Most of us have the more traditional kitchen appliances, like a microwave and blender, but sometimes it's fun to try some slightly unusual kitchen gadgets. These items can also make nice gifts for the cook who has everything else in his or her kitchen already. While you might use some of these items more often than others, all can come in handy at times.
1. Presto Salad Shooter
The salad shooter is most useful in shredding large quantities of cheese to use, for example, in lasagna or enchiladas. It comes with two blades for slicing, shredding, grating, and chopping vegetables and fruits. Clean up is easy as the salad shooter is dishwasher safe.
2. Sandwich Maker
A sandwich maker not only makes fast grilled cheese sandwiches, but can also cook pastries, pancakes, omelets and more. Older kids and teens love this fast snack maker.
3. Rival Ice Cream Maker
Another kitchen gadget that is not a necessity, an electric ice cream maker can be lots of fun for the kids, and it makes delicious homemade ice cream. The Rival ice cream maker comes with a recipe book full of lots of different ice cream flavors.4. Rival Snow Cone Maker
The snow cone maker finely shaves ice cubes to produce delicious snow cones, slushies and smoothies your family will love.5. Rival Meat Slicer
A meat slicer is another handy gadget to have in the kitchen. We use our's to slice meat thinly for beef jerky; we buy a whole ham and slice that into sizes perfect for sandwiches. Also slices cheese, onions, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables.
6. Digital Cooking Thermometer
Although a digital cooking thermometer is not a necessity, it can be very handy to have in the kitchen. It can almost instantly give a reading on the internal temperatures of food such as roast and turkeys. I also use mine to test the temperature of the water before adding yeast when baking breads.7. Hamilton Beach Electric Knife
An electric knife is very useful in slicing turkeys, roasts and fresly made bread. We use our's mostly during the holidays for carving the turkey, but it's handy to have year round.8. Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer
With three growing boys, I like to buy food in bulk. The FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer helps keep the extra food I buy fresh. And it's compact so it fits either on the counter or in the cupboard.9. Classic Cookie Press
Whether you are making cookies for your child's birthday party or homemade Christmas cookies, this cookie press will help you create lovely cookies. This cookie press by VillaWare comes with a heavy-duty cookie gun, 20 cookie shapes with interchangeable disks and 4 cake decoration funnels.10. Potato Ricer
This kitchen gadget isn't a necessity, a potato ricer makes light and airy mashed potatoes for your family dinners. This potato ricer comes with 3 interchangeable stainless steel disks and, in addition to mashed potatoes, strains tomatoes and makes hash browns.