Veg-O-Matic still the mother of all gadgets for the kitchen

I blame my obsession with kitchen gadgets on the Veg-O-Matic.

That little 1960s gem of a chopper-dicer-slicer (but wait, there's more!) came up in conversation last month when I was visiting my parents in Minnesota. Mom, in her ever-practical manner, decided that since she had a captive audience of her four children, she'd make a list of who gets what when she dies. Kind of morbid, since she's probably got a good 20 years left in her, but that's Mom.

"Who gets the Veg-O-Matic?" she queried.

"That baby's mine," my oldest brother piped up. "I bought it for her for Christmas."

Since no one could remember otherwise, we quickly relented and moved on to the next keepsake. There would be no fistfights over the esteemed Veg-O-Matic, which I remember my mother using two or three times before relegating it to a place of honor on a back shelf of the pantry.

My research shows my brother would have paid about $2.98 for the fancy vegetable cutter in 1963, the first year they were sold. They're worth between $6 and $8 today on eBay.

Even though we never used the Veg-O-Matic much (Mom called it a newfangled contraption and preferred to slice potatoes the old-fashioned way), it was the potential of the gadget that we really fell in love with. Television commercials assured us, "Now you can slice a whole can of prepared meat at one time! Isn't that amazing!" Did we ever slice Spam with the Veg-O-Matic? No, but we could have.

I'll boldly state that I'm all for kitchen gadgets. Where would we be without the cheese slicer, invented by Thor Bjorklund on a hot summer day in 1925 when his Gouda was too soft to cut with a knife? Or the pop-up toaster, a 1919 marvel?

But let's face the real issue here. Our kitchens are only so big and will hold only so many handy-dandy gadgets.

My husband loves to cook, and it seems like we already have every kitchen gadget known to mankind. There are a few obvious omissions in our home, by choice. We don't yet have a countertop electric quesadilla-maker, nor will we buy one. We don't have a George Foreman grill or a countertop pizza-baker or an electric rice-cooker.

Why? Because they're too specific. Who wants to clutter up the kitchen with items you might use once a month after the novelty wears off? Actually, that was probably Mom's thinking when she shelved the Veg-o-Matic.

I have a pasta maker and a bread maker languishing in my pantry that never get used.

Since we're also on every cooking-magazine mailing list known to mankind, the temptation to buy more kitchen gadgets heightens this time of year as mail-order catalogs fill our post-office box. We were drooling over the possibilities in a recent Chef's catalog, but agreed about the absurdity of some offerings.

One was a $70 elevated cutting board with a "convenient" knife drawer below the cutting surface. How exactly does one wash such a cutting board? Drawer, knives and all? It didn't seem very practical.

We also mused over a gadget that peels, cores and slices a pineapple "in one easy twist." The catalog suggests that the pineapple shell can then be used as a "delightful mug." We laughed, too, at the $20 herb mincer, "a must for chervil, mint and leafy herbs," and thank God, "It's safe for fingers and knuckles." I don't know about you, but we don't chop much chervil at our house, and if we did I'm sure a simple knife would suffice as a chopping tool.

As I perused the magazine, I began to wonder how we all survived before the advent of salad spinners.

The latest gadget in our household is my husband's recent purchase of a professional mandoline. I'm not sure how much it cost, but my guess, judging from the various models in the Chef's catalog, is about $80. It slices and dices fruits and vegetables, from paper-thin to ultra-thick slices. Sound familiar?

Maybe I should tell him we could have saved ourselves some money if we had just borrowed Mom's Veg-O-Matic.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com