It’s rare for a guy my age to feel excited these days, but the joy was palpable last week as I waited for the squeal of brakes, the car-drop and the dash that’s the latest Amazon delivery driver’s customary routine.
Packaged in a box big enough to serve as a Labrador’s coffin, the item was stuffed with bundles of joy by Ninja Mini Chopper.
This isn’t my first time working with the Mini Chopper (argh!), but I’m going to leave the Benny Hill jokes at the door and praise the genius of this kitchen appliance. This Ninja Chopper has gone straight to European qualifiers, if not Champions League qualification.
Its blades are sharper than a lemon-flavored kumquat, and its power-to-weight ratio is the Manny Pacquiao of the appliance department. It snarls and bites, and if anything, it’s too good. I spun a plum too quickly, pressed the “start” button too many times, and ended up with a reddish mush that reminded me this is a beast in a princess costume.
Unfortunately, the freshness quickly faded as it took time to rinse the container and clean the blade — a nerve-wracking task, as the blade is sharper than Sweeney Todd steel — and I realized that it probably would have been quicker to just use the knife the “old-fashioned” way.
Then I took a look around my kitchen: the tools and gadgets designed to make life easier serve little purpose other than taking up surface space in case someone uses them in the next six months before they start to mold.
There was a blender that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an Ann Summers catalogue, a coffee machine that now smells of “stale” coffee, a coffee bean grinder that after using it once left me all riled up like a lion attacking a banana and glued to the china for an hour or two, electric knives, a meat thermometer, and other items I would never even dream of describing without a little innuendo.
What a pointless effort and expense. We’ve been totally duped spending our hard-earned money on items that serve almost no purpose other than to inducing stress by saving us nanoseconds of time. And when I think of how, back in the day, our grandmas used to cook on open stoves with mangles, I wonder how we’ve become so clumsy that the effort we celebrate with knives has finally become insuperably elegant.
I then explored the cupboards and was delighted to find items I hadn’t used in years that I’d vowed to give a thorough cleaning before bringing them back for everyday use by the end of the game on Friday. The egg omelette maker somehow managed to slip the word “non” into the description because of its non-stick coating, and it took me two hours to clean afterwards, but I was still pleased.
But the pinnacle, the crown jewel of all kitchen appliances is none other than the Breville Deep-Fill Sandwich Toaster. It’s a joy to load two slices of bread with Marmite, cheese, ham and a slice or two of vine-ripened (what on earth does that mean?) tomato, press down the latch a la Jeff Capes, listen to the click and watch as the toaster crisps and burns down the house.
The Mini Chopper is certainly a great thing, but with the return of sandwich makers and the resurgence of our mouths being burned by hot foods like McDonald’s molten lava apple pie, the Mini Chopper may sadly soon be consigned to its grave in the cupboard under the kettle…
