Last week, I wrote about kitchen gadgets, both useful and not. Let me add some news about a simple $5 gadget — with a Utah connection — that helps with peeling potatoes, a necessary chore if your family likes potatoes.
A few years ago, I spent more than $30 on a contraption that resembles a medieval torture device. The potato goes on a long spike with four prongs, and you turn a crank to make it peel. It's fine for apples, since they're smooth. But potatoes are lumpy, and the machine can't reach all the bumps. So you end up first putting the potato on the machine, then taking it off and finishing the job by hand.
For Thanksgiving this year, our family made mashed potatoes to serve 50 people, and we found out how tedious paring potatoes can be. My 11-year-old daughter even developed a blister from gripping the hand peeler. So much for KP duty.
So, I was interested a few weeks later to see the Peeler Pal, a simple plastic holder somewhat like a long skinny screw that you twist into the center of the potato. Then, in one hand, you hold the handle (with the potato on it), and with the other hand, you peel. You have a firm grip and you're able to peel without fear of cutting yourself. It also works on apples, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash and so on.
Unfortunately, you still have to do the peeling part by hand, but at least the potato doesn't slip while you're working. It's packaged with a stainless steel right- or left-handed peeler, made as a set.
"That's another great thing about it — I'm left-handed, and you can't find another left-handed peeler out there," said Christine Bryant, whose husband, Roger, invented the Peeler Pal. She was born in Salt Lake City (old friends may remember her by her maiden name, Christine Motzkus), and the couple now lives in Tempe, Ariz.
Roger Bryant, a former high-speed test driver for General Motors, frequently had to peel about 20 pounds of potatoes for his extended family of 25.
"We would get together two or three times a week, and he was sick of getting his hands nicked by the peeler," Christine said during a telephone interview.
So he improvised and made his own plastic holder, which worked so well that the couple decided to patent and market it. The gadget is now in all the Utah Albertsons stores and Kitchen Collections mall kiosks. You can also check out the Web site www.peelerpal.com to see if this is a gadget you might use.
After writing a column warning readers against filling up your drawers with gadgets you don't use, I'm certainly not going to advocate buying anything!
E-MAIL: vphillips@desnews.com