My boyfriend and I live what some would term a “bachelor lifestyle”. Or if you are a millennial, if you looked at our apartment you might say we are having problems “adulting”. This is mostly because we are childless and can live our lives in any ridiculous manner we choose, not because we are irresponsible. Our living room may be decorated with month-old party decorations and our towels don’t match, but trust me, we have our shit together where it matters. And that includes kitchen tools.
Every now and then something new enters your life and you wonder how the heck you lived without it. I have several of those items in the kitchen, and today I would like to share my years of experience with them in case they haven’t entered your life yet. The best part is that each of these alone is pretty cheap. Cheap in the way that if you put them on your wedding registry, these are the items all your underpaid millennial friends will rush to buy.
The first is a potholder, and preferably an oven mitt. Although I cut my crafting teeth as a child sewing and crocheting potholders, as a young adult they seemed frivolous. Why was I wearing a shirt if not to use for any task that required fabric, such as wiping my nose or grabbing burning items from an oven? I wish I had been self-aware enough to write down a list of all of the extremely dangerous ways I have moved hot objects in the kitchen, but if I were that self-aware, I would have just bought a damned potholder. Suffice it to say, my attempts were both creative and terrible in an America’s Funniest Home Videos-type of way.
In my family, most Christmas gifts come with the label “as seen on tv,” so I have also used an Ove Glove and a silicone oven mitt. I still prefer the traditional quilted oven mitts that you can get for $3 new or .50 from Goodwill, lightly singed. The Ove Glove has individual fingers, which feels weirdly unsafe to me, despite what the label says. Silicone oven mitts have the opposite problem; it feels like you’re trying to perform a delicate task in a Stay Puft suit. Nope, nothing beats a good old-fashioned fabric potholder, not even your shirt.
The next item I’m going to recommend is a bag clip, preferably a million of them. If you can see your photos under all of the magnetic clips on your fridge, you are doing it wrong. Similar to not owning a potholder, not having bag clips handy forces you to use up all of your creativity in useless places. You could be the next Picasso, dammit, if it weren’t for your ill-equipped kitchen.
The most expensive item on my must-own list is a Magic Bullet. Remember how I said that all of my Christmas presents come from infomercials? This is the only infomercial product I’ve ever owned that does exactly what it says it does. I actually own its slightly higher-end cousin the Nutribullet, which is what I would recommend for vegans who are chopping lots of cashews. The Vitamix is always described as the vegan holy grail, but I’ve never encountered a recipe in which my Nutribullet didn’t perform the task at least well-enough. I use it any time a recipe calls for a blender, a food processor, or a grinder. I am going to have to write an entire other series about how I use my Nutribullet because I could talk about it all day.
Ok, just one more example. My ultimate quick dinner is to boil some pasta, and while it’s boiling, I throw whatever is laying around into the Nutribullet to make a sauce. Peppers and miso, cashews and nutritional yeast, avocado and basil, microwave-steamed cauliflower and practically anything. Drain the pasta and toss with the sauce. Done.
My last suggestion for must-have kitchen tool is an electric tea kettle. Yes my fellow apple-pie-blooded, baseball cap saluting Americans, I am talking to you. You don’t realize how much hot water you really need in the kitchen until it’s easily available to you. Think of all the times you’ve let the tap run just to get your water slightly warmer than tepid. You can do better.
Well that’s it for now. I’m going to see if I can do a hypnosis session and get back to you with my repressed memories of kitchen tragedies that happened from using forks to remove hot items from the oven.