Till final month, I couldn’t justify proudly owning a salad spinner. After all I believed it will be good to have, nevertheless it’s a cumbersome single-use gadget I mentally categorized with different honey-oak-cabinet litter of my youth: electrical griddles, standalone popcorn poppers, and Ron Popeil’s newest culinary improvements.
Plus, the few occasions a 12 months I’d point out to my husband that perhaps we must always get one—all the time whereas inefficiently drying lettuce for a dinner I used to be already behind in getting ready—he’d roll his eyes, make a sweeping gesture towards the mountain of no matter kitchen gear I occurred to be reviewing on the time, and inform me a salad spinner was the very last thing we wanted. Maybe that’s why it’s the very very first thing I purchased once I went buying to inventory the house I moved into not lengthy after I filed for divorce.
As I added my new software to my cart, I felt a bit of foolish for resisting it so long as I had. I wholeheartedly consider a considerable salad—whether or not it’s topped with hen or tossed with avocado—is an entire meal, and I’d typically stated I’d eat one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the event that they didn’t require a lot preparation. A salad spinner eliminates essentially the most annoying and time-consuming a part of salad prep: drying the rattling lettuce.
Beforehand, my lettuce-drying routine concerned holding a contemporary kitchen towel taut over a colander filled with dripping-wet chopped romaine, then turning it the wrong way up and violently shaking the entire thing to launch the water from the greens. The primary towel instantly soaked by means of, and I’d repeat this course of a number of extra occasions till my lettuce appeared tolerably dry or till I ran out of unpolluted towels (whichever got here first).
Now I could make a salad in a comparatively quick period of time, and since it now not feels so daunting, I’m truly making and consuming much more salads than I used to be earlier than. And as my colleagues have identified, a salad spinner is good for greater than drying lettuce; you need to use it to dry shredded veggies, canned white beans (certainly one of my favourite salad toppings!), and just-rinsed cauliflower or broccoli florets. In the event you get a good sufficient one, your salad spinner can double as a serving bowl too.
Nowadays, I’m a lady laughing alone with salad. Dry salad. I nonetheless have a bunch of unpolluted, dry kitchen towels besides. Spinning my lettuce additionally occurs to convey me a ridiculous quantity of pleasure and I actually don’t know if I’ll ever get sick of urgent down on the deal with and watching the interior bowl rotate at tremendous velocity whereas ejecting water from my freshly-washed romaine.
It truly is the little issues—and the cumbersome issues which are completely value making room for in the event that they enhance your life.