Same here. My mother simply cannot get along without hers and probably opens about 4 cans a year. If she is visiting me and we’re cooking (probable, since we like to cook together) she acts like it’s this huge imposition to manually open a can. She usually makes me do it.
I actually think a manual can opener is easier to use than her electric can opener.
Now when I was feeding the neighbors’ cat while they were out of town and they had one of those fancy can openers that doesn’t cut the lid, but actually unseals it… I had to watch a YouTube video on how to work it while the cat angrily meowed at me. But once I knew what to do it was easy.
I effen hate our can opener. Some sort of open the lid from the side of the can.
I’ve tossed it in the garbage twice but it’s been retreived. Now I just whine and complain when I have to open a can. The trauma, the injustice. I put on quite a show.
I was reading tips for donating to the food bank and one of the things it said was donate a manual can opener. And also try to donate cans with ring pulls. Often, homeless or near so, who come to the food bank for food don’t have can openers and it makes things difficult for them to get into cans that need an opener to get into.
I imagine electric can openers are mostly needed by the disabled or older folks with arthritis. Can openers require two strong hands to operate, which not all possess. But like other “useless” products for the disabled, they’re not marketed that way.
Buy one you like better. I’m guessing that with your income you could probably afford to have his & hers can openers. It’s not like the manual ones take up that much space. Just saying.
My mom’s electric can opener requires more strength than my manual can opener. To be fair, I think it was a wedding present when she & my dad got married in 1968.
Maybe newer ones are easier to operate… no clue. It’s the only electric one I’ve ever used.
At least; I think it is. Maybe one of my grandmothers had one I used sometime, but if they did it was probably a similar vintage… or even older.
Hmmm, they mention egg separators. I never would have bought one, but one came with a set of measuring cups, so I have one. I like it for separating eggs when I’m making a particular recipe where the whites don’t ever get cooked. I figure the less the whites touch the outside of the shell the better. Plus the jagged shell edge will bust the yolk once in a blue moon, and the egg separator is better at not busting the yolks.
It’s not a big deal or anything. I don’t bother for a soufflé or an angel food cake where everything is getting cooked because I so rarely break a yolk that I chance it. It’s probably shaves 20 seconds (per egg) off the separating process at the expense of something else to put in the dishwasher and put away when finished… so about a wash time-wise. For me the benefit is a possible increase in food safety when there’s raw egg whites.
They’re kind of like a Keurig I guess. Saves no time. Maybe if I had 100 cans to open it’d prevent fatigue but usually I only need to do one and it takes like what, 10 seconds the manual way.
We bought a portable electric compressor. Works off car’s “cigarette lighter” port. (I have no idea what they are really called, but I am old enough to remember when they were used to heat up the cigarette lighter in cars.
Makes short work of inflating bike tires and basketballs and pool rafts and wheelbarrow tires.
Evidently they can be used to inflate car tires, but I just roll over to Wawa for that.
