In Defense of the One Use Kitchen Gadget

I hear it all the time. You’ve heard it. You and I have probably even said it at one time.

Don’t spend your money or storage space on single-use items.

The idea is that you’ll end up with a house full of items that won’t get used as often as one multi-use tool which will take up a lot less space. Well, I’m hear to tell you that this rule doesn’t always work out and so you shouldn’t feel guilty at all for buying single-use items.

If you do a lot of preserving like we do there are just some tools that you can’t live without. I have yet to find a multi-use tool that can take care of all the stuff I need to do throughout the year. When I find that cherry-pitting-apple-corer-slicer-peeler-citrus-zester-food-milling-mandolin I’ll be the first to tout it’s amazing-ness here. In the meantime I’m going to go ahead and keep a separate tool for each single use. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE my KitchenAid stand mixer, with its gazillion attachments but believe it or not, I don’t use it nearly as often as I use my bread machine or ice cream maker. Hell, my apple slicer-corer gets more play than the stand mixer. Poor stand mixer. At least it looks pretty sitting on my counter.

The bread machine – this one single-use item can be such a hot button topic for some people. Why do I love my bread machine? Because I have a million things to do every damn day and making bread is pretty low on the list of shit that MUST get done every day. You know like milking goats, feeding and watering animals, tending to the garden, and making dinner. If I didn’t have a bread machine bread would never get made. Add on to the fact that a teenage boy can and will eat an entire loaf of bread in a single afternoon, it’s pretty much a must have around here. Before bed you just set it and forget it and the next morning there’s homemade bread waiting for you. If the KitchenAid mixer also baked the bread I’d totally use that instead, but alas, it does not.

My view is if that single-use item saves you time doing something that you do often then own it.

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