I adore summer for a variety of reasons…flies, mosquitoes, stinging bugs, more spiders around etc   Seriously though, I do love the summer/warmer months more than the colder months of the year.  Yes, I love the heat but I really love the abundance of fresh grown food.  Give me an interesting salad any day!  Add a light dressing and I’m as good as a pig in mud.   I don’t like commercial dressings…call me precious, i don’t care, but I love making my own dressing by taste.  I generally stick  to 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar/acidic, give it a bit of a shake and Bob’s you’re uncle (or aunt if a sex change operation is on the cards).  I picked this little plastic bottle up last night at the kitchenware store at Central Markets on Gouger Street [Adelaide for non SA readers].

It has a rubber stopper so you don’t wear the dressing while shaking your little heart out…as 99 says, “Good thinking, Max”.  It even has little recipe’s around the bottle for those dressing challenged folk!  I like that I can store in in the fridge, take it out and give it a quick shake and pour straight on to my salad…it has a little pouring lip.  In the past i’ve been known to use pre-loved glass jars, but they don’t have spouts and can be a little messy.  Someone has thought about the design…the pouring lip, and the rubber stopper for fridge storage so it doesn’t absorb other odours make this ‘gadget’ a winner in my books.

The $9.99 price tag sold it for me…if it turns out to be crap [let's face it, we've all made regretful crappy impulse purchases before] then I haven’t wasted a lot of money.

So dear readers…what do you think about the salad bottle gadget?  Have you got a better one that I’d covet?  Go on…..tease me!

You can live or die by your mash in my world!  If you think serving up lumpy mash was hard for the Masterchef contestants, you haven’t been judged by my family.  They don’t even need to wear cow hide boots or cravat’s to make the potato chef’s knees shake in fear! For the last two decades i’ve served up my creamy mash using my trusty hand held masher.  But recently, i bought a new gadget that helped me produce my creamy mash without so much effort!

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The humble lemon squeezer, I’m happy to say, has competition! And quite frankly if i were a traditional lemon squeezer, i’d be shaking my kitchen cupboard right about now! These are the new generation of cast citrus squeezers.  I bought, Miss Lemon first, about a year ago now, after seeing it on a popular daytime tv show. She didn’t disappoint the $20 + postage price tag. Soon after I bought her sister Miss Lime, at a local cookware shop for around $14. More recenty i bought Misses Lemon and Lime’s big brother, Mr Orange, for $20 at another local cookware store.

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