The utensil drawer by the stove quit closing on the Fourth of July. Somewhere under the tongs, a potato masher had wedged itself sideways, and when Ryan gave the drawer a good yank in the middle of our Lowcountry boil prep, the whole thing came off its track and dumped about sixty tools on the kitchen floor. I swept them into a laundry basket and promised myself I'd deal with it before school started. This week I did.
We got married in June 2012, so that basket held fourteen years of wedding gifts, impulse buys and a few good finds. My rule for the clean-out: if I hadn't touched something since last summer, it had to make its case. Most couldn't.
The why is a classroom rule. In my labs, sharp tools never share a drawer with anything else, because a hand that's digging can't see what it's digging toward. My own kitchen had a mandoline blade under a pile of spatulas. Not great, teacher.
What earned its drawer
- The chef's knife from our wedding registry. Fourteen years of daily use. It's showing its age near the heel, but it's still the first thing I reach for.
- The $25 instant-read thermometer from last May. It lives in the crock by the stove and gets used most days.
- A bench scraper, about $9 in 2016. Dough, flour, chopped onions, the counter.
- Two pairs of 12-inch tongs, $12 each. One pair would be plenty if Ryan didn't keep borrowing them for the grill.
- A thin fish spatula, $14. It flips eggs, pancakes and wedges of cornbread more neatly than anything else I own.
- Three silicone spatulas, about $15 for the set.
- A rasp grater, $15, which is the reason the garlic press is leaving.
- Pyrex measuring cups in 1, 2 and 4 cups, wedding gifts, the red markings on the 2-cup nearly worn away.
- A wooden spoon from Granny June's kitchen, scorched on one edge from her stove. It doesn't do anything a $3 spoon can't, and it isn't going anywhere.
- Kitchen shears that come apart for washing, about $20.
- The mandoline, which stayed on one condition. I bought a cut-resistant glove for $9, and the glove now lives in the box with the blade.
The knives moved out of the drawer altogether, onto a $20 magnetic strip on the wall by the stove. On the counter, the KitchenAid stand mixer from our wedding stays put. It's a tilt-head that sounds like a lawn mower now, and it still makes every birthday cake in this house.
What went in the donate box
- The bread machine, a wedding gift used twice in 2012.
- The fondue set, a wedding gift used once, on New Year's Eve 2013.
- The spiralizer I bought in 2017 for one summer of zucchini noodles.
- A panini press. A cast iron skillet with a second heavy pan on top does the same job.
- A quesadilla maker that made exactly the quesadillas a skillet makes.
- The garlic press, which took longer to clean than mincing takes.
- An avocado slicer, a $10 impulse buy from a checkout line.
- An egg separator shaped like a chicken.
- Three of our five vegetable peelers, two of four can openers, two melon ballers, a second pizza cutter, pizza scissors and a strawberry huller.
- The second potato masher. The one that started all this.
A cake pop maker also went in the box. Nora pulled it back out within the hour and carried it up to her room, and I let that one go.
I added up what I could remember paying for the impulse buys in that box: about $210, not counting the wedding gifts, which were free to us and not cheap for somebody. Everything went to a thrift store in Columbia on Tuesday, and a bag of plastic containers with no matching lids went to recycling.
What I'd do differently
Nearly everything that left was a tool built for a single job that another tool already did. So the rule from here on: a new gadget has to replace something in the drawer, or it doesn't come home. One in, one out.
And if a newly married couple at church ever asks me what to register for, I'll tell them a thermometer, two heavy sheet pans and a good pair of tongs. Skip the fondue set. You will use it once, on New Year's Eve, and then keep it for thirteen years out of guilt.
The drawer closes now. Nobody has tested it with a yank yet.
