and use it all the time. Were you trying to get the garlic out of the same opening you put it into? There’s a second opening further down; you open it, remove the blade thingy and extract the garlic. To clean it, run it (open) under water.
Anyway . . . my most useless gadget was something I bought back in the '70s. It was a little lucite press that you put a hard-boiled egg into, and it turns it into a cube. Why would anyone want cube-shaped eggs? Perhaps for building “egg-loos.”
I bought one of those eggcubers too. My father thought it was nifty. He said that he LOVED slicing cube shaped eggs, as the slices were…square. And I suppose that it would be good for packing in a school lunch. Especially if you do bento.
I used the bigger opening, but there would always be bits that wedged themselves into various crevices in the sides - there seemed to be holes designed specifically to catch garlic.
I have an electric knife for the turkey. It also works quite well for thin slices of homemade bread.
However, last year I was at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving and sliced the turkey. Ever since I could remember my family used the same avocado green electric knife at Thanksgiving. This year, however, it was the Henckels 10" slicer, which he had sharpened that week, just for the turkey. Cut like butter. I mean a thin slice of turkey breast with crispy skin came off like it was sliced before I touched it. You don’t actually need an electric knife, but if you don’t have one, your knife needs to be really sharp.
Woah, woah, back up a second there.
I’d use the colander for draining pasta, and the strainer for pouring my stock through to get the gross bits out. The strainer, of course, sits on top of a large bowl or another pot to catch the stock.
I do also use the pot lid method, but only for very small amounts of pasta, like a box of mac & cheese (don’t you judge me! :D). For a pound of pasta, I just don’t have the strength to do it without looking like the moron in the infomercials and ending up with pasta in my sink. But then again, I have pretty heavy pots and use a lot of water.
I was just scrolling down to say this. I get a hankerin’ for fresh-cooked bread every few weeks, so I set the bread machine to have a loaf ready by breakfast time. Then, pop it out, and use the electric knife to slice it up while it’s still hot. Nothing finer. Apart from that and the turkey, the electric knife doesn’t see any use, but I reckon that’s enough to justify its existence.
Edit: oh yeah, about colanders. We have this OXO colander, and it’s awesome. If you open the legs wide, it hangs on the sides of the sink over whatever’s below, which is handy when there are already dishes in the sink.
Missed my window for editing a second time. I was gonna add:
For small batches of pasta, though, I use a crescent strainer, although mine’s plastic and sort of a double-crescent, so you can use it right- or left-handed. It’s easier than the lid, in my opinion, and seems to get more water out as well.