When one's budget is cut in half, it becomes quite easy to spot useless gadgets - like a $20 panini spatula. I spotted this gem while Daisy and I were paging through the Williams-Sonoma catalog for November.
It's a wide spatula with a slit down the middle where you can insert your knife - a $69.95 Wusthof Classic Panini Knife, no less - and you cut the sandwich in half, while holding the sandwich down with this specialized spatula. And, when you are done, you will (apparently) have a restaurant-perfect panini, all without having worried that your panini innards might start to ooze out while cutting the sandwich in half.
How did we ever get on with eating lunch before the invention of this spatula and knife pairing? I mean, how did we ever get the perfect panini when it was the wild west of a person holding the sandwich in place with one hand and cutting it with an ordinary knife in the other?
You know what else works great for cutting a sandwich? A bread knife. And, it's good for other things, too. Like slicing bread, bagels, lettuce, whatever.
Don't get me wrong, I love looking at Wusthof's knives. Their Ikon Blackwood collection takes my breath away, because those knives really are just that beautiful, and I'm a sucker for a really good knife set. However, after Daisy and I relocated back to Pittsburgh, there was a long period where Daisy had a genuinely hard time finding a new job, and our budget for non-essentials shrank to the size of a pea - a situation to which a lot of people in this country can relate right now.
Our budget hasn't returned to the level it was before, but even when it does, we have come to realize that a $300 knife set - enter Henckels - works just as well as the very pretty $700 set. That extra $400? Mostly just for show, so we probably won't own a set of Wusthof Ikon Blackwood knives. Or, a panini-specific knife either.
What can I see us picking up one day? An All-Clad Stainless Steel Multipot with Mesh Insert, which runs at $129, a price that should not be undertaken lightly. However, just about everyone makes pasta or boils potatoes, and just about everyone has gotten the boiling water on themselves while trying to dump the pot contents into a strainer in the sink. This pot saves you from that problem. Nothing to sneeze at.
Think of it - the timer goes off to tell you the spaghetti's done, and all you do is turn off the stove, lift the mesh strainer out of the hot pot, and finish making dinner. When the water has cooled, dump it in the sink later. No more burned fingers, toes, whatever. Priceless.
Penn
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