My sous vide precision cooker. Absolute control over meat temps and tenderizes even the toughest meats without cooking past your desired amount of doneness.
I wonder if your opener is defective. I’m not all that coordinated and I have never once had that problem. Sorry my recommendation made your wife hate you.
I have trouble figuring out how a simple can opener could work yet be defective but the other person upthread seemed to have the same problem. But please sleep ok, you did not cause my wife to hate me. Perhaps I slightly overstated the situation.
But remember when we all had electric can openers? Marvelous things, but like electric blankets sort of forgotten now. I remember when, maybe 40 years ago, I would put a can of cat food in the electric can opener and the whir would bring two loveable, overfed cats galloping into the kitchen. Talk about a Pavovian response. Loved those cats…
Bob and I had one of the type of can opener y’all are talking about. I could never figure out how to actually open a can with it, and got Bob to open cans for me. After he passed, I went back to my can opener, and gave away his.
You can stll buy electric can openers, it’s just that most people don’t want to sacrifice surface area in the kitchen.
An electric kettle. We bought it just to make tea and French press coffee, and have come to depend on it entirely. Not only for beverage making, but for any time we need some boiling water.
I almost forget that I can boil water in a pan or in the microwave when we stay at rentals and I want to make tea.
And a lot more canned goods nowadays don’t need a can opener because they have pull tabs. (Plus, I suspect that many of the things people used to buy canned are now more commonly bought either fresh or frozen.)
Screwdriver. Much more useful in some situations where I previously used a hammer.
Nah, you just needed a bigger hammer.
A stocking hat with a rechargeable light. My wife got me one for Christmas a few years ago because she still had a few bucks left in her budget for me. It ended up being my favorite and most-used gift she ever got me. Once the calendar turns to November, I pretty much have this thing on my head from the time I get out of the shower in the morning until I go to bed at night. Keeps my bald head warm AND I always have a flashlight just a tap away. I’ve found this is especially helpful as my 47-year-old eyes have a harder and harder time reading fine print; just pop the light on on my head and voila! I can read!
Bought a second one last year so I can have a casual-wear hat and dress hat. 
The only problem is, come spring, once it’s too warm to wear a stocking hat any more, I’m constantly tapping my forehead expecting to get a light to turn on.
This is me too but sorta sideways vs. your story.
I’ve had the traditional manual kind for decades with the cutter disc that cuts the top. New wife has used the peel-off-the-top-and-rim kind for equal decades; it’s a Zyliss.
I cannot get that damn thing to lock onto a can with less than 5 minutes fiddling then have to go around the can about 12 times before the top is fully cut off. Of course the opener pops off the can partway around each pass & need to be reattached after much fumbling. Again.
Then it takes 5 more minutes of fiddling to reconfigure it to grip the cut-off lid/rim so I can separate the two. Often spilling contents.
My old one worked perfectly every time with one quick easy pass around the perimeter. But it’s “unsanitary” and therefore verboten in our her kitchen. Sigh.
But she’s worth it.
I posted elsewhere about how our microwave exploded and had to be replaced. We wanted to build in some redundancy with out kitchen appliances, and so the replacement is one which is a microwave, an oven and a grill. So you can oven things, and microwave things and grill things - and combine functions. Er - why?
Woah, that’s odd. Never had anything like that before. Take Gözleme, for example - a Turkish stuffed bread, which is difficult to source so I have to bulk buy and freeze it. But how to defrost and warm it? An oven scorches the bread before the filling is warm; a microwave does a lovely job on the filling but turns the bread to a soggy mass. Simultaneous hot oven and low microwave power? Perfect in four minutes from frozen.*
We’ve had this fella for less than two weeks, and I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities. I may just start a thread to see if I can learn from other dopers experiences.
j
* - OK, we preheated the oven for a few minutes - but maybe you don’t need to do that. Dunno - yet.
I agree!
I have a Presto “Above All” can opener. It’s mounted underneath the upper kitchen cabinet in a convenient spot. Got it for a dollar or two from a yard sale about twenty years ago and it still works great.
Philips XL Hot Air Fryer. I thought my wife and I might use it every so often, but we now use it for virtually every meal. Last year, my wife bought a combination air fryer, convection oven, toaster thing to replace it on our (small) counter. Within two weeks, we had to figure out a way to make space to get the Philips unit back on the counter. The new unit couldn’t come close to the results we got from the true air fryer.
One reason it gets used all the time is that we do all of our vegetables in it…asparagus, brussel sprouts, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, peppers, etc. Of course, just like microwaves were invented to reheat pizza, air fryers are made to prepare tater tots.
Hate cleaning it, though.
Air fryers are ideal for heating pizza.
The microwave is fatal to any bread product.
You reheat pizza?
Unfortunately, pizza does not fit in the (real) air fryer. The other air fryer does OK with pizza, but it does dry it out a bit more than I like.
A real oven is out of the question.
The best way I’ve found to reheat pizza is in a skillet on a low temperature burner. Works great, and makes the crust nice and crispy. For some pizza, it’s better reheated than fresh.
That’s how I do it. Only worthwhile method IMO.
The good thing about pizza is that good pizza tastes good a good many ways. It’s good fresh-hot out of the oven, of course. But it’s also good fridge-cold or room-temp the next day. And, it’s also good reheated in the microwave (retaining the floppy texture) or reheated with an air-fryer or skillet (for a crisp crust). I like it all ways. I’m ambi-pizzarous.