Kitchen Toys - My First Love

salad spinner
Originally uploaded by Kit Pollard.

Long before I started to learn to cook properly, I learned to make salads. Beautiful, tasty, crunchy salads. Salads that would feel at home on a restaurant menu.

So it fits that my very first kitchen toy was an OXO salad spinner. My mom has a funky orange Zyliss salad spinner, a wedding present from the early seventies. At first, I thought it was the most unnecessary piece of equipment ever. A few months later, I realized that it was an awesome toy.

And I bought myself one. Then I went crazy with it. Much to the amusement of Cooper and friends.

Then something odd happened. As I started to learn how to cook things beside salad, and to receive the entire Williams Sonoma catalog as wedding and shower gifts, my romance with my salad spinner waned. I had new toys to play with - a fancy French mandoline, a Nigella-inspired mezzaluna, a mixer just like Barefoot's.

These days, fickle as I am, my salad spinner sits in a hard-to-reach cabinet above my refrigerator, gathering dust. I dry my lettuce with paper towels (which, actually, works a lot better if you don't want your lettuce broken and beaten down). And I'm constantly on the lookout for a new toy.

But don't worry. I won't forget you entirely, salad spinner. As they say, you never forget your first.