Great kitchen gadgets

A little over a month ago, t! and I went to Ottawa. The purpose of our trip was three-fold: to take Carter to visit his foster-parents (the couple who fostered him for the rescue shelter before we adopted him), to hit Prime Crime Mystery Bookstore, conveniently located around the corner from Carter’s former home, and to make a pilgrimage to Lee Valley Tools.

The excursion was an overall success, with many books and many tools bought. I tried very hard not to go too consumerist in the Lee Valley Tools shop, but it’s tough when the entire place is devoted to gardening equipment, woodworking tools, and kitchen gadgets.

I did manage to limit myself to two kitchen gadgets, and both have proved to be fantastic purchases.

Exhibit A:

A purpose-made, stainless steel compost pail may seem very extravagant, especially when an old recycled plastic margarine tub would do the job, but this one does the job so well, with no mess, no smells, easy to open and easy to close, and easy to carry (by the handle!) out to the compost bin at the end of the garden. And it’s huge! An entire week’s worth of tea bags and egg shells and vegetable peels and dried-out leftover pasta fits into it, but more importantly, it’s wide enough that I can peel potatoes directly over it. No more peeling potatoes into the sink and then having to fish the peelings out. We have every expectation of it lasting for the next 20 years, at least. Definitely worth the couple of bucks a year that it will have cost.

Exhibit B:

This is a tablespoon-measure pour spout, based on the ones used in bars to measure shots of booze. They also had a teaspoon and one- and two-ounce sizes, in equally eye-wateringly brightly coloured plastic (so as not to get them mixed up, of course). The pour-spout measures an exact tablespoon of olive oil into whatever I’m cooking. Since 90% of my recipes start with “saute some garlic and onions in olive oil until soft” it will get a lot of use. And hopefully no longer guesstimating the oil into the pan will mean using less oil, and thus fewer calories – since t! and I both could stand to loose a few pounds, that’s also no small thing. I buy olive oil in 3-liter metal tins (costs $15 on sale, lasts us about a year, and the sealed tin has an indefinite shelf life), so I simply refill the bottle that sits on our counter. But, horrors! The new pour-spout didn’t fit my old olive-oil bottle, whose neck was too wide. So I had to find a bottle that the pour-spout would fit. I think it looks quite pretty: