by Marie-Luise Stromer

Created on: January 17, 2011

I wonder how many expensive and sophisticated kitchen gadgets stand in dark corners of cupboards gathering dust. When smart sales people demonstrate the skills of such  technical miracles, everything looks easy-peasy. Once you’re home, you find that assembling the thingy takes more time than you need for the job you want to perform proper. How long does it take to get it out of the box, assemble it, plug it in and switch it on? How long does it take to cut an onion into small pieces with a kitchen knife? See?

No battery-driven potato peelers or pepper mills hereabouts, with the exception of a simple mixer for mashing fruit to make jam and an even simpler hand-held mixer to whip cream or whisk egg white and a toaster I have only hand-operated household helpers. The Kitchen Craft Stainless Steel Rotary Grater is one of them. I’ve had it for ages, I really can’t say when I purchased it.

It comes with three interchangeable drums for slicing, grating and shredding. You put the one you need into the lower part of a kind of gripper with the handle to the right if you work with your right hand or to  the left if you’re a leftie. You put the food you want to slice, grate or shred into the small container which sits at the end of the lower part of the gripper and is folded over the drum. Then you press it down with the end of the upper part of the gripper (with the hand you don’t use for turning the handle) and rotate the handle. The sliced, grated or shredded food falls out of the inside of the drum. Part of it, however, remains inside and must be taken out with, say, a spoon.

I  don’t use the drum for slicing, and I rarely use the drum for shredding. This is useful if you want to cover vegetables  with bits of cheese and then put the pot into the oven (I prefer laying thin slices of cheese on the vegetables). I mostly use the drum for grating. What I grate is dry, hard cheese, for example Parmesan cheese, which is then strewn over a plate of spaghetti. Of course, you can also use a battery driven cheese grinder, but believe me, the spaghetti don’t taste better with cheese ground that way.  Give the money you save to charity! I also use it for grinding hazel nuts for baking biscuits or nutmeg for spicing pumpkin soup.

Occasionally I want to coat a cutlet with breadcrumbs, if I don’t have any in store, I grind a dry and hard slice of bread (I don’t throw  dry and hard slices of bread away

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