Nifty Kitchen Gadgets Worth Having

There are a lot of nifty kitchen gadgets out there. Quesadilla makers, yogurt makers, egg cookers, deep fryers, special grills, and so on.

I'm not talking about these. I'm not talking about the kind you get from Grandma for Christmas , tuck inside a cabinet, and never use. (However: MY grandma sent me a Magic Bullet, and I use that thing almost daily.)

I'm talking about some inexpensive must-haves for your fresh-food, healthy kitchen. Ready?

• Several sharp knives. They don't have to be fancy, just sharp. You can buy a sharpener for non-serrated knives.
  
• A Cuisinart. I promise - this is the most expensive thing on the list. Healthy food shouldn't be prohibitively expensive. (Yes, I'm going to continue to re-iterate that.) However, since eating fresh, whole food ingredients means you're giving up on factory-processed foods, you're going to have to do some processing yourself (minus all the icky chemicals , preservatives, and gross stuff like corn syrup.) Hence the need for a cuisinart.
• A Magic Bullet. This thing is a miracle worker for chopping up small amounts of things, or creating ultra-smooth dressings when you only want a cup and don't want to dirty up the whole cuisinart or blender. AND, you can store your creation right in the little cup you made it in; the thing comes with several and they all have lids. It's rockin'. I can't tell you how much they cost because mine, as I mentioned above, was a present from my Grandma.
  
• A smoothie-maker or blender. My smoothie maker is great because it's tough; it was only $30 but it's made to chop ice and fruits, so it doesn't self-destruct the way some of the cheaper blenders do when you toss in fibrous or hard things. It also processes fairly well.
  
• A dehydrator. But.....only if you are interested in learning to make dried-fruit, soy-jerky, flax crackers, raw-food breads, and raw-food taco shells and raw food corn chips and OKAY.... there are a lot of healthy, delicious reasons to have a dehydrator. You can get a corny little Ronco dehydrator for about $35 at Target, and it's what I use. I know that serious raw-foodies will get an Excalibur and spend $200 and up on the thing, but my little Ronco trucks along just fine and turns out some pretty delightful stuff.
  
• A Mandoline. This is basically a vegetable slicer. When you eat as many uncooked vegetables as you're going to be eating, sometimes slicing with a knife gets taxing. Or sometimes you want a super-thin french fry cut, and so on. You can make ultra-thin, uniform slices very quickly with a mandoline (and I got mine at Target for $9), so they are very handy.
  

So that's all I have in my kitchen as far as special gadgets goes. There are others that are nice-to-have, i'm sure, such as a Champion Juicer or a VitaMix. But some of us are just not, for the foreseeable future, going to be in the market for a six-hundred dollar blender, and I don't want the many wonderful raw food recipes I have discovered , modified, or created, to be unattainable to the masses. So I'll do without, and so can you (if you want to) .

You don't need a Vitamix to be healthy.