Filling Up Your Kitchen Toy Box

by Gabby Hyman
Face Your Kitchen Columnist

It's time once more to present the newest, coolest kitchen accessories you've always wanted -- without knowing it. After all, what's the point in remodeling your kitchen if you don't fill it with do-dads, gizmos, and toys that will make you wonder how you've ever survived without them? If you're not using a La Mandoline Rouet, for example, you just might be classified as a kitchen primitive. For starters, consider the Lobster Cracker currently featured at a leading online kitchen accessory website. This stainless-steel, serrated tool with hinged arms sells for $28, and will make fast work of any steamed crustacean. Unconvinced? Try adding the Chef's Thermometer Fork to your kitchen toy box for about the same price. Powered by double-A batteries, this gizmo shows your food's inner temperature on a digital readout the moment you prod it with its sharp tines.

More Kitchen Aids and Accessories for Ease and Comfort

If you hate handling gushing fruit with your bare hands, there's the Mango Splitter ($11.99) recently featured on National Public Radio. It cleaves the fruit into two even halves and spits out the seed. There's a similar kitchen toy for cherries ($12.50) made of triple-plated steel and zinc that punches the pits out of cherries as efficiently as Mike Tyson.

But wait -- as the saying goes -- there's more. La Mandoline Rouet (which sells for $65 online) carves dandy spirals out of carrots, spuds, apples and other fruits and veggies with razor-sharp julienne blades. Hate peeling and crushing garlic or grinding ginger for stir frying? No point being a cave-dwelling brute when you can go online and order kitchen accessories that peel cloves of regular or elephant garlic in seconds while rubber sheaves protect your hands ($2.95). And a $15 ginger grater shreds up gnarled roots of piquant spice in seconds with rows of metal teeth.

Come on. It's a new day out there in your kitchen! Enjoy.

About the Author
Gabby Hyman has written for print and online media for more than 20 years. He has created online content for eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Avaya, and Nissan UK. He has also been a web consultant to the Governor of California. As an author of fiction, journalism, and poetry, Gabby is a former English professor for the University of Illinois, University of Alaska, and Old Dominion University. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Alabama.