Tag: kitchen gadget

wakey-wakey part mcmlxiv

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Let’s see, how does this work? Oh, yeah: Wake up too early, make coffee, cat on my lap, type up some drivel.

Mmmm, coffee. Gone back to making it drip. Still like my coffee gadgets, but drip is the way to go. That’s my official word on that. Take it to the bank. Tell ’em I said so.

Man, this granola is the best thing ever. I buy it in the bulk food section of the co-op. Supposed to be good for you. They sell lots of locally-produced, organically-grown food, but this looks like the kind of stuff that comes from a 55-gallon barrel shipped from China by container ship. Don’t care. Has a nutty, vanilla flavor that is now permanently associated in my brain with granola. All other granola tastes like gravel.

Cat is purring like a diesel engine. He can keep it going for hours, but if he starts to fade all I have to do is stroke his chin and he cranks the volume up to eleven again. He won’t purr for nothing. Got to give him a chin-rub, or at the very least let him climb in my lap. Did you know cats are the reason laps were invented? It’s true. If you have a lap, you need a cat.

Osterize this!

~ Dave O ~ 3 Comments

image of Oster blender

This is the Osterizer that My Darling B bought more than twenty years ago. And isn’t “Osterizer” a great word? Way better than boring old generic blender. The Oster company doesn’t appear to have named this particular blender unit Osterizer but I love the name so much I’m going to use it generically to apply to this machine, the way Kleenex describes all tissue paper that you blow snot into.

“Snot” is a word that’s too much fun to pass up repeating way too many times as well. Snot snot snot. There, I think I got that out of my system.

B isn’t sure exactly when she bought her Osterizer, but she’s certain it’s older than her oldest child, and he’s going to be twenty-five this year, if memory serves. She’s hung on to it all these years because it was made so far back in the mists of time that it’s actually got “Made In U.S.A.” stamped into its metal bottom. Try to find an Osterizer or any other blender thingy like it without a week-long search on e-bay.

Actually, I’m a dork. No sooner had I said that than B found dozens of them, whole and in part, all over e-bay. That’ll teach me to open my mouth. Oh, who am I kidding? It probably won’t.

This drivel about kitchen appliances was triggered when B’s prize Osterizer froze up last weekend while she was trying to convert a bushel of tomatilas into salsa verde. After she tried and tried to get it turning again I got my chance to crack it open and take a look inside. No matter how many times I do this I can’t seem to get it through my head that I’m never going to open it up and find a big OFF switch. “Hey! Here’s the problem!” Doesn’t happen.

But she loves that thing, and I don’t blame her. It’s stuck by her so long it’d be hard for anyone not to have an emotional attachment to it. I suggested we buy a used machine just like it that I saw at a neighborhood thrift shop. They had to, in fact, but after checking them out she decided that one was too expensive and the other was too beaten-up.

“Let’s stop at the small-appliance repair store,” she suggested as we headed home. She was talking about a shop on Monona Avenue. The front window was chock full of vintage mixer machines so old they made her Osterizer look modern. I stopped there just to make her happy, but I really didn’t believe she’d find one like her machine in there.

She found two. I’m just never going to be right in this story.

Not only did she find a couple of machines just like hers, she found out they could probably repair hers for a reasonable price. I told her to go for it, but after we got home and she started finding all that great stuff on e-bay the little gears in her head started turning and I think her emotional attachment to her own machine might be weakening enough for her to consider buying a replacement and using the money left over to also throw an attachment or two into the mix. So to speak.