During the last few weeks, my kitchen has decided to do a purging of its own. For some reason, the gadgets which we have been using for the last 5 or so years have begun to break. My guess is that they just reached the end of their useful life cycle (and probably had been already lasted past their expiration dates anyway)…but I was just not ready to let them go.

One of these was our mango slicer. I cannot even begin to count the number of mangoes we Mackenzie has consumed in the last few years. Funny enough (or maybe tragically) I had a mango slicer before Mackenzie was born. But I almost never used it. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we weren’t going to farmers’ markets quite as often as we do now (it was a monthly thing versus our almost weekly trips now) and at the little produce market down the street, they seriously charged 4-5 EUROS per mango the majority of the year (versus the 3 mangoes for 3 or 4 Euros that we now pay).

At any rate, I did think this slicer was pretty practical when I was using it on a regular basis, but the problem was that after a few years of use, the blade seemed to get mangled by the mango seed…and so there were little waves and crimps in the bottom of the cutting blade. This meant that it was getting to be less and less effective as slicing nicely through mangoes. And then it went from making on a little bit of waste around the seed to a whole lot of waste and more trouble than it was worth.

Long story short, if you are hopeless with cutting mangoes, this device is pretty practical. I had a generic one bought here in Germany, but there is a really nice OXO one at Amazon and they are usually really good quality. And it definitely made cutting up a mango pretty quick and easy as far as separating the majority of the meat from the seed goes. Obviously, you still have to worry with peeling it and lining up the cutter correctly so it cuts around the seed and not through it can also be a bit tricky. On the other hand, if you have a sharp nice and are willing to practice a lot with cutting them, you can do just as good a job by hand if not better after a few mangoes. I’ve learned that the hard way this week since I got sick of fighting with this thing and squashed a few very ripe mangoes into juice versus fruit salad. :-/

Something about this picture just looks perverse — or maybe my mind is just in the gutter this morning….

Another kitchen gadget I lost this week was our pineapple corer and slicer. Mine was all lightweight plastic (unlike the one in this picture) which could be where things went wrong in the first place. But it had two sizes of spinner things so you can easily slice up big and smaller pineapples…and most of the juice stayed in the pineapple (unless you happened to cut through it). Again, cool and useful to make cutting up pineapples more fun. But can I live without it? Most definitely.

What happened with ours is that the “button” on the handle which holds it in place on the desired slicer lost a spring or something and no longer popped into the hole. So it became pretty much useless. I tried using it without the handle, but it just wasn’t the same. I wound up with a bunch of pineapple mush and only half of my pineapple was sliced, so into the trash it went.

Now while I really enjoyed using both of these things, with the limited amount of space we now have in our kitchen, it just seems more practical to let the items go and focus on the stuff that I really do need. I can certainly manage to cut up mangoes and pineapples on my own, just like I’ve always managed to cut up apples without one of those apple cutters. Hence, I won’t be replacing them with new gadgets but might go check out YouTube in the near future to see if there is some sort of trick I’m missing to cut up these fruits without making a total mess of things. 😉

Do you find yourself replacing certain gadgets in your kitchen on a regular basis? Or are you aiming for a gadget free kitchen? If you have gadgets, what is your favorite one?