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For years, I had a four-sided box grater than I only used one side of. It was great at shredding cheese or potatoes, but anything smaller than that put me at risk of almost taking off part of my finger.
Then I remembered that my beloved Ina Garten was always zesting her citrus and grating garlic with something smaller, flatter, and handheld: a microplane grater, the internet told me. So I went out and bought one, and I've had the same one for the better part of a decade. It's less sharp now, but it gets the job done to grate garlic into yogurt sauce, zest a lemon for vinaigrette, or make it rain Parmesan on top of pasta.
The magic of a microplane is that it turns anything into fine pieces that can disappear into a sauce, preventing you from biting into a huge piece of garlic or ginger in a dressing. (They also come in varying sizes to make larger ribbons or even finer pieces.) Whenever I get a random craving for garlic bread, I grate some garlic into softened butter and schmear it on toast. If I have parsley, great. If I have cheese, that can be microplaned too. If I have my act together, I can combine it all for garlic bread grilled cheese. But at the end of the day, I just want to get garlic distributed evenly through butter so it can melt and make bread toasty and comforting. If the only reason you buy a microplane is to make garlic bread, I support you.
Since garlic is the No. 1 reason that I use my microplane, I had to learn how to clean it carefully. Make sure to only move the sponge in the opposite direction that you'd shred in—i.e. never bring the sponge down against the blades or it will shred into a million pieces! Be careful when using it and cleaning it so you don't slice your fingers, and always clean it immediately or stuff gets stuck in it. I like to let water pressure do most of the cleaning, then run a sponge one direction over it on the front and back to make sure it doesn't reek of garlic before I use it to shave chocolate on top of the tiramisu that I'm definitely making for Valentine's Day. For myself. You may not find love this year, but at least you found a microplane.