The Smarmy Carny

When you look through your kitchen drawers, you'll be surprised to see the dozens of tools and utensils available to help you make food. Even most bachelors have a relatively large number of such tools. Which are worth their salt?

• Basting Syringe: B The basting syringe earns points for its simplicity, but mostly it's just great because it's useful for indoor water fights, too. Just as we love miniature corn because they're so much smaller than we're used to seeing, the basting syringe is great because it's so much bigger than we're used to seeing.
• Can Opener: C If there was another way to open a can, the can opener would get an F. Most can openers have so many little blades and gears and such, it usually requires several minutes and an engineering degree to figure out how the darned thing is supposed to open a can. I've seen someone cut the entire upper section of the can off instead of just the top because of a confusing can opener.
• Candy Thermometer: F This is one of those tools that sounds a whole lot better than it really is. "A candy thermometer? Awesome!!! Oh, wait — you mean it's just a high-temperature thermometer? Rats."
• Cheese Grater: D Sure, it's a wonderful tool when you want to turn a block of cheese into a bunch of little tiny cheese shavings, but this device is really just a torture machine. Use this tool to get rid of any skin on your knuckles. Usually, you end up feeding your knuckles to your family because, let's face it, who wants to go and grate more cheese?
• Egg Beater: A Egg beaters are fun! Electric-powered egg beaters are good if you're making food, but the hand-operated ones are much more fun for anything else. Plus, if your sister starts annoying you, just let it rip and hold it up to her beautiful locks of hair. She'll leave you alone for at least an hour.
• Flour Sifter: A- This has always been one of my favorite kitchen tools. Crank it, and the flour falls out the bottom. No flour, no problem! You can have hours of fun just cranking an empty flour sifter and listening to the metal scrape along the sieve.
• Whisk: B- Simple, elegant, and a pain in the butt to wash. The whisk definitely loses points for being difficult to lick clean. And I wanted all the brownie batter!

Please feel free to leave a comment. What do you agree or disagree with, and why? Which kitchen utensils do you wish were included that I didn't cover here?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 15:00 by Novac and is filed under All, Blogathon, Blogathon 2007, Charity, Food, Health, Ratings. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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