Dear followers, readers, friends (and who’s to say you might not be all of the above) and other people who have just wandered onto this but also might someday become follower, reader and/or friend, I need your help. But first, a story.

A few months ago a number of TV cooking shows that I watch and cooking magazines that I read featured bad gadgets. Everybody seemed to want to do their version of the Top Ten Worst Kitchen Gadgets. I didn’t get it. Why waste all that time and space on things that don’t work. It seems to me that most people with enough brains to operate a toaster oven can tell the worthwhile helpers from the culinary dreadfuls.

That being said, I indeed also have bought an occasional pig sticker in a poke. Usually they end up used once, uncovered for their uselessness, and then relegated to the “save for the next garage sale” box.

By the same token there are those gadgets that were once useful but now take up space in the drawer and have been made less useful to me because of changes in the things or way I cook or because new and improved really was. Every once in a while I take a turn through those cabinets and these items find themselves in that aforementioned box though not due to any fault of their own.

However (dramatic pause more than you might typically ascribe to a comma please), there is one gadget that I use with some regularity and I wonder why. No, it was never on any Worst Gadget List and it has never been supplanted by a better version. At least I don’t think so. You see, I don’t know what it is. I know what I use it for but I don’t know what it’s used for. Exactly.

And now, question time. What the heck is it?

It’s about the size of a dinner fork, made of hard plastic, has no markings on it, and bears a familial resemblance to a crochet hook. I use it to clean the inside edges of the beaters from a hand mixer. It’s also handy for cleaning out the underside of a squeeze bottle cap and flicking open the battery compartment of thermometers, timers, and scales. It’s also good for digging small seeds out of small fruits and vegetables, and probably animals if you had that kind of mind. (Yes, there once was a time when my life wasn’t even quite this thrilling.) I would ask somebody around here but I’ve had it forever and nobody who was here then is still now, or anybody who is here now wasn’t there then.

If you know what it is, please help.  Otherwise I’m going to have to put it out at the next garage sale and wait for someone to pick it up and say, “Oh look, a whachamacallit like those people at the rare kitchen gadget store had on display for 43 billion dollars. And it’s only a quarter. Let’s offer him 20 cents.”

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?