A Drain I Can Get Behind

When the good people of Healthy Steps contacted me about doing some work with them, they sent me a few of their top selling kitchen gadgets that their customers love to help with portion control.  I was really excited about the individual pasta portion basket. Great idea-taken from kitchen restaurants-for those who have trouble eye balling an actual serving of pasta.  Proper portion, holes for drainage, easy to handle, dishwasher safe and it collapsed--perfect. But I had another idea.

We eat a lot of beans in this house--and I mean a lot. It seems like not a day goes by when I'm not opening up a can of beans, draining them to remove the sodium and popping them into a salad, topping tacos, mixing into a Tex-Mex dish or serving them as is-with a touch of cumin-to my son. You can imagine how frustrating it got to take out the medium sized colander every single time to drain my beans. I was so tired of washing it-over and over and over. It got old-quick. I have two sizes of colanders-big and bigger and a steamer basket that I will sometimes use when my frustration gets he best of me. In reality, I just get more frustrated when I take out that steamer basket to drain my beans because-let's face it-it's not meant to strain liquid out of beans.

Enter the individual pasta portion basket. It's a perfect size for draining 1 can of beans-easy to rinse, drain, hold and-simple to wash. It hides nicely in my sink if it needs to-unlike the big, bulky colander. I find myself using it all the time as a colander-rinsing berries, measuring out veggies after chopping and, occasionally, portioning out pasta!

I love the duality of a kitchen utensil-especially when its unintentional. Tell me, what kitchen tool or utensil does double duty at your house?