We love multitasking kitchen tools that don’t take up too much counter space and are easy to clean. What’s not to love about something like that? One of our favorite kitchen helpers is the pastry blender, that multibladed hand tool that’s usually reserved for cutting butter into flour in piecrust dough. Here’s what else you can use it for…

The pastry blender has the perfect weight and sharpness for mashing up eggs for egg salad and avocados for a nice chunky guacamole…and for cutting up cooked potatoes for a homemade potato salad (that doesn’t look store-bought). The best part is you can just stick it in your dishwasher for easy cleaning—supposedly you can do that with food processors and those fancy as-seen-on-TV choppers, but the pastry blender takes up way less space. Speaking of space…when clean, it easily tucks away in your kitchen drawer with your other hand tools.

Do you have any additional uses for common kitchen tools? We’d love to hear about them!

More help in the kitchen…