Stuff You Need

This will (hopefully) be a new feature on The Sweet Life. Each Monday, I'll highlight "Stuff You Need" in your kitchen. This week...one of my kitchen heroes:

The salad spinner! For anyone who eats a lot of salad, you definitely need this! My mother-in-law (Shirley), and my stepmom (Theresa), both told me for a couple of years that I needed a salad spinner. I was skeptical. Why in the heck would I buy a salad spinner? I always just bought salad in a bag. Then I began to do a little math (and I avoid math like the plague). David and I eat salad at least a couple of nights a week. We can very easily put away a bag of salad between us at meal time. A bag of salad costs about $2.59. A bag of three hearts of romaine costs $3.00. We can get about 6 side salads or 3 meal sized salads out of it. It's much more economical to buy the hearts of romaine! (Even my mathematically-challenged brain can figure that one out.) That leaves the problem of cleaning the lettuce, though. So I decided to buy a salad spinner and see what all the fuss was about. I went to the local Wal-Mart to buy one, and I was surprised to see that they ranged in price from $2.98 to about $30.00. I'm also no engineer, but I can see that there aren't a whole heck of a lot of mechanics involved in this thing, and I wasn't entirely sure I needed one, so I bought the $2.98 model (see above). I've been using it for several months now, and it's no worse for wear. I did have one "incident" though...I got my thumb hung up in the water hole while the salad was spinning. My thumb stopped the spinning action, the lid popped off, and I had a tornado of lettuce flying through my kitchen. But my thumb was still intact, and the problem was operator error, not the fault of the spinner. Have I conviced you to buy one yet? If you're on the fence, let me leave you with this...in a pinch, the inner compartment (that actually holds the salad), can double as a colander in a pinch:See? I think even Alton Brown would approve, because the salad spinner ISN'T a unitasker. He says you should only have one unitasker in your kitchen! Do you know what it is? Leave me a comment with your answer. I don't have anything to give away to you, but you can have bragging rights as the first "Stuff You Need" trivia contest winner on The Sweet Life!