Go-Go Gadget Kitchen

 Chef Mac

Hello. My name is Mac, and I’m addicted to kitchen gadgets.

Hi Mac!

Let’s face it, a lot of guys and gals who get into stuff get into stuff because there’s so much cool stuff that goes with the stuff that you can use to make stuff or do stuff with the stuff you’re into. Some people like to dress up their cats in superhero outfits or S&M gear. Some people want to make an endless series of dangerous and/or unnecessary adjustments to their car that will usually only effect performance at roughly double the legal speed limits anywhere other than the Autobahn. Some people never saw a piece of wood they didn’t want to turn into a lovingly stressed faux antique. Me, I’m satisfied with endless ways to mutilate a potato. Granted, I’ve been damaged by experiences at culinary school where chef instructors breathed down my neck in anticipation of the chance to point out that my tournes had eight sides, or six sides, when I had done my level best to carve seven. I even spent $35 on a bird’s beak knife about the length of my pinky, which is used only to cut tournes, and which of course I promptly lost because the damn thing was so small. How many times have I been asked to tourne anything outside of school? Exactly never. Still, I sometimes remember that I no longer have a bird’s beak knife, and wonder if I have enough empty bottles to reclaim the deposit on that I could get one. Then it occurs to me I left my boning knife at my ex-girlfriend’s parent’s house, and that’s going to cost me at least fifty bucks. In the end I completely freeze with indecision, only to buy some other gadget I probably won’t use very often either.

One of my most prized possessions is a $15 spatula. Triple ply steel with a heat resistant silicon grip. My ten inch chef’s knife cost me almost $200. I own four peelers, and I’ve lost several others. I can not see an electric frying pan or a crock pot at a thrift store for less than ten bucks and not buy it. I have an antique bread crumber, which is particularly useless, made from poisonous pewter, and actually jams up when you try and put bread through it. The dumbest thing I own is a tomato slicer, a little hand held gadget with five serrated blades in a little safety cage. There’s no way to hold the tomato as you slice through it, so it really doesn’t work at all. My bone saw, which comes in its own camouflage belt pouch, is designed to cut through the rib cage and pelvis of a quarter ton elk. How often do I find myself in need of cutting through the rib cage and pelvis of a quarter ton elk? Let’s just say I’ve made a lot more tournes.

My mom showed me a trick once where you take an apple corer and use it to make little cylinders of potato which you can then cut into discs for any number of applications. Soups, fry, au gratin, pot roasts. It’s unbelievably time consuming for a simple potato element, but to this day I have yet to get a lesson from my mother I consider more valuable.

I bought a table top deep fryer at Wal-Mart, at a price I was pretty happy about, in order to impress my girlfriend with the spiral cut fries I had bought a different gadget for. She broke up with me anyway. Worst part was I forgot she still had my boning knife before I pulled my jilted lover routine. It was a damn fine boning knife too.

Then there’s other things I simply treasure. A square black iron skillet that is the only thing my grandmother’s poor estate could bequeath to me. It probably almost a hundred years old, but it still looks shiny and new. An oyster shucker I bought after a gig where I spent six hours in a freezing  back yard shucking ice cold oysters. It was a sort of act rebellion to buy it, an indication to the fickle gods of this profession that it could continue to throw its worst at me, and I would never, never, never give up. One of my four peelers is super nice. A shrimp deveiner that saved my ass once, and that someone once saw and asked me why I was keeping sex toys in my knife kit. My pots and pans set nearly put me out for a grand, but good lord they are sexy. Three wooden spoons I found on a curbside next to sign that said “FREE”, not sure why I like those so much, but I do. A non-stick Tuscan pan with makes the best grilled cheeses in the world. A muffin pan I’ve used twice, neither time to actually make muffins.

There are two gadgets left in my current stockpile. One I use every time I cook, and the other I don’t feel I deserve to use yet. The first gadget is my brain, which James Bond claimed was his favorite weapon, and  one that if more people would use when they cooked and ate, we wouldn’t have so many societal problems. I firmly believe that. The second is a chef’s coat. It’s 500 thread count Egyptian cotton, with “Chef Mac” embroidered on the chest in black cursive script that matches the silk piping and ebony buttons. I bought it online one night when I was drunk and feeling aspirational. I’d forgotten all about it until the UPS guy showed up at my country cottage and dropped it off. For now, it remains in the package. I don’t feel like I even deserve to look at it, much less wear it. I keep it in the closet, and sometimes take it out, debating whether to iron it and just try it on for size, but my conscience admonishes me that the moment hasn’t arrived yet. My culinary accomplishments have not lived up to the kind of person who can really get away with wearing that kind of coat, and I sometimes think they never will. Maybe, just maybe, if I can get my hands on the right gadget, all that will change.