A Surprising Kitchen Gadget

I bought this little gadget as joke for my husband. Have you figured out what it is yet?  It looks a little bit like an old-fashioned egg slicer, but it isn't.

My husband loves strawberries ... but me, not so much. In fact, not at all. He buys them at home (in Canada) in those little 1 pint packs, but then he sticks them in the fridge and won't eat them unless I clean them for him.  I don't eat them, nor use them so after a week or so, they go in the compost bin. It's supposed to be his job to clean and cut them, but never gets around to doing it.



A couple of weeks ago he bought 2 huge bags of strawberries off the "day-old" rack at Walmart ($2 total for both bags). There were a LOT of berries in those bags, but I knew that given his condition at the time, he probably wouldn't be the one cutting them up.

It would have been too much to waste all those berries so I spent 20 minutes cutting the tops off them, and washing them clean, but I wasn't looking forward to cutting them up. I remembered this little gadget I had bought a year or so ago as a bit of a gag, because I knew he'd never use it and I doubted I would.

I dug around in the cupboard til I found it (still in the box, still wrapped in plastic) and opened it up.

I actually didn't think it would work very well, but it surprised me. This was billed as a strawberry slicer on the box and you know what? It works like a charm.

I paid less than $2 for it at a local discount store but in about 7 minutes, I had all those berries neatly sliced in a bowl ready to be bagged for the freezer (8 cups of sliced berries). The blades are way sharper than I expected a cheapie little gadget to have (sliced my finger on one of them) and for the most part, the berries are sliced uniformly.

(Now I'm wishing I'd bought 2 so I could take one to Florida for our house there ... we live 20 minutes from the strawberry capital in Florida - Plant City.)

How long it will stay sharp is anyone's guess, but for less than the price of a pair of panty hose (which I typically can use once) I expect this little gadget will do for a few years anyways.  It was certainly worth the price, and might even induce me to cut up his berries for him.

... and I bet it will slice eggs just fine too.