I started cleaning out the kitchen utensil drawer the other day, mainly because it wouldn't close. It's a drawer that can get into an awful tangle for a simple reason: too many things in it. Often it has two or three of the same thing, because I find it almost impossible to throw out the multiples. Like triplets – and who needs three, really? – they're all special in their own special, almost identical, way.

So the four fish slices (vintage, non-stick, thick and very thin) were jostling with the two ice-cream scoops (plastic, metal) and three pairs of kitchen scissors. The olive/cherry pitter was straddling the oyster shucker. A bunch of measuring cups and spoons and some palette knives were locked in their own weird jumble, along with two pastry brushes, an apple corer, three bottle openers and a pair of long, thin pickle tongs – bought to extract something from somewhere at some stage, but kept in case any extraction of actual pickles is ever required. Buried among it all, five vegetable peelers, small serrated knives, a collection of tea strainers, midget whisks and a shrimp peeler. I was like some kind of crazy utensil prepper, ready for any kitchen armageddon.

I bought the shrimp peeler, or prawn deveiner, years ago in San Francisco. It has a slim handle and a curved blade. The blade slices open the back of the prawn and the pointed end is used to lift out the veiny bit. I was pretty excited about finding such a thing and I brought an extra one back for a friend. She was less excited.

I am a sucker for a small gadget or kitchen utensil, especially one bought elsewhere. It's like a souvenir tea towel. It has to be reasonably sensible, however, and not a one-trick, plasticky item sold on late-night TV, like a strawberry slicer to "take the effort" out of slicing strawberries. So, a julienne peeler from a French market, a cotton jelly bag from London, a citrus reamer from Paris, a dough scorer from New York, a cherrywood pasta stirrer from Verona.

None of these are essential, of course, especially the prawn deveiner. As Masterchef's Matt Preston points out on his list of unnecessary gadgets (phew, glad to see I didn't have the zucchini corer or the egg-topper), no one needs such a dedicated device because you can devein a prawn by making a small slit in the base of the tail and using an ordinary old wooden barbecue skewer to hook out the alimentary canal. Point taken.