Kitchen gear

If you're like me, and there is always that possibility, you have spent the last few years collecting kitchen gadgets so you have mostly anything that you could ever need while not really collecting a lot of useless things along the way. Microplane? Got it. Tortilla press? Got it. Pasta machine with a variety of sizes? Got it. We even have inherited a waffle iron and crockpot that I've never broken out of the boxes. In fact, I'm so generally satisfied with my kitchen stuff that I can't even come up with an excuse to purchase anything for it, except a working blender and a 7-cup or larger food processor.

So when I was visiting my sister, it was definitely a change to cook not only in someone else's kitchen, but with someone else's stuff. It was also a rare opportunity to poke fun at my sister, which one should always seize when that rare moment comes up. A chef's knife that has never seen a sharpening steel, non-stick pans that have turned to stick, using steak knives as a bread knife.

I did, however, come across some nice roasting/serving dishes and an Ikea salad spinner. Now, I wasn't paying enough attention to the salad spinner, so I filled it with wet lettuce and set to spinning. And then I realized that I was getting completely soaked. This is because the salad spinner didn't have a bottom, but damn did that lettuce get dry. In fact, it made me wonder why we don't use our salad spinner, instead choosing to dry lettuce with paper towels, a waste of paper towels and time.

So when we returned home, I pulled the salad spinner out of the closet, dropped in my wet lettuce, and spun away. And voila: wet lettuce. Our salad spinner sucks. I threw it out. Soon, I will go buy a nice Ikea or Oxo salad spinner. (The Oxo, if you didn't know, has the button press system and no leaky bottom. Hurray!)