Nigella Lawson Has a Brilliant Idea for Your Spiralizer

If you stopped three people at random on the street, chances are good that at least one of them would own a spiralizer. For the last couple years, spiralizers have been the trendy kitchen gadget everybody has to have — especially people looking to eat more healthfully. But they also take up valuable kitchen space and are notoriously difficult to clean, and it seems like a lot of people have stopped using them.

According to the Telegraph, sales of spiralizers in the U.K. have dropped 40 percent from last year, and online searches for spiralizers are down 53 percent. People aren’t even Googling “spiralizer” anymore. Before putting the spiralizer on the yard sale table, though, celebrity food personality Nigella Lawson has one last great spiralizer trick that’s worth trying.

Spiralizers caught on in large part because a lot of people used them in an attempt to eat less pasta and more vegetables. Nigella Lawson objects to the very idea of using vegetables instead of pasta. But in her new book, At My Table, she uses the gadget to make shoestring french fries.

“If you are one of the fad-resistant few who have never either bought a spiralizer or don’t even know what one is, turn the page now. Don’t give it another thought,” she writes in a section called Subverting the Spiralizer. “But, mindful of the several tonnes of spiralizers lying dormant in kitchen cupboards up and down the length of the country, I have found a new use for them. While you will never find me making zoodles or courgetti or allowing any other vegetables to masquerade as pasta, I can say this for my spiralizer: it does make very fine shoestring fries.”

French fries! That is brilliant. Crunchy, salty, shoestring potatoes are amazing, especially with very good mustard. But they’re very labor intensive to make, so we don’t see them nearly as often as we should. Her recipe involves potatoes, sea salt, oil, and a deep-fat fryer. It’s probably not part of the healthy revolution the makers of spiralizers intended, but it sure sounds tasty.