My Favorite Kitchen DooHickeys

It's hard finding places to keep things, and i tend to throw away utensils and appliances with abandon when they aren't working for me. That said, there are some doohickeys that get used almost everyday in our house.

Good Knives
Good knives are important. You probably don't realize how important until you've used a good knife, and then had to use someone else crappy knife. While we have an assortment of small paring knives in our drawer, our knife block consists of 3 knives that we use daily. That's right, 3. We have a pairing knife, a 7 inch slicer, and chef's knife from the Calphalon Katana Series. If i had to pick 1 knife to use forever it would be that 7 inch slicer. $70 seems pricey for a knife ($56 if you use the 20% off coupon at Bed, Bath, and Beyond), until you realize that you will never need another knife again. We had ours for 5 years before i asked a chef friend to sharpen them for me, and they were still superior to other knives even then. I did, in fact, throw away a bag full of kitchen knives when we moved to our new house, because we acknowledged that we really do only use 3 knives

 Storage: We keep ours on a magnetic knife block with our steak knives and the bread knife (which we don't use everyday, but do have). This block is flat on the back and about 6 inches deep. 

Citrus Peeler
I don't know why, but we have like 5 of these. They are awesome. This is a pampered chef citrus peeler. If you ever have a friend toting pampered chef, these are usually like $1-$2 in the catalog. They're $7 for 2 on Amazon. These ingenious little tools score citrus perfectly. I have used them to make long spirals, but mostly i just use them to peel oranges and grapefruit. If you eat citrus, you will not regret having one (or 5) in your drawer. Storage: These take up no space. Get one

Apple Slicer
My husband eats apple slices with peanut butter pretty much every day. I imagine when we have a kid they will too. He uses this everyday. They run around $7, and we actually picked ours up at an antique store. Storage: If you have a kitchen catch-all drawer, that's where this ends up, mixed in with spatulas and turkey basters. While I don't mind just cutting apples with a knife, the corer function is desirable.

Pineapple Corer

Ok, if you don't eat a lot of pineapple/want to eat a lot of pineapple, there is no point in having this. My husband goes through a pineapple a week and this thing is awesome. It Cores and rings the pineapple just by screwing down through the top. It saves a lot of effort. $6 Storage: This is an awkward one to store, it barely fits in a drawer.