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Here’s hoping everyone had a fantastic break over the festive season. For me, the New Year feels like the Old Year already. It’s time to get back to work.

One of the presents I got for Giftmas—actually, now I come to think about it, the only one—was a kitchen gadget I never knew I needed. My thoughts on the Mockney Prat are on record, so I can’t help wondering if this was a joke present. Jamie Oliver’s face gurned out at me from the box accompanied only by the words “Flavour Shaker” and a vaguely suggestive glimpse of a strange egg-shaped plastic thing while I tried to work out what, exactly, it was I was saying thank you for.

It turns out that the Flava Shaka is for crushing, grinding and mixing spices and other ancillary ingredients. The humble mortar and pestle is, it would seem, insufficient for Jamie’s needs. You put the stuff you want to be mixed into the plastic bauble along with a heavy ceramic ball, screw it closed, and then shake it all up—making a horrendous rattling noise in the process, terrifying one’s unsuspecting partner when she’s trying to do the dishes. (Experiences with the Flava Shaka may vary.)

It’s actually rather clever. The plastic bauble has a fat end and a narrower one, so you can pound things coarsely by holding it one way up and then turn it over to get a finer grain. This at least is the theory, although it seems to me that since you shake it with an up-and-down motion, the ball is going to be impacting against stuff at both ends of the bauble whichever way up you hold it. I confess that I haven’t made any detailed studies of the relative velocities of partially-ground spices and heavy ceramic spheres in an agitated environment. Perhaps Jamie has.

Recommended in the booklet—and in many other recipes on the Flava Shaka website—are various rubs and marinades. Since it’s not only the festive season, it’s cold-and-flu season as well, I’ve been using it mostly to grind cloves and peppercorns to add zing to the gallons of chicken soup I’ve been drinking over the last few weeks. I did also make a fantastic maple-honey-mustard gravy for an impromptu late-Giftmas dinner. It’s encouraged me to buy mustard seeds, and a few other things, which can only be a good thing.

Technically speaking, the Flava Shaka doesn’t do anything that a mortar and pestle doesn’t already do. But it’s nice and neat and tidy, it makes just the right amount of stuff with no mess, and I calculate that it’s about 138% more fun than a mortar and pestle. It’s also about 300 per cent noisier, so it’s not suitable for late-night fryups when your flatmate is asleep. Caveat emptor.

Very handy, and it’s good for encouraging oneself to mix together things one might otherwise not get around to mixing—which is what cookery is all about.

You can buy the Flava Shaka here.