One, two, get rid of it – kitchen gadgets for the thrift store
When you’re in a little-house-on-the-prairie mood, you might get the idea: I’m going to make my own yoghurt, bake my own bread, knit my own socks and keep bees. Once that mood has passed, a few strange new kitchen gadgets are sitting in your kitchen cupboard that you’ll never use again. Would the thrift store want them?
Yoghurt maker
It sounds fantastic: heat a litre of whole milk, add a spoonful of organic yoghurt and then put it in this appliance. A few hours later: soft, creamy yoghurt. In reality: watery, sour yoghurt drink after a few hours. And still the same a few hours later. Where did it go wrong? With the yoghurt culture I was supposed to add? Next experiment: no, that’s not it. Meanwhile, the whole thing had been sitting on the counter for hours, surrounded by fruit flies. Get rid of it. And now the good news: you don’t need a yoghurt maker at all to make yoghurt yourself.
Bread maker
The same promise as the yoghurt maker: minimal effort, maximum effect. The smell of freshly baked bread! Waking up in the morning and immediately being able to eat a warm slice of bread with honey! But the loaves look more like a brick with a hole in it than a rustic pain de campagne. Within a few hours, the homemade bread is dry and stale. Unless, of course, you buy the ready-made bread mixes for the bread maker, but they contain just as many bread improvers and additives as the cheapest supermarket bread. Not such a success after all.
Slow juicer
Let’s put all kinds of fruit and vegetables through a special juicer that turns them into hyper-healthy juice packed with minerals and enzymes. When did that seem like a good idea? The juicer in full operation sounds as if a helicopter is landing in the kitchen and, yes, the name gives it away: it takes quite a while before a drinkable juice comes out. Cleaning it takes about twice as long as making the juice, and the bonus is a container full of fibres, skins and seeds. And then there’s the juice, which at best tastes like an ordinary glass of juice but in the healthiest version (juice made from spinach, rocket and avocado, anyone?) tastes like frogspawn. Um, no.
Anyone else who has bought unusual kitchen gadgets on a whim? Whose nonsense-with-a-plug is piling up in the dark corners of the utility room? What kitchen junk won’t even the Salvation Army take? Let us know.
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