Thursday, February 21, 2013

Gadgets: Clip & Drain

The other day, I was straining some spaghetti and watched in horror as a good handful of noodles wriggled past the strainer and into the sink.

Okay, the sink was clean enough, but most of 'em went down the drain, and there's no five-second-rule for that.

Two days later, the Clip & Drain ($11.95) showed up. It's a simple idea - you clip it to the edge of your pot, and you have both hands free for pouring. The shape of the Clip & Drain makes it work with a huge variety of pot sizes, from small to pretty darned big.

With pots on the far ends of the size spectrum, the fit wasn't quite as good as for the mid-sized pots, but it was good enough to keep my spaghetti from going down the drain.

Although I like using this thing for draining potatoes, pasta, and vegetables, I found it even more useful when I was straining some stock. Maybe it's just me, but that usually ends up being a mess since it's the liquid that needs to be saved. With this, it was pretty easy to just strain the stock into a storage container and toss the remains that were left in the pot.

I can't say how long the clip part of the Clip & Drain will last, but it seems pretty sturdy, and it grips the pots firmly. I was a little bit skittish the first few times I used it, thinking that if it slipped off, I'd lose a whole pot of vegetables, but it held firm.

The curious thing about this product is that no one thought if it before. It's a genius idea, and it works really well.
Yum