Kitchen Gifts My Persnickety Mother Truly Loves

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday. She turned 80 or 81, depending on how you count the years. In the evening, I took a break from making dinner to call her up to wish her happy birthday. “Why are you calling? You already sent a card and gift,” she said. “I read that it’s better to eat dinner around 6pm so you can digest better. You should be cooking and eating dinner now. You and Rory eat tend to eat late.”

“But we also stay up late and wake up late,” I said. Moms can be hard to please and over the years, I’ve come to realize that simple things tickle mine the most. She loves sentimental-but-not-sappy cards. My mom isn’t a totally Hallmark-card kind of woman. She wants things sincere and genuine. I’ve learned not to buy her big ticket items because (1) I can’t afford them and (2) even if I could afford them, she’d just squirrel them away somewhere and not use it.

Instead, I get my mom cooking tools that I know she can really use.  They are things that I use in my own kitchen most often. Sure there are misses that disappear into her pantry or garage; she found little use for the Mr. Spring Roll rice paper dipper. Then there are winners. My mom recently told me how much she appreciated certain practical and affordable kitchen tools that I’ve gifted her over the years.

Digital Scale – Yes, my mom measures with particular rice bowls and Chinese soup spoons but she has always had a scale in her kitchen. The woman can switch between metric and imperial measurements in a flash. Years ago my sisters and I bought my mom a Williams-Sonoma scale. She covered it with a plastic bag so it wouldn’t get dirtied up. The scale’s tiny numbers were hard to read but Mom didn’t complain.

A few years back, I bought her a digital scale. She demurred at first, saying she had the Williams-Sonoma one. I showed her the big, easy-to-read numbers and the tare (zero) function so she didn’t have to manually adjust the scale’s dial each time. I saw her put the scale back into the box. Whatever, I said to myself.

But the next time I came to visit, the scale was on the kitchen counter, enveloped in plastic wrap and tucked into a convenient spot. I didn’t say anything.

“I used that scale all the time,” my mom finally said last month. “It’s great.”

Light, Cheap Knife – I like Japanese knives with thin blades that are easy to keep sharp. There’s a lot of prep in Asian cooking that you just can’t leave to a machine to do. My mom still does a fair amount of hand chopping. Many years ago, I brought her one of the ones below. It cost around $15. She handed me a dollar as a customary thing to avoid bad luck. My dad sharpened it for her and she used it for a long time, saying how easy it was to keep sharp and make the cuts she wanted for Asian cooking.

When I bought a better one, she handed it back to me saying, “I still have the other one you gave me. Give this one to someone else.”  (For more, see these posts on keeping knives sharp and cheap knives.)

Salad Spinner – We eat a lot of raw lettuces and herbs and for about 10 years, my mom was using the same so-so Copco salad spinner. You operated it by turning an arm on the lid. It never seemed quite secure and often times, it would skip and the vegetables would remain wet. I probably bought it at Ross or Marshall’s. Maybe it was defective?

Several years back, I tried to upgrade Mom to my favorite salad spinner from OXO. At first, she kept it in her pantry. After the Copco one failed her one too many times, she switched to the new one.

Mom recently said that the OXO salad spinner is amazing, great for getting things dry. For a while she didn’t realize that the pusher thing could lock in place and she found it to be awkward to store. But when she figured it out, the salad spinner became her new best friend in the kitchen!

Garlic Peeler – I paid no attention to these until Paula Wolfert told me how wonderful they are. Seriously? Paula swears by them, saying that they give people great joy. So I bought one for my mom. I’ve given her a garlic press that she likes. I buy her garlic from Costco. At 80-something, peeling garlic is a pain in the ass so I when I showed my mom the little tube, she said, “Really? Show me.”

I put the cloves in the tube and told her to lean in and roll with pressure. When she shook out the cloves and the skin had become detached, we both giggled. Now Mom is peeling entire heads of garlic at a time with little sweat.

Yesterday, I asked Mom if she was using the peeler. Yes, she was. Then she thanked Rory and me for the birthday card and thoughtfulness. Yup, the little things are what mean most to her, knowing that her kids care. I guess that’s quite the Hallmark card sentiment. 

What do you gift your mom? What has worked and not?