Cool Kitchen Gadgets That Don't Seem So Once They Arrive

What kitchen in the country doesn't have one of those cool kitchen gadgets that kind of look like they just might be able to do the thing they promise, but never do? The magic peeler, the magic juicer or dicer-slicer or whatever - who hasn't at least bought one or two of these zany cool kitchen gadgets and cursed themselves for their gullibility?

When we buy one of these, we can never bring ourselves to admit that they don't work. Who wants to admit that they've been had? And so, those super gadgets will take up counter space or drawer space somewhere in the kitchen for the next five years until someone one day just gets sick of it and throws it out when you're not looking.

One reason these cool kitchen gadgets never actually make it to being useful devices is that their designers just have the wildest imaginations. They make these things for very very specific needs. Even when we do need them, we don't need them more than a few times in a lifetime. That's not the way to design anything for the kitchen. The kitchen needs multipurpose stuff - not one-trick ponies.

But you know - after all these years, you would think that we would know better than to pick one of these strange contraptions yet one more time. They continue to churn out out these strangely cool kitchen gadgets because, hey - you keep buying them.

And it isn't even just those crazy gadgets. When we travel to another country, often, we will come across some kind of device that they use in their local cuisine - handmade sushi knives from Japan, a pasta maker from Italy or something. Those things can seem great over there where they know how to use them. Once we get them over here, when they don't have the magic of their native culture around them, they just seem useless.

Perhaps the mistake we make is that we plan for things that never happen. When we get a beautiful pizza maker, we imagine that there will be these family get-togethers and everyone will be a nice happy family talking and munching on delicious pizzas altogether.

As it turns out, those family get-togethers are few and far between, and people don't feel like home-made pizza then.

It isn't even just exotic stuff like this. Take a simple food processor that comes with a million attachments. Or a simple thing like an oven. Who would think that an oven was a useless kitchen gadget? But there are plenty of us who just don't do that kind of cooking at home. We just like to trick our kitchens out like that.