A New Gadget
I’m not much of a kitchen gadget person yet they clutter my drawers and cupboards one way or another. There are the Pampered Chef thingies given to me over the years—choppers, baking stone, specialty pans, and kitchen shears. Some I use, others collect dust.
My favorites have lasted forever, some now entering their fourth decade of solid use. These include a zester from Germany, a KitchenAid stand mixer, a Silpat baking mat, an Italian food mill, and a set of good knives. The ones I have killed off from heavy use are the Cuisinart food processor, a behemoth that made it through a catering business, two delis, and a restaurant before the motor seized during a batch of pesto a few years ago, a couple immersion blenders, and my beloved Krupps coffee grinder. The one that self-immolated recently was my grandmother’s toaster oven. I bet it was older than I am.
It went to college with my sister. Then it went into my parents’ kitchen and finally after seeing it cast aside, I took it home to where it functioned both as a toaster and mini oven for well over a decade. Being a handy kind of gal who likes to fix things I took it apart hoping I could clean the element and replace the melted wires, but I also thought I could burn down my home by being thrifty. Wisdom got the better of me and I put the tiny metal oven in the recycle bin.
For a few months I got along fine without the little oven, even toasting a bagel using a cast iron skillet, but as the weather turned colder, I missed the simple little things made with Grandma’s oven such as shirred eggs. I also contemplated replacing the microwave a lightning strike had killed off, but I never liked cooking with those things after an explosion involving a spaghetti squash from which I still have burn scars. My disdain for quasi-dangerous cooking equipment carried over into Instapots. I won’t even can with a pressure cooker after seeing my mother spray a batch of soup on the ceiling with one that malfunctioned.
Other abandoned gadgets over the years include a bread machine, a personal pizza oven, a yogurt maker, an ice cream maker that had a bowl that took up way too much room in the freezer, popcorn poppers, rotary grater/cutters, waffle makers, egg cookers, and an extremely expensive espresso machine.
I have been craving hot food and firing up my big oven for little things here and there takes forever and isn’t very energy efficient. So, like a good consumer, I checked out the Black Friday sales online for a new toaster oven. A simple appliance was the goal, but there was the sale of the century, a toaster oven air fryer combination with several functions—it baked, it broiled, it roasted, and it air fried.
My market customers have waxed lovingly about their air fryers, and I was adamant that was one gadget I did not want. It seemed so frivolous, so wrong. Frying means hot oil, rendered lard, melted tallow. Food gets immersed in a hot tub of grease and cooked to a golden crunch. Anyone who ate McDonald’s french fries prior to 1990 understands this. There was no way plain ol’ hot air was going to cook up anything tasty. I want to feel the grease stick to my fingers when I pick up something fried. But the combo unit was the exact same price as the plain toaster oven, so I fell for it.
I was not expecting a recipe booklet that was 30 pages attached to the user instructions. Furthermore, the included recipes featured many of the ingredients that are popular market items now in season. Beet chips, fried pickles, kale chips, spinach dip, Brussels sprouts, roasted acorn squash, roasted fennel, carrots and parsnips and sweet potato fries. And that’s just the vegetables! There were recipes and instructions for crab cakes, burgers, wontons, chicken, tacos, pizza, quiche, and even lamb chops! The Sweet Treat section included baked and fried apples.
My goal was for a simple appliance to heat up my spanakopita, but what I got was something that can cook just about anything that the farmers market can throw into it. That’s a gadget I can live with.