10.31.08
Multi-Use Kitchen Tools!
It slices, it dices, it chops, mops and minces! Get one today!
I don’t have any gizmos like that, except maybe a knife, which doesn’t do any mopping. Kitchen stores are a vast wasteland of gizmos YOU DON’T NEED. Note the emphasis. Stay out of kitchen stores! They are centers of lust for hoighty-toighty cooks. Yes, I’m trying to shame you. Or myself.
We bought a gadget lately for sharpening knives, since I didn’t keep the high-tech electric knife sharpener and we can’t find the knife steel. It was fine until my husband used it on an axe, and the strongest-man-I-know broke it. We need to find the knife steel. I don’t think he can break that.
Kitchen drawers end up tangled, forlorn places full of gizmos, gadgets and bits. (You know, the twist ties, bag clips, honey dippers, plastic doodads still unidentified as to use.) I have tried to move away from such accumulation and have found multiple uses for ordinary kitchen things.
You may have read already of my turkey lifting system (two wooden spoons jammed in undignified places in said turkey). But other items work in other interesting ways! Chopsticks will support an improvised coffee filter cone made of a big funnel, paper filter, and a teapot. The kitchen tongs get called into use in the chapel occasionally to hold the charcoal while lighting it for the thurible (incense burner). And the demitasse spoons no longer used for espresso are perfect for incense dipping. (Espresso is a distant memory of my single life at seminary. We now need coffee in really big cups.)
Once when the power was out and I hadn’t made supper for the kids, I used two bricks set on end, a cork-backed tile under three votive candles, a cookie-cooling rack, and an aluminum pie plate to cook cut-up hot dogs in tomato sauce. They had it on bread. It was good, too. (If you have a fondue pot with fuel, then you have an emergency stove. I know people in areas of poor electric service who keep them just for that. But who makes fondue anymore?)
My big cast iron skillet goes on top of the stove and into the oven as a baking dish. I don’t have a cookie sheet right now since I never bake cookies, anyway. I make pizza in it, too. I roasted a nice piece of beef in it at Thanksgiving this year. (We will eat meat if someone gives it to us.) It was great for that – holding the heat evenly, and the roast potatoes put in with it were perfect. It took a bit of cleaning afterward, but I didn’t ruin the seasoning. Sometimes it doubles as a stove-top oven, when I make skillet bread. This is not cornbread, but yeast-raised wheat bread rolled into small cakes and cooked on both sides. They turn out a bit like crumpets, and were an innovation when we didn’t have a working oven.
I use old-fashioned double-handled cookpots, which are all metal and enamelled. The medium size one with the cover makes a good bean pot. The traditional stoneware beanpot is now a collector’s item, I think, and while great in the woodburning stove, hardly necessary in a modern thermostat regulated oven. The underlying steel is thicker in old pots, by my observation.
The canning kettle is used also for apple butter (when I can get the apples and cider), pot luck sized soups, and as an emergency dishwashing sink. It has also been a bread box and a mouse-proof container for dry beans and grains.
My large cutting board used to double as extra counter space, covering half of the double sink.
Do you have any mother-of-invention ideas using standard kitchen items? Perhaps you would like to share them.
