Inventions that may be utter bollocks...

[Arlanymor]

... Salad spinners - I mean, why? Wash your leaves, blot them. Why the need to take them on a 60-second merry-go-round?

Am I missing something? Are there other examples?

You are not alone.

Also with all the recalls of prepared packs of lettuce and spinach lately, it seems it’s beat to wash your own.

Avoid all bags of salad stuffs

Replace with a bag of oven chips

Non-touch soap dispensers. You’re literally about to wash your hands.

re: salad spinners, I just buy "little gem lettuce". They come in pairs for about a quid readily washed. Just cut them up and throw it together with chopped tomatoes, peppers, onions etc into a dressing.

Our salad spinner gets a fair amount of use… our electric steamer, on the other hand, sits in its box, gleaming and untouched by human hand.

Egg poacher pouch things. They all promise perfectly poached eggs, and they all, without fail, deliver either something that could stun a rampaging bullock, or a dollop of goo you could suck between the gaps in your teeth.

Those stupid contraptions you load dog poo bags onto that never work and just make a disgusting job about a million times worse

Dryer sheets

Horizontal blind dusters

Why would you wash a whole iceberg lettuce? Just take off the outside leaf or two if necessary, and use. The end. No salad spinner required.

Oh, they're hopeless. I use dog poo bags to scrape cat food leftovers into so the bin doesn't smell so bad, and the dispenser on the ones I've just got was so useless I just tear them off the roll and to hell with how messy the kitchen looks because they're not in a neat little tube.

My dh would say the veg peeler, only because he can't figure out how to work it.

My mum bought me a veg chopper thingy for my birthday last month, I was so unexcited about it that I don't even know what exactly it does or where dh put it. Surely chopping all the veg is part of the fun of cooking? (must say I do have a hand tremor so she's probably seen me be near lethal with a knife and thought it was an excellent purchase).

This made me laugh. Either you are a Tesco picker or have just been let go from Weight Watchers.

The egg frying things that you put in the pan for perfectly round fried eggs. But they just stick to the pan and the egg sticks to them and they are a bastard to wash.

I prefer a salad spinner to using kitchen roll. Gets it dryer and also doesn't unnecessarily use kitchen roll. I don't use it for lettuce much though.

I think some people have forgotten that lettuces are grown in soil. If you grow your own, they need a wash first.

Generative AI.

I use a clean tea towel. Bigger surface than kitchen towel and less wasteful.

Haunting…

Love it @soupyspoon😂

Could not disagree more. Virtually the whole of Asia has a rice cooker ! You don’t need to watch it. You put it in, press the button and get back to work/farming/housework… rice is kept warm, never burns and when you eat rice 3x a day - keeping an eye on the hob is a massive waste of time - that can be used more productively. Wouldn’t be without it.

See, I thought this until I remarked to a friend how fluffy her rice was (mine was always sticky) and she told me about her rice cooker.

Never going back to the stove top method.

That was my TicTok back in the day.

Team ricer cooker. Utterly essential.

I grow my own lettuces and just used to give them a cursory rinse, shake them dry in my hand and pop them on the plate.

That was until the recent Night of the Slug. Now I was them very, very thoroughly (but still shake them dry in my hand).

An iceberg lettuce will last for weeks if you just take the leaves you need as and when.

Ok, so I know millions of people disagree, but I can’t see the draw for rice cookers. My stove top rice is great, and my kitchen’s tiny and already rammed with gadgets I don’t use much, but just enough to keep. Are Asia and Mumsnet wrong?? 😱

I'm the same, but I guess I don't eat rice all that much to justify the need and I quite like the way I make it myself.