I bought a few small silicon dough rising containers, for use in the fridge when making pizza (i.e. low yeast content) dough. Absolutely stellar. Can easily keep balls of dough around for 1-2 weeks and they in fact get slightly better with age, and they're trivial to clean, too.
I don't know about unconventional but I use the absolute heck out of my half width spatula, the skinny one.
Also got a silicone fish spatula and that thing rocks. I thought it would be too bendy to work, and I don't have any nonstick pans (cast iron all day every day and one steel pan we call the stick pan, sometimes you want fond) so usually use metal but the edge on this thing is knife sharp and it squeezes under fried eggs like nothing else.
I really want a stovetop milk steamer. Sure would use it every day.
Huh. No one has said ground meat breaker/chopper.shen my wife got one, I said it was a waste, a spatula was fine, etc etc. Then I used it once....holy crap so much better and easier to get exactly the chunkiness you want from ground beef, turkey, etc. Love the the thing now.
Pizzelle maker - like a cookie iron. It was the only thing I asked for as a HS graduation present, my parents thought I would never use it. 20 years later, I still whip up pizzelle every few months
Can't get medium eggs in nice slices on sandwiches so well with a single point of pressure on the egg. That is even with a really sharp knife cutting soft-ish eggs is annoying and just not as good.
Strawberry cutter. That stupid looking plastic strawberry with the little blades in it? Turns out it can do basically evening I don't like cutting, mushrooms, berries, olives, all in tiny perfectly uniform cuts.
I got this one weird ass meat mallet from a Brian Lagerstrom video and I use that shit for my black bean burrito filling. It works like a dream chopping and mincing anything especially if you are cooking it.
Someone gifted me a Le Creuset rice cooker. I use it at least once but often twice a week. At $200+ it's truly something I never would have bought myself.
Oh my partner's been trying to convince me to accept one because I make so much stovetop rice, but don't want a digital rice cooker with plastic and circuits and all that.
Get a good pressure rice cooker. These are meant to let you leave the rice warm inside for about up to a week. Game changer and always have rice on hand.
With a rigid bamboo pot scraper (and, yes, a little soaking if really stuck on there), I've found it's actually not worth the bother of the dishwasher when it's so easy to do by hand.
Steel tea pot - I drink a pot every day but last couple pots were both glass and only last a couple months before breaking (both my fault) so upgraded to steel and so far my clumsiness hasn't yet managed to break it
If you are into tea, you might want to consider an electric kettle with variable temperature. Nothing is more of a shame than burning good leaves or having to be limited to leaves that can handle a near boil. It’s tricky & a futz to watch a thermometer for boiling water to a specific temperature for your tea—especially if you are relying on that cup to help your mood & concentration.
Weirdly, a dough scraper. It's not because of the measurement conversions, I don't think I'd ever noticed them up until now actually. It's just a really solid dough scraper. I use it for dough, but I've also used it for so many other things, like assembling/disassembling furniture, patching holes in the wall, wrapping furniture in a vinyl sheet. Loads of various tasks.
Every so often you find that you need a solid, flat, steel thing, and this comes in handy every single time.
I don't think drywall is a thing in apartments here. Growing up I always thought that "punching through the wall" was something they put in for comedic effect, because here you'd just crush your hand.
Where I'm from, the walls are mostly made of either brick & mortar, or straight up concrete. Some would be from particle boards and drywalls for less critical stuff, but most if not all would have reinforced concrete as their foundation.
However, I've stayed where construction's made out of wood, and would use drywall. I've seen people comically punch thru walls and doors when they're emotional.
Edit: Most of the time, they wouldn't punch thru. You can easily leave a hole witha single hit, but to get to the other side, you'd need to be really angry.
To be fair, some of our walls are a bit more hollow, and can be easily drilled into. I wonder if they're more or less drywall. Though I don't think you could punch through them without hurting yourself. There's this part of me that now wishes to try, but it's like as best we don't find out. 😅
I use it to scrape up all the stuff once I've chopped it. Chop onion, use spine of blade to scrape onto this, dump in pot. Saves lifting heavy chopping board, or scraping onto thin knife.