Do You Need Every Kitchen Gadget Sold on TV?

I'm watching the latest and greatest appliance that no home can live without - the Bullet Express. You can slice and chop and shred and dice very quickly and very nicely. It's huge, the size of a large juicer. Of course I will not be told how much it costs for another 30 minutes until the infomercial ends.

Some of the As Seen on TV appliances made the leap to staying in our kitchen permanently but not very many. My husband uses a George Foreman Grill on a daily basis. Every year he gets a new model for Christmas as the old one is pretty worn by then and he makes meat every single night. As a vegetarian I don't use it. It does cook very well and he just loves pork chops, steak and other meats. It is now in stores everywhere.

Years ago we bought the food dehydrator. It worked more or less, but it took forever. The beef jerky was questionable. It took days and you wondered if it was really cooked or not. Turning grapes into raisins was certainly not worth the effort. Fruit roll ups out of applesauce were a flop.

One of the more unique TV cooking things we bought was a grill that burned newspaper. Seriously - not kidding - it looked like a waste basket with holes in it and you wadded up newspaper and lit it and grilled your hot dogs or burgers. It folded up so you could take it to the beach or the park. You had to keep feeding it newspaper like crazy and the food tasted like newsprint. It rusted in our shed over the winter and went to the recycling center.

We had one of the sandwich makers - an early ancestor to the GT Xpress. You put in bread or batter and toppings and close the lid. A few minutes later it's a sandwich. It worked very well, but we lack the creativity to make much and keeping quantities of little cut up things on hand to put in the sandwiches was too much for us. (I guess we needed this new Bullet Express!)

We have sales resistance to most TV cooking products, probably because we don't cook, we heat up. We passed on the Magic Bullet, the Retro Hot Dog Cooker, the Ronco Rotisserie (how much counter space does Ronco think we have?), Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker and the Genie Egg Cooker. I actually really want a Pancake Puff Maker. I need it like I need a hole in the head, but I want one. Who doesn't want little puffy pastries with gooey filling inside?

The infomercial has ended. The New Bullet Express is 6 "easy" payments of $19.99 plus shipping and handling. That's $119.94 plus shipping and handling. It looks like a great product and I'm impressed by what it does. If I had a lot of money and storage space I think I would be ordering. For now, I think I will have to stick with my Ginsu knives.