My Favorite New Kitchen Gadget

It seems that each cook has their favorite part of their kitchen. The appliances, the cookbooks, the ingredients, the memories from their kitchen. For me it is the tools that I love. I love to go to a kitchen section in a store and look at all the cool tools to use. Vegetable peelers, mini choppers, knives, cutting boards, lemon juicers, spatulas, reamers, melon ballers, funnels (they're like fancy tunnels, right Erin?), pastry blenders, I could go on forever. I love all those cool gadgets that I can use to make the process of cooking much easier and smoother.

I love making lemon bars and other lemon deserts like lemon meringue pie, which of course requires lemon juice and lemon zest. Well I finally had to bite the bullet and get a lemon zester.
The above picture is the zester, which is super cool because if you pull on the gray end and push the red button on the other end it pulls out of itself. When you're finished adding your lemon zest to your ingredients, you can easily slip the zester back together. Sleek and small it fits very nicely into your kitchen drawers and doesn't take up a lot of room.

The first time I used it was to make the Lemon Lentil Soup which Erin made earlier in the month. And contrary to popular belief the lemon flavor of Lemon Lentil Soup does not come from Lemon Curd.

Now I have a feeling that some people will comment on me lacking such a vital tool in the kitchen, but for a while I used bottled lemon juice and dried lemon peel in recipes just because Mom always did that. And in a pinch, for a recipe that calls for just a few tablespoons of juice or peel I think the bottled stuff is great. However, after using this zester I almost feel like I want to buy real lemons to use in every recipe that calls for lemon just so I can use my new tool!!! And after this very long discussion about lemons, I feel that the lime is often overlooked in its ability to liven up recipes. Limes are way cool too. Perhaps now I shouldn't call my favorite new gadget a lemon zester, but a citrus zester so I don't offend anyone in the produce section or appear prejudice towards any fruits or vegetables.