The lure of kitchen gadgets is undeniable.
They promise to make your cooking life easier. They will fix problems that you never knew you had until the moment you saw the solution. Your food will taste better, be healthier, and somehow still manage to be all these things despite halving your cooking time.
Who would resist those ideas?
Very few of us, which is why it’s so common for most homes to have more than a few kitchen gadgets – barely used since purchase – sat gathering dust in the back of their cabinets. So rather than add to the graveyard of the discarded appliances, it might be worth asking yourself a few questions to see if it’s really necessary.
Question 1: Where Did This Idea Come From?
An acceptable process:
You decide you need a new food processor spontaneously, based off an experience in the kitchen or realizing you could cut time.
You go and consult online advice guides, seek recommendations from friends, browse through this list of the best ones here and eventually settle on one you know is going to suit your needs and budget.
An unacceptable process:
You see an advert or a recommendation from a friend for a new food processor. You haven’t thought you needed one and had no plans to buy one, right up until that minute.
You want that one in particular, even though you have done no research on it.
With the first process, the idea is organic and meeting a genuine need. For the second, you’re falling for the hype. That’s rarely a good thing.
Question 2: Can I Afford It?
Sometimes it’s so tempting to be caught up in the idea of something making your life easier that you forget about the basic questions. Can you really afford this new gadget? If you don’t have an explicit need for it or it does nothing more than “save you time”, then maybe you’d be best waiting a few weeks and just making sure that money isn’t needed for something more important.
Question 3: Do I Know What I Am Getting?
If you buy something on the spur of the moment, then you don’t have time to do your due diligence. You don’t want to buy an item and then realize it doesn’t do what you thought it did, or it’s not suited to the tasks you had in mind. Always – always – leave a day or so between deciding you want the item, and actually purchasing it, giving you the time to make sure it’s the right call for you.
Question 4: Do I Have Room For It?
If your kitchen cabinets are already full to bursting, that doesn’t mean you have to go without the new gadget love of your life. It just means you need to be prepared to clear some space – while preserving space for the essentials you use on a daily basis – to give it a home.
Try and do this before you make the purchase. Don’t buy and just assume that it’s something you’ll figure out – and then get home and realize you don’t have enough space, so it’ll spend its non-use hours nestled beneath the dining table! It’s the kitchen that needs to have the space – so take the chance for a declutter to make room.
