The Bee's Wrap sounds interesting. How do you clean it?

Kept seeing pix of fish spatulas on cooking websites/ blogs so I ordered one.

Fish Spatula

I've had it for a few weeks and, so far, my opinion is that I could have lived without one. Didn't spring for the expensive one that gets recommended a lot. Maybe that's the difference?

I'll keep using it and trying to like it for a while. Wish the metal part was a little shorter and a bit more flexible. Haven't tried it on fish yet.

Parchment paper. I've only been baking for two years, so what might seem standard to many is all new to me. Amazing that it doesn't burn and how much easier it is to cleanup!

I got one of those spatulas given to me. I use it for taking out slices of pie, etc. More like a regular spatula. Haven't used mine for fish either. :-)

Fawnridge, I bought a huge box of sheets of parchment paper off Kiiji. Someone wanted to run a bakery from home, but apparently it's not legal here, so she was selling the box. I've got more than enough to last a lifetime, and I've given some to friends.

I love it for roasting vegetables as well as for baking. I like my baking sheets to look pristine, and I hate roasting directly on them.

A friend gave me a vegetable spiraler for my birthday recently, I am looking forward to zucchini curls and such. Really! I've wanted one.

Amck2, I haven't gotten to the cleaning part yet, but the instructions say to use cool water and dish soap, hang dry. They also say not to use it for meat, for obvious reasons. :)

Fawnridge, keep your Ray Bradbury in mind when you use parchment. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. Parchment doesn't combust at that temperature, but it does scorch and can make your bread taste scorchy. If you're doing something freeform, it helps to cut the paper close to the dough--the dough will keep it cooler, and deprive it of air. If it's lining a pan, trim it well.

I'm too busy wowing over the wine keeper and the pizza pan.
My recent....maybe 18 months ago...is that seal and wrap self sticking saran. Keeps frozen stuff freezer-burn free for easily a year...
And I was given 2 new sil-pats for Christmas...so I am in fat city!!
But...I did figure out the use for some gadget I have had in my gadget drawer for a lot of years. Bought at an estate sale of a foodie friend. All sorts of good stuff at that sale! a Cracker Jack nut cracker a lemon zester, little olive wood spatula.....and this thing.

I'll start another thread and post a picture! I feel so smart to have figured it out after all these years.

Oh, I baked for 30 years before discovering parchment paper. Now, I can't imagine cooking without it. I bake hamburger and hot dog buns on it in the toaster oven...just slide the paper onto the racks and bake without even needing a pan. And I get several uses out of it before it gets too roasted. Nice stuff for roasting veggies, too.

I wanted a spiralizer, too, to cut zucchini noodles. Got one of those twisty ones at Menards. Like this one: Spiralizer

The one from Menards was cheap China crap. I broke my zucchini and the spiralizer broke the first time I used it. Didn't have much faith in it when I bought it so had saved the receipt and returned it the next time we were at Menards. Then I discovered that I could make nice zoodles with my Bourne V-Slicer. Except they aren't curly & cute. :(

I used to want a fish spatula till I had a chance to use one at a friend's house and it's just not for me. Too bendy. I think theirs was probably fairly high end, if that helps any, ci_lantro.

The wine keeper looks interesting.

WB, I wish the Winco one was a bit more bendy. Somewhere, there has to be a happy medium. Turners are tough, though, to find one that you love. The overall length, the size of the turner, the angle of the turner to the handle and the flexibility are all factors that determine how useful it's going to be. And, of course, all that is personally subjective.

My favorite one is a carbon steel (I think; it will rust) one that I bought at a garage sale a long time ago. The seller was 80 something and told me that it had been her mother's! The reason that I bought it was because I thought the heart cut-out on the blade was cute. It's similar to this one but the handle on mine is a bit different:

Antique Turning Spatula

Funny this should come up. I was just watching an Alton Brown video on the most useless gadgets on Amazon, LOL. It happened because my son in law has one of those things that makes an egg, toasts the muffin, etc. He says it's the most useless thing ever, he never uses it, and Alton Brown agrees.

I have about two bazillion gadgets and use very few of them. I let the kids use the lemon and lime squeezers, and just use my old green glass juicer. Paring knives are preferable to me over peelers, except that serrated one that peels tomatoes and peaches, that one I like. My countless coffee gadgets have been relegated to the back room while I use the Chemex, very low tech and great coffee.

I do have a favorite gadget, though, my cookie scoops. I went through countless Wilton/Norpro/OXO and their ilk, each one breaking after only a few uses. Then I used my Christmas gift card for these:

http://www.amazon.com/Jenaluca-Cream-Scoop-Cookie-Melon/dp/B00IM6ZF90/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1460303235&sr=8-7&keywords=cookie+scoops

Yeah, $50 cookie scoops. With a lifetime warranty and I've used them for everything from cookies to meatballs to dishing out cupcake batter. I love, love, love them, best $50 I ever spent!

My other favorite may be an appliance, not a gadget. Years ago Deb kindly gifted me with her Zojirushi bread machine, she didn't use it and didn't really like it. My carpal tunnel had just rendered me incapable of kneading bread and I was newly divorced and so broke I didn't have two nickels to rub together. That Zo made thousands of loaves and batches of dough. It finally gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago and Elery didn't even blink as he spent $300 to replace it.

Annie

I haven't bought anything since I got my last grater in October of last year. I do use it a lot, however, and now no longer use my KA grater attachment. Before that, the last gadget I bought was a Spaetzle maker, and I use that fairly often - I think I've had that for a year or so now, and I was surprised at how easy it is to use.

One thing I bought fairly recently was a new pastry blender, which I thought would be an improvement over the old style because my old one would get slightly bent when mixing in frozen butter, but the square one is just not practical, and I've gone back to using my old one instead and just being more careful with it. The curved shape works much better in bowls than the flat shape.

We did buy a couple of wine fridges recently (one for white and one for red), but I do not consider those to be gadgets. They are both small (hold six bottles each), and they fit nicely on my counter under the pot rack. That counter space is really not usable as a work space because of the pots and stuff hanging over it, and now we have wine at the right temperature. I bought them in anticipation of having a wine party, but that hasn't happened yet.

I have to admit I bought the silliest little $3 unitasker in the clearance aisle of HomeGoods, a cupcake corer.

http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-3567-Cupcake-Corer-Red/dp/B0063QEHZY

It only has one use -- to make little divots in the center of cupcakes to put filling (custard, lemon curd, marshmallow cream, fruit)

Just added the scoops to my wish list, haha. After MeatballMarch i sure could have used them. Well worth the cost.

I was on Amazon early this morning convincing myself i need this and that. I've had things in the 'wish list' for a few years...delete, then add something else.

We put in two full deep pull out drawers last month during the mini kitchen renovation....one is still empty and I don't want to junk it up with crap. I still fight with thinning out the rest of the drawers. : )

Because i cook, every gift giving season is all about kitchen stuff. Common here to bring a gift when visiting...not just a bottle of wine. 30yrs of hosting parties...lots of gadgets.

Sassafras Stoneware, gorgeous.

Frustrating is when something seems solid and made well, then breaks within months! I have a microplane grater and the panel of quality grate is well made but the plastic housing split making it useless. On the list of many things is to make a nice wooden frame for it and lose the plastic.

The seam of a new pot holder opened up and is a fraying mess. SurLaTable and i can return it but i should not have to put that chore on my list.

Sleevendog, it also might be that there was a flaw in your grater. If you tell Microplane, they might send you a new one. Though your wood housing sounds awesome! Agreed about the should not have to have returns on the chore list!

So, Gooster's "unitasker" comment (good word!), made me think of all those people on TV ranting that you should never have a tool that only does one thing. I agree when it comes to single use appliances like Annie's s-i-l's breakfast sandwich maker. The only time they seem to have a purpose is when they're a bridge between the Easy Bake Oven and the real kitchen, like the cake pop maker, and that one's mostly because kids sometimes have a hard time with molds, especially keeping them level while moving them.

OTOH, I have a number of little gadgets in a little drawer that I love. I could use a paring knife for most of their tasks, and would if I were camping and seriously had a reason not to have them, but they're really good. Like my strawberry huller (similar to this but no plastic buttons and cleaner lines) and wire avocado slicer. A couple of bigger ones (but that still fit in the little drawer), that have changed my life, are the pineapple corer-slicer (makes me willing to cut pineapple rather than designating it a "man's job", and it makes it SO easy!) and cherry pitter, which leaves a messy job messy, and requires hand strength, but is pretty fun to use and goes so much quicker that I'm willing to make cherry pie.

All of the above are light weight and go in the dishwasher, as do my multiple reamers for different purposes, and whisks ditto. I'm more likely to do a task by hand, like grate a small block of cheese, or slice a platter of vegetables, than use the food processor or mandoline because a grater goes in the DW and washing a knife is nothing--I wash it and my hands together. :) Washing the FP and serious mandoline, and taking them in and out, and all that, is a big chore, and only worth it when doing big chore cooking, even though, technically, they're the epitome of multi-task units.

plllog, I have a cherry pitter and love it, although I have this one and only use it once a year when I do the pick-your-own orchard:

http://www.amazon.com/Leifheit-37200-Cherrymat-Cherrystone-Remover/dp/B001MSYWQW/ref=sr_1_7?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1460313919&sr=1-7&keywords=cherry+pitter

We have the pineapple corer/slicer and I hate it, I've relegated it to the bottom drawer. It only works when the pineapple is perfectly straight, I seem to always get bits of core and have to trim those by hand, just peeling and slicing with a knife is much easier for me.

Elery has a very expensive mandolin. I can't get the blasted thing to stand up and the food guard is nearly worthless, but Elery can make it work. So, into the back room it went, until Elery decides to use it and drags it out. It's right next to the Panini press and the 2nd ice cream maker, because Elery and I each had one and only use both when the grandkids are here and we need lots of ice cream.

All my various shaped cake pans are back there too, as I only use them for birthdays and weddings, etc.

The worst? I think it was the punch fountain. We used it for a couple of weddings but it splashes punch all around about an 8 foot radius, makes a heckuva mess. It would only be OK outside, so that went to the on-line auction.

Annie

I am very sensitive to raw onions. I could not do without my onion goggles. I don't care how silly I look - they have changed my world as I can now bear to be around raw onions for cooking.

I've had my eye on this gadget to hold a bottle in place upside-down, to satisfy my frugal self, and eliminate the frustration of getting out of the bottle the last of the shampoo, barbecue sauce, dish liquid, salad dressing, liquid detergent, etc. etc. Smart Funnel

Speaking of ice cream makers, I recently bought a Whynter Ice Cream maker, even though I have two that require the bowls to be frozen in the freezer. I really do not need those any more, since the new one has a compressor freezer and can make one batch right after another. Again, I need to have a party in order to make full use of this, but it's nice to have anyway.

That cherry pitter looks great, but I never have that many cherries and use the one that Plllog has. I used to use my olive pitter for cherries, and while it worked fine for olives, some of the cherries were too big to fit, and so I bought the other cherry pitter. The cherries we get in the market are not the ones that are supposed to be used in cherry pies, but they still work okay. It would be better to have sour cherries from Michigan, but I never see those here.

I have an inexpensive Japanese mandolin, and it works pretty well for me - I use it mainly for making julienne carrots - I have an electric meat slicer (two of them, actually) that I use when I want to make very thin slices of vegetables, such as bell peppers. The new meat slicer will slice cheese very thinly also, but the old one was not good with making thin slices of meat or cheese, and so I use it now mostly for slicing bread, but I will also use it for slicing pickles, if I have whole ones, and it makes very nice even slices of zucchini. I thought I would be able to get rid of it, but I use it too much. It has a serrated blade, and the new one just has a very sharp blade (and a built-in sharpener).

I did not find goggles very helpful when slicing onions, but when I prepare Habanero chilies for my special sauce twice a year, I wear a swim mask and snorkel, to avoid breathing in any fumes. The kitchen has to be evacuated for a couple of hours as well.

I love my Granny Fork! OH and I've started using heavy rubber gloves for hand washing dishes. I can no longer be without them. You can wash in the hottest water and cannot even feel it. OH I found these long skinny tongs at Big Lots a while back and I use them all the time for stuff like pickles and olives. I have a nice cookie scoop, I use the heck out of that too. It's the perfect cookie size and also meatballs. I use those cheese slicers with the wire all the time too, we have several different sizes.

Lars, what kind of meat slicer do you use?

Re pies, I make a good cherry pie from less than fully ripe local cherries. We do see Michigan sour cherries for about 3-5 days. The problem is the same as when the rest of you get nasty "California tomatoes". The best of the sour cherries stay in Michigan. :)

Friedajune, that's genius! I've seen plenty of gizmos for marrying ketchup bottles and the like, but it looks like your funnel gadget doesn't require any similarity in bottle size, just enough more in the bottom bottle that it won't fall over. Very cool!

Annie, you're right about the pineapples. I seem to be pretty good at choosing a good, ripe pineapple that's not too small, or too crooked, or so big that there's waste. But we always have dozens to choose from. Pineapple juice dissolves my skin like the connective tissue in a marinade, and handling a pineapple with gloves is difficult (slithery!), so the gadget is really an amazing deal for me.

Love my fish spatula. Used it just last night on a whole baked red snapper. Just slide the end of the spatula on top of the bone and lift the wonderful cooked flesh to a plate. The fish spatula makes it so easy.

Thanks, Lars. I've been thinking of cooking my own sandwich meats and a slicer would make that so much easier...

So I made fajitas w/ homemade flour tortillas today and used the fish spatula for flipping the tortillas on the griddle. It worked really great for that...and for flipping around the peppers and onions that I cook in my Saladmaster electric skillet. So I'm liking it more now that I'm discovering some other uses for it. (I'd mostly used it for flipping over easy eggs before. Not the tool of choice for that job.)

plllog, it's not so much that the good sour cherries stay in Michigan, but that they are fragile and don't travel well. The sweet cherries are sturdier and better able to handle the packing and shipping. It's the same reason that I never see fresh figs here in Michigan, they just don't travel well.

I do have a big commercial slicer that I bought at the on-line auction and I asked Wendell to cut me some big boneless eye of round roasts that I can run through the slicer, makes great lunch meat for French dip sandwiches, Philly cheesesteaks or just a cold sandwich.

Annie

I guess that's why they also look a little sad when they do get here. :)

Several months ago I went though the gadget drawers and any item that I haven't used in the past year (or longer) was bagged up and sent to Amvets charity shops. But my favorites are plain old rubber spatulas. i think I have 6 of the regular size, one half width for jars and 4 minis. I would be miserable without them.

The other favorite is the Pig Tail for flipping meats in a pan or on the grill.

My food/meat slicer is not a commercial one but it does the job well. Sliced 4 pounds of rare beef yesterday for Italian or French dips. It took about 30 minutes. It is some off brand that Menards had about 8 years ago for $40 buck. I do need to take the blade in next time the knives go in for sharpening. I love being able to slice my own foods.

And I love the pineapple corer/slicers. I put the pineapple in a high sided plastic storage bowl to catch the juices and just twist away and yank out the fruit when I hit bottom.

I just hit send off an Amazon order wish list this morning...and the one thing i really needed i forgot to slide from save to the 'order' list, grrr. lol.

It's going to be just like Christmas all week long. : )

I broke two fancy glass travel containers last year that had silicone sleeves. The glass was way too thin. Hoping this will be better...9 wide mouth ball jars and two sleeves.

arkansas_girl mentioned Big Lots. I discovered it just last year for some home goods. Before I'd buy the salt for icy sidewalks there and maybe if I needed a plastic tarp for something.

I have gotten some good gadgets there. I try to go with quality for the kitchen but I bought a "scraper" spatuala (all one piece, double ended) and a set of two can strainers. The can strainers are awesome. I use a lot of canned black olives and DH loves premium canned tuna. There are two sizes in plastic with a handle. I can strain an entire can of tuna in the large one and love it. I love tuna salad but hated straining it until this. DH cannot do that for me any longer so it was a great fine. I use the small one for olives or pickles.

Sleevendog, it may still not be too late to add an item to your order.

I order so rarely but do have amazon prime. We are about to head up to Newfoundland and needed a few things for the trip. Always such a crazy trip to pack for....i'll check as sometimes 1/2 an order has not been sent.

If you have Amazon Prime, you do not have to order everything at exactly the same time - they will still consolidate the order if they get it in time.

We received this wine aerator as a gift.

https://m.wine.com/product/vinturi-wine-aerator/120451?warehouses=CA&cid=GoogleBase_CSE_120451_Beta&gclid=CjwKEAjwlq24BRDMjdK7g8mD6BASJABBl8n310IPzm54CwZGYb5jIVpe2Mj-rkHdl7ntD2MlAdvEXRoC3Pnw_wcB&mode=xfercomplete

Sometimes I have guests do blind tastings - (1) a glass straight from the bottle, (2) a glass poured through the aerator. They prefer (2) about 2/3 of the time. 1/3 of the time they can't tell the difference - but those guests might not be able to tell a California wine from a French wine, so we won't give their opinions too much weight. No one, so far, has preferred (1).

If you decant into a carafe then the aerator is unnecessary.

I picked this laser-sighted infrared thermometer up on a whim, because I was in Home Depot and it was only $16.

http://m.homedepot.com/p/PRO-SERIES-Non-Contact-Infrared-Thermometer-with-Laser-Sighting-12-1-Spot-THERMNC/204262824

Along with enabling all sorts of geeky investigations - have you ever wondered how much hotter your ceiling is than your floor? do cats have the same internal temperature as humans? when your spouse is "steaming mad", is she really? - it has certain cooking uses. Measuring the temperature of a pan. Or of spitting oil that is too scary hot to dip your probe thermometer in.

This one is as cheap as they come, and no doubt there are advantages to the expensive models, but save your money and get the wine aerator too. Differences in the emissivity of surfaces limits the accuracy of infrared temperature measurement anyway.

LOL, John. Elery has that same thermometer, I never thought of taking the dogs' temperature!

Annie

John, I'll second the aerator. There's one for white wines, too, but I don't think it makes as big a difference (for obvious reasons). People bring wine because the label was pretty or something. The aerator can be the difference between barely palatable and drinkable without having to decant iffy wine. :) Thanks for sharing the results of your tastings!

I'm even more impressed with the Bees Wrap as time goes on. The heel of the loaf isn't dried out at all. Which leads me to something that isn't a gadget per se, but delightful. :) Although I do some kitsch, I'm not really into the "country" look, but after I whispered in Santa Claus's ear that I needed a new bread board with a crumb groove, what the elves brought me was a honkin' big double sided Boos block with a carving side with a moat. I was looking for a bread board for myself, and didn't find what I wanted, but kind of fell in love with this ridiculous thing. The crumbs do wander everywhere, but it makes me smile. :)

I haven't posted on this thread because GADGETS are my weakness consequently I have way too many and it would be embarrassing to share, especially things like a watermelon seed remover.

The Bees Wrap sounds interesting.

John, I have way too many thermometers, here are some.