Appliance Love

I have always loved appliances.  When I was an adolescent I started asking my parents to give them to me for Christmas.  My thinking was I no longer wanted toys and I was going to need all those appliances someday, why not start collecting them now when my parents were paying.

I think I was eleven when I got a tiny Sony black and white TV.  I never had to leave my room again.  My father learned his lesson from the TV and gave me a sewing machine the next year and on Christmas afternoon brought me four pairs of pants he needed mended.

When I was in college the Weis Market in Carlisle, PA gave out green stamps.  I started saving freshman year, volunteering to do the shopping when my Pi Phi pledge class was having a function.  Eventually I moved off campus and shopped weekly with my roommates pasting the stamps in the little books after every trip to the store.

After three years I had amassed enough green stamps, 62 books, to get the second most expensive thing in the catalogue, a Cuisineart.  Only a canoe took more books.  When I went to the redemption center to turn in my hard licked stamp books the other patrons clapped for me.  The clerk told me I was the first Cuisineart she had ever awarded.  That appliance served me well through 10 years of catering and hundreds of dinner parties.  It was 25 years old before I retired it.

This appliance love might be somewhat genetic because my daughter, Carter likes appliances too.  When she was about six years old the two of us were leaving the mall late in the evening.  I asked her if we could go out through Sears because I wanted to look at the new washer and dryers.

Since we were the only customers in the white goods department we had a number of salesmen descend upon us. I will never forget the starry look in Carter’s eyes when the clerk asked if there was something he could help us with.

At six, she was sure he was talking to her, so she responded in a sing-songy voice, “No thank you, we are just dreaming.”

That salesman must have thought one of two things, that Carter was his ideal life-time customer or that we were too poor to own a washer and spent hours at the laundry mat, otherwise a small child would never dream of a new front loading set.

Today I love my stick blender with it’s 8 different attachments for whisking, chopping – both rough and fine and blending of all sorts.  It is a dieter’s best friend.  I can make smoothies, soups, sauces and purees all without dirtying another bowl, pitcher or appliance.  You just put the stick in the pot of tomatoes sitting on the stove, flick it on and within seconds I have whirled up a soup for dinner.

So in case you do not have the appliance gene, or you are looking for the perfect gift for your mother for Christmas, think of a stick blender and dream of all she will do with it.