Last week I wrote about the things I didn’t know how I lived without. This week is less dramatic. I could certainly live without these things, but I am going to recommend them anyway because they have made my life marginally better.
As an example of how frivolous but great some of these things are, the first thing I’m going to recommend is a bag of sugar cubes. Not only sugar cubes but ~*~fancy~*~ sugar cubes. I popped into our local Whole Foods competitor for some item I could only get there and, like always, I ended up walking away with a handful of unnecessary things like jade rice and a bag of fancy sugar cubes. I think I mostly wanted to see what made a fancy sugar cube fancy (spoiler: I am still not sure). That was over a year ago, and despite using them pretty regularly, I still have a lot. What I’ve discovered is that they can be used to turn a bottle of Andre’ into champagne cocktails. Put a fancy sugar cube in a champagne flute. Sprinkle on some bitters. When you pour in the champagne, the sugar cube fizzes up like a science experiment. Guests find it delightful and it requires no mixing skills. Also think how hard core you look when you make your guests an Old Fashioned. It’s like you just morphed from one of the non-David Beckham-banging Spices into Posh Spice.
My next suggestion is decidedly un-Posh, though. (Bye-bye, David Beckham). I think everyone should have a supply of paper plates. You don’t want to have a reason to hesitate about having your friends over. If you’re worried about the environment, let me put it this way: if you have so many friends over for dinner that it actually affects climate change, you are probably also bringing a great amount of joy into the world.
Speaking of joy, let me introduce you to my salt pig.
Anything that makes it easier to properly salt your food is worth it. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I would like this as much if it didn’t look like a cute little pig. In programming, we have a concept called “rubber duck debugging”. The idea is that you can talk your problem through with anyone, even an actual rubber duckie like the one I have on my desk, and the process of talking it through helps you solve it. In my kitchen, instead of a rubber duck, I have Salt Pig. I complain to him about how my dish just doesn’t taste right and I’m worried. He always suggests the same solution: “add more salt.”
My last life recommendation is to buy a knife sharpener. We’ve all heard that a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. I’m personally a little skeptical, but I will heartily agree that a dull knife is less enjoyable. Even when I barely cooked for myself at all, I understood the value of a knife sharpener, I just grew up poor and was not a person who was in the habit of buying things. See my entry on pot holders if you need further proof of the lengths I go to to avoid buying things. In addition to it costing money, adding a knife sharpener had an difficulty level because you had to know how to use it, I thought. Turns out that I was confusing a knife sharpener with a honing steel, which is used to straighten the blade. A knife sharpener, instead, is generally simple to use and you can even get automatic ones. The one I had cost $5 and was worth it for the sheer amount of frustration it removed from my life.
Alright, comments are open. What item did you put off buying for a ridiculously long time only to discover what a fool you were?
