Maybe ever. Meet my new silicone jar spatula, which I bought yesterday for $4.95 from the Crate & Barrel Outlet in Berkeley. I'm in love with rubber spatulas and food scrapers in general, because of the very neat way they clean all the stuff out of a mixing bowl to minimize waste. For the uninitiated, it works a lot like a rubber squeegee does on your window. Satisfying.
I only started using them recently -- baking at my parents' home as a kid, I always found myself scraping the sides of a bowl about a million times with a wooden or metal spoon, and never being really happy with all the batter left behind, and sometimes having to scrape manually, with my fingers (not pretty).
I am usually a passionate detractor of dumb kitchen utensils/appliances that have just one use (I'll save that for another post), but when I surveyed the racks of kitchen utensils yesterday and came across this, I knew I had to have it. How many times have you been frustrated by the globs of jelly or peanut butter or mayonnaise that you can never really get out of the bottom of a jar with a mere knife? Well this baby is designed just for that - more slender than your garden-variety spatula to get in the most narrow-necked of glass and metal jars.
Crystal asked the pointed question, "So, with what you save getting that last bit out of your jars, how long does it take for this thing to offset the cost?" I said to her, "My dear, you forget that the pleasure and sheer satisfaction you get from it, rather than the actual peanut butter or jelly salvaged, is more than worth the price."