I am irate, just for a change. A close friend – well alleged friend, she being the same darling chum who produced the psychosis-inducing Brussels sprout jigsaw puzzle – has just remembered that she neglected to bring me one of my Christmas presents. Given that it was a crab mallet, you can well understand my indignation.
I pride myself on my collection of imbecile gadgets, some of which are so unutterably daft I have even tried to use them for the wrong task...it was some time, for example, before I discovered that the reason the stupid bloody strawberry huller didn't work was because it was a stupid bloody icing crimper.
The crab mallet, had /\/\ac remembered to give it to me, would have gone into pole position in my What the Hell is This? drawer, in between the truffle brush and the indispensable extendy-poking-pickle-lifty-droppy-sod-it fork. I have long wanted something outré with which to bash crabs, if only to remind them of the time one bit me in Cornwall. (Geese and jellyfish are also on the list of creatures on which hidjus revenge will eventually be wrought, as soon as Spong come up with something loopy enough to do the job...)
The gift-forgetting conversation having taken place in a food-oriented electronic forum, others were quick off the mark in admitting that they, too, possessed gadgets that had seen the light of day but once. All over the world, it appears, are drawers containing pizza ruining wheels, electronic pasta spoons, special plastic lids for putting over half-eaten tins of catfood (eaten, hopefully, by the cat) and somewhere in England is a hang-on-the-pan egg poacher, but I'm not even going to go there. The proper method of poaching eggs is to make a whirlpool of almost-boiling water that contains a splash of vinegar, drop in an egg, wait thirty seconds and then decide to have some toast instead.
Everybody, it seems, has useless kitchen gadgetry without which their lives would be incomplete. Personally, I can live in perfect harmony knowing that no house I ever inhabit will contain something that drills down the centre of pineapples in order to extract the core whilst at the same time removing the skin, gouging out the eyes and possibly making a cocktail hat out of the leaves; nor will I ever grope at the inaccessible reaches of a drawer in order to make contact with a potato ricer, only accidentally to wave aloft a machine that de-rinds cucumbers so effortlessly I can use the time I've saved to clean a complicated machine that de-rinds cucumbers.
I can, however, whenever I wish, not use a set of copper sauteuses so small that Barbie would have difficulty making supper in them ("Oh but they're so cute") and when that palls I can cut off the whole of my lower lip on a dessertspoon I had specially sharpened but cannot remember why. (It was either to effect something that was of more use than a grapefruit knife, or to teach any passing hungry burglar a lesson, but the reason isn't important. What matters is that I have one.)
And so, although it is nearly the end of January, I have finally made my New Year's Resolution. I shall re-arrange my What the Hell is This? drawer so that the really useful items, such as the miniscule icing nozzle bottle brush, the pommes Parisienne cutter and the thing that might be a different sort of strawberry huller, but could perhaps, on closer inspection, be a teabag-squasher, are nearer the front and can be ignored on a more regular basis.
Otherwise, I can't see the point of having them.
