My Favorite $5 Kitchen Gadget

I buy too many kitchen toys, and I suspect I'm not alone. Admit it: Anyone who watches Food TV, buys cookbooks, or owns an up-to-date Zagat's, to say nothing of the hardcore amongst us who actually read blogs about food and cooking in our spare time, owns an extravagant number of culinary gadgets. That many of them go unused is a virtual certainty, strange, medieval-looking devices that seemed so indispensable in the Williams-Sonoma catalog, but which turned out to be hard to clean or - worst of all - to require more work than the task they were originally meant to simplify...