Handy Little Kitchen Gadgets

Another crazy weekend here in Atlanta, with more snow and ice on the way.  Time to do some more cooking.  My attention has now turned to kitchen gadgets and here are a few of my recommended favorites.

Cuisinart Griddler Jr.

It’s compact and easy to clean.  The nonstick upper and lower grills can be removed and tossed in the dishwasher for easy clean up.  This is a nice size for a single person or couple.  I’ve been using this for a couple of years with great results.  Big enough for a couple of fillets of salmon or a couple of burgers.  Nice for grilled cheese sandwiches, toasties and panini.

Tribest Personal Blender

I’ve had this for about a year.  It makes great smoothies.  Much more reliable than that Bullet thing.  The Tribest will actually shut off if it gets too hot so you don’t burn out the motor (I haven’t had that problem yet).  The cups have nice screw-on lids that I use to take my smoothies to work or to store them in the fridge.  The Tribest is also good for making salad dressings or blending small batches of whatever.  Another solid product.

Pyrex Storage Dishes

Round ones, square ones, I have a good collection of these.  The ones with the blue lids are the best.   I use them for freezing leftovers and taking leftovers to work for lunch.  These are very sturdy, the lids snap on nicely and they go from freezer to micro to oven and back.  Great to use glass instead of plastic, especially if you are heating up food in the microwave.  Shopworldkitchen.com carries the round dishes with the tabs on the lids that flip up to allow steam to escape when reheating food in the microwave — very handy.

Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 5-1/2-Cup Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker

Well, this is more of an actual kitchen appliance rather than a gadget, but I’ll mention it anyway.  (This is actually a newer — more expensive — model than the rice cooker I have, but it looks like basically the same thing.  The neuro fuzzy models are great because you just dump the rice in the cooker, set it and go.  The cooker knows exactly how to cook the rice.  (I always rinse my rice a few times before cooking, which cuts down on the stickiness).  The cooker has a number of settings for various types of rice.  This cooker makes fantastic oatmeal — I usually put it the cooker before  I get ready for work in the morning.   It cooks hands-free for a while, just in time for me to eat before I’m out the door.

There are a lot of recipes you can cook other than just rice.  The Ultimate Rice Cooker is the best resource I’ve found for recipes.  It has a lot of additional information about various rice cooker types and varieties of rice.  The recipes are easy to follow and specifically state which kind of cooker you need for which recipe (the neuro fuzzy cooker, as great as it is, can’t be used to steam vegetables, for example).  This is one handy little kitchen appliance!