These are some of my most helpful friends in the kitchen. I tend to like to do things as manually as possible, I think this is just habit from growing up in a place without much electricity. I also find that doing things this way gives me a good workout. I have often thought of putting together a culinary workout type video–if we just spend more time walking, pounding, chopping, whisking and whatnot we would find we have burned plenty of calories by the time we sit down to eat. It is my personal opinion that most of the cooking shows these days are really just geared to sell you some new useless plastic utensil, and I know many people with houses full of unnecessary kitchen gadgets they never use. I don’t really like that old saying–Keep it Simple Stupid–but it does work.