Watch one good video on how to dice an onion an you're 90pct there.

1. http://www.thekitchn.com/brendan-mcdermotts-knife-skills-cla...

2. Misen.co and http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/09/best-cheap-chefs-knives-m...

What they are mostly great at is a few things that are so labor intensive (ever made hummus by hand?) you otherwise might not bother. Also a good time saver for things like pasta dough.

Learn to keep your knives sharp. A sharp knife is a safe knife and makes the whole prep process go faster.

I recommend a jig that keeps the angle for you. I use a spyderco sharpmaker (https://www.amazon.com/Spyderco-Tri-Angle-Sharpmaker/dp/B004...), but there are others. I enjoy eating steak with a super sharp knife, so I have it out frequently for sharpening our set of steak-knives, and less frequently for our chef's knives.

Purist will call them crap, but I use both a traditional whetstone and an electric sharpener and the electric gets 90% of my usage. It takes a few minutes to take a knife from "very dull" to "pretty sharp". The whetstone definitely gets them sharper, but it takes a lot longer and you only notice your knives are dull when you're right in the middle of making dinner.

https://youtu.be/kSKpz1UqIl4?t=4m13s has overkill levels of detail (and some marketing upsell) but communicates the idea well.

I've had great results with both but water stones need to be soaked in water before use (instructions say 10 minutes, but my experience is more like 30 minutes), they release a messy slurry when they wear and they don't stay flat for very long (flatness isn't that much of an issue with knifes I suppose, but essential for woodworking tools) and wear down as you use and re-flatten them.

Diamond plates stay dead flat, need very little maintenance, ready to use (just wet them, no soaking) and last 10 years or more in my infrequent use.

I have big 8" plates for my woodworking tools, but I intend to buy a small 1200 grit sharpener for kitchen for about $6 from here: https://www.fine-tools.com/ezelap-diasharpener.html

1200 grit isn't super fine (compared to water stones) but is enough for basic kitchen sharpening (you don't need coarser ones unless you sharpen damaged blades and you don't need a finer one to get decent sharpness). I'd add a leather strop and some honing compound (chromium oxide) if I needed to get them sharp enough to shave (like I do with my tools).

That's about $20 for diamond plate + strop + compound, you can't get a decent water stone for that price.

But the real difference between sharp and kinda-sharp is practicing the skill of honing the blade. Sharpen a little at a time, test frequently and do it often.

    > Nespresso machine

I don't mind the 30 seconds of ritual to enjoy a cup of coffee/espresso.

We have a k-cup machine at work and it's drinkable, but not great.

We have both in our workplace kitchen; they both produce mediocre coffee, in my opinion (and I'm no coffee snob). I wonder how the Nespresso got such a reputation? Is it widely considered good?

That seems strange to me. I got the Nespresso Inissia as a Christmas gift a few months ago and it takes maybe 30-60 seconds to heat up. Then, <30 seconds for every shot of espresso after that.

This is in sweden though.

- small food processor to significantly reduce the chopping time. I picked one up cheap on a whim (I think for making hummus) and now most of the time I just coarsely chop veggies and throw it in with a slicer blade or grater, depending on what I'm making. (By coarse, I mean, I'll quarter the onion so that it fits down the chute)

- Quit peeling! I've got a vegetable peeler that is sitting very sad in the drawer because it hasn't been used in a long long time.

OK, so if someone is taking it seriously, let me specify a little, since I've been thinking of it for some time: a rice cooker that uses vapour.

I often cook rice in the pressure pot. It takes something like 5 minutes to warm the pot, 4 minutes of cooking and a few minutes more for releasing vapour until I can open it again.

It would be nice to have a device that:

1. Wash the rice with cold water first. 2. Makes vapour in a few seconds holding the pressure. 3. Automatically stops when the rice is cooked. 4. Finally releases vapour. 5. Bonus point if it cleans itself.

Just that, plain boiled rice in five minutes, instead of 10-15.