I try to eat as healthily as possible and I make a lot of meals from scratch. I've recently become a Vegan so my food is quite limited until I start experimenting with the different meat substitutes etc, which is why I like to make dressings and marinades to add a bit of extra taste to my salads/pasta and so on.

I used to just stick all of the ingredients into a bowl and stir it around but when I saw the flavour shakers by Jamie Oliver reduced in my local Debenhams, I decided to buy one - it seemed like a great idea and it also appealed to me because it would save on washing up as I wouldn't have to use any bowls or spoons, lol.

I paid £8.00 for my flavour shaker which was a reduced price - the RRP was £16.00, which I feel is very overpriced and despite how much I like this, I'm not sure that it's worth that much money when you can do excactly what this does with a basic kitchen utensil such as a spoon or rolling pin. The flavour shaker is very widely available and it can be found in a lot of high street stores as well as online. Amazon also sell it at a reduced price of around £10.00, which is a much more sensible price when compared to the retail price.

So.. what is a flavour shaker? It looks like quite a cool and unusual gadget but what it does is really basic - it simply crushes up cooking ingredients such as herbs, seeds and nuts and it mixes food together, meaning it's ideal for salad dressings. Using it is really simple - the design is simple enough and it has two halves which come apart by unscrewing them - it's quick and easy to do and putting them back together securely is really easy as they click into place.

To use the flavour shaker you need to unscrew it and put all of your ingredients in. Inside there's a little marble shaped ball which crushes up the ingredients. I usually use mine to make salad dressings - my favourite is white wine vinegar, olive oil, agave nectar, salt, garlic, mustard and sesame seeds. This mixes them all up within a few shakes. Shaking it is really easy; despite being quite bulky it's not heavy and the little grips ensure that it doesn't fly out of my hand mid-shake!

The dressings and marinades that I make in this always come out nicely mixed up with any seeds etc all crushed up finely with no lumpy bits. It's never pastey or mushy, but saying that I do always make my salad dressings with oil so if you used this with purely dry ingredients the results may be different. Cleaning the flavour shaker couldn't be easier and it takes literally 2 minutes to rinse it out and wipe the ball. It's dishwasher safe, however I find that rinsing it out is quick and more effecient.

Overall, I'm really impressed with the flavour shaker, but I wouldn't pay the full retail price. If you ever see this on offer I'd recommend getting one, but if not you might as well stick to using a pestle and mortar.