Not every small kitchen fix needs a trip to B&Q. Sometimes it’s just a bit of kit that happens to be the right shape for a tight space. Here are three things under £20 that do a proper job without asking for a drawer of their own.
A chopping mat set that stands up instead of lying flat
A big wooden chopping board is lovely right up until you try to find somewhere to put it. The Joseph Joseph Pop 3-piece chopping mat set gets round that. Each mat is flexible, double-sided and colour coded, and Joseph Joseph list the regular size at 24 x 34 x 0.6cm, so three together take up barely more room than one ordinary board. They’re BPA free and dishwasher safe, and each one has a hole through it, for hanging on a hook or for pushing the mats together so they don’t slide around in a drawer. Because they bend, you can also use one to funnel chopped veg straight into a pan.
Good to know
A flexible mat will never feel as sturdy as a thick wooden board, and chopping something tough like a butternut squash can make it wobble a bit under the knife. Not a big deal. But better to know first.
A whisk that folds flat
A balloon whisk is the thing that always ends up wedged sideways across a utensil pot, catching on everything you try to pull out next to it. A flat whisk, like the Rösle RL95652, swaps the round cage for a single flat head of stainless steel wire. It sits in a drawer the way a spatula does, and it’s genuinely good at folding egg whites or cream into a mixture in a shallow bowl without knocking the air out of them. Rösle make it in a 27cm length, in dishwasher safe stainless steel, worth having alongside a normal whisk rather than instead of one.
Good to know
A flat whisk needs a bit for work for whipping a big bowl of cream to stiff peaks or beating air into a sponge mix from scratch. The flat head doesn’t move as much liquid as a balloon whisk does, so it needs a little more elbow grease to get the same results.
Food covers that fold down to almost nothing
Rigid cake domes and plate covers are useful right up until you need to store three of them. This set of three collapsible mesh food covers from Crystals folds flat with a simple buckle closure, so instead of a stack of upturned bowls you get three thin discs that slot behind a tray or in a narrow gap by the fridge. Pop them open and they’re a round mesh dome, handy for keeping flies off food cooling on the side. They won’t keep food airtight, but that’s not really the job. It’s a cover, not a container.
Good to know
Mesh covers like these are built to keep insects out, not to seal in moisture, so they won’t stop food drying out the way a lidded container does. The buckle closures on collapsible covers are also the part most likely to wear out first with heavy daily use. Treat these as the cover for the fruit bowl, not a swap for your everyday food storage.
None of these will transform your kitchen on their own. But they’re cheap, small, and none of them will still be hogging a whole shelf a year from now. That’s a decent return for under £20 each.
Quick note on the pictures in this post: they’re AI generated illustrations showing the general type of product, not photos of the exact items, so the real thing will look a little different.
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