For years now, the Onion Blossom Maker http://www.onionexpress.com/ has held first place in my affections as Silliest Small Kitchen Appliance or Gadget, but lo! a competitor looms on the horizon. It is the Presto Pizzazz Pizza Oven, with exclusive Roto-Bake Technology. http://www.presto-net.com/pizzazz_alt.html
Better living through science…It’s billed as “perfect for dorm or cabin”. Oh, right, whenever I go up to the cabin for a weekend to get closer to nature, I need to be able to cook a frozen pizza.
I give it about 8 minutes before some enterprising college kid finds something nasty and drug- or booze-related that you can do with this thing, and colleges all over the U.S. ban them in dorms.
I can think of two right off the bat, related to beer-making, but I won’t post them because I am a Good Person who wouldn’t dream of advocating the manufacture of hooch in dorm rooms. [ insert emoticon of extreme tee-totaling piety ] :rolleyes:
You beat me to it with that Super Laser Pizza Carousel Oven Cooker Thingy. I can see buying a highly specialized food cooker if you were a gourmet and wanted some kind of special souffle oven or something, but frozen pizza?! Of course, this comes from the same kind of marketing geniuses who imagined that hundreds of millions of people were lamenting the fact that they couldn’t fit a fishing rod in their pocket, so no surprise.
Hell, I’ve always thought electric can openers were pretty damn silly. Who is so lacking in energy that they can’t open a little can the old-fashioned way, for Pete’s sake?
I’ll vote for the potato chip slicer (which I have). I mean, really, just how often do you have a snack food craving and say “HEY! I’ll just get some whole potatoes, wash (and optionally peel) them, shove them through the slicer, soak them in cold water, and then haul out the FryDaddy to cook 'em up, then drain, cool and salt them!!”
I bought a garlic slicer which is a complete waste of time and money. Supposedly if I put the slices back in and slice again it will give me shreds. Life is too short, it’s easier to use a knife.
I love my salad spinner! Nothing worse than wet lettuce! Unless it is gritty lettuce…
Salad spinners are probably cool, but look like they’d be a bitch on storage space. In summer I pop the washed greens into a clean pillow case and centrifuge 'em on the back porch. In winter, I just dry 'em off w/ a towel.
And this is from a salad snot: wash 'em well, dry 'em better and store them cold and dry before tossing.
The most inane kitchen gizmo… I made the Ex take this when he plundered the kitchen: the Presto Jiffo Hot Dog Cooker. It was a cheesey adaptation of a “hot rollers” hair gizmo, I swear; plastic hood, w/ electrodes to impale the weenies. They cracked, burst and tasted like ozone.
In a moment of domestic revolt I put Frankenstuff weenies in there. Not pretty, though fascinating in a way.
I’ve seen TV ads for a doodad called the “Eggwave”, to be used for nuking eggs to perfection. I think it would be more of a pain in the @ss to clean the bits of egg debris out of the top of the “Eggwave”, than it would be to get out a pan and cook the egg the “hard” way.
I am the proud owner of a single serving ice cream maker. All I have to do is dump in a thimbleful of various ice cream ingredients, turn the crank till my arm feels loose in it’s socket, and then I get to eat my yummy 1/2 cup of ice cream. Feh.:rolleyes:
I have to say that my humble offerings pale in comparison to that pizza oven. I’m glad my hubby didn’t see that web page when he walked past. He’s still casting about for gift ideas…
“How about the Popeil “Inside the Egg” Scrambler?”
If nobody else said it, I was gonna. This beats the “Salad Shooters” and “Veg-e-matics” and the Bacon Cookers and even the Popeil “Mug Froster” all hollow. Why in the name of Pluperfect Hell would anyone NEED to scramble an egg nside he hell?
The various battery powered appliances have always amused me with their total worthlessness. The battery powered stirrers for the bar take first place. The multipurpose mixer, whipper, stirrer whoopdeedo came in a close second. These things never have the amp hours to do more than mix Kool-aid.
Any Ronco product is always a prime contender. His pasta machine sounded like a hair drier with a high school diploma.
One of the real winners are the “multi-edge” cutting knives. In the attempt to combine the serrated and razor edges into one knife, they instead gave you a weakened knife edge that can never be resharpened. Nothing matches a razor edge knife.
I’m usually pretty cynical about kitchen gadgets, but I own a (woooo!) Super Salad Shooter, and while I don’t use it all the time it really has been handy. For a single meal it’s a bit of overkill, but for mass quantities it’s a godsend. Maintenance overhead is pretty low, too.
