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Until last spring, I could not justify owning a salad spinner. Of course I thought it would be nice to have, but it’s a bulky single-use gadget I mentally categorized with other honey-oak-cabinet clutter of my youth: electric griddles, standalone popcorn poppers, and Ron Popeil’s latest culinary innovations.
Plus, the few times a year I’d mention to my husband that maybe we should get one—always while inefficiently drying lettuce for a dinner I was already behind in preparing—he’d roll his eyes, make a sweeping gesture toward the mountain of whatever kitchen gear I happened to be reviewing at the time, and tell me a salad spinner was the last thing we needed. Perhaps that’s why it’s the very first thing I bought when I went shopping to stock the apartment I moved into not long after I filed for divorce.
As I added my new tool to my cart, I felt a little silly for resisting it as long as I had. I wholeheartedly believe a substantial salad—whether it’s topped with chicken or tossed with avocado—is a complete meal, and I’d often said I would eat one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they didn’t require so much preparation. A salad spinner eliminates the most annoying and time-consuming part of salad prep: drying the damn lettuce.
Previously, my lettuce-drying routine involved holding a fresh kitchen towel taut over a colander full of dripping-wet chopped romaine, then turning it upside down and violently shaking the whole thing to release the water from the greens. The first towel immediately soaked through, and I’d repeat this process a few more times until my lettuce seemed tolerably dry or until I ran out of clean towels (whichever came first).
Now I can make a salad in a relatively short amount of time, and because it no longer feels so daunting, I’m actually making and eating a lot more salads than I was before. And as my colleagues have pointed out, a salad spinner is good for more than drying lettuce; you can use it to dry shredded veggies, canned white beans (one of my favorite salad toppings!), and just-rinsed cauliflower or broccoli florets. If you get a nice enough one, your salad spinner can double as a serving bowl too.
These days, I’m a woman laughing alone with salad. Dry salad. I still have a bunch of clean, dry kitchen towels to boot. Spinning my lettuce also happens to bring me a ridiculous amount of joy and I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get sick of pressing down on the handle and watching the inner bowl rotate at super speed while ejecting water from my freshly-washed romaine.
It really is the little things—and the bulky things that are absolutely worth making room for if they improve your life.
