All Those Kitchen Gadgets, but a Sharp Knife Just Might Do.
'Berries are hot this year, Scott Goldsmith was saying on a recent rain-flecked Friday, brandishing a bright red plastic, wagon wheel-shaped gizmo called a PushBerry, which aims to hull and slice your strawberries in one go.
Avocados, still hot, he added, gesturing at the Flexicado and the Avoquado — two of the many slicers and pitters for sale in his store, all rendered in acid green plastic (designers of kitchen gadgets seem to go in for biomimicry). As for tenacious kale, this decade’s celebrity green, its grooming aids now include the Looseleaf and the Swiftstrip, otherwise known as kale leaf strippers, the solution to a problem you might not know you had.
Mr. Goldsmith, 61, is the third-generation owner of S. Feldman Housewares — a glittering bazaar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — and an impresario of kitchen gadgetry. On this April morning, his shelves were bursting with esoterica like the billowy yellow silicone Food Pod (a combination steamer and colander that looks like vegetation imagined by the production designers of “Star Trek,” $14.99); the SpreadTHAT titanium butter knife (“It’s pretty cool,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “It uses the heat of your hands. I don’t eat much butter, but I don’t discriminate,” $19.95); onion goggles ($19.95); and sequined aprons ($120) that were a big hit last Christmas.
How do you wash the aprons? “I have no idea,” he said.
Mr. Goldsmith’s long retail career spans decades of gadgetry — including truffle shavers and cherry pitters, Salad Shooters and spiralizers — and traces a history of ingenuity, optimism and sheer whimsy. If the invention of defoliating devices for cruciferous vegetables causes you to think the makers of kitchen gadgets have finally and collectively lost their minds, Mr. Goldsmith will remind you that his store has been in business since 1929.
“Between you and me,” he said, “most of these things you can do with a knife.” . .
As she wrote, “the birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty wears off.”
She continued, “To the woman who has just acquired an electric blender, the whole world looks like soup.” . .
Christopher Kimball, the determinedly skeptical cooking program host and co-founder of two food networks based in Boston, America’s Test Kitchen and Milk Street, identified three categories of kitchen gadgets: Completely Idiotic Useless Objects, Things That Are Not Worth the Storage Space, and Things That Seem Practical But You Could Actually Do Better With a Knife.
“A well-designed tool is immensely valuable,” Mr. Kimball said. “But for the specialty items you’re only going to use once a month, how much more work is it not to use it?”'
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/style/kitchen-gadgets.html?
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Love, love, love my Samurai knife! That's what my husband calls it. 
I bought a Vitamix & it sits in a cabinet in my basement. 
Well, to be honest- used it twice. Once to cut ribbon potatoes for frying (quite good) and another for zucchini. But it's going on the table at the next garage sale.
Most totally useless thing - hot dog maker (to cook them, not make them)
