Every Home Should Have One

Appliance mania

I just about snorted my coffee through my nose.

There. In the catalogue. Another ‘must have' kitchen appliance. It was - wait for it - a ‘Toast ‘n Egg'. A toaster and egg cooker - combined! ‘What is the world coming to,' I thought. ‘Seriously? Who dreamt up that one?'

The scary thing was, I then started rationalising it to myself. ‘Well, I suppose, if you liked eggs on toast for breakfast every morning...' But what if you wanted bacon as well? Or baked beans? What then? Will we soon be seeing the ‘Toast ‘n Bacon' or the ‘Toast ‘n Beans'?

‘Ah, now,' I said to myself, ‘before you get too judgmental, some research is in order.' (What did we do before Google?) Well, to my surprise it got an ‘ok' rap from the one or two reviewers I found, because apparently, the 'Toast ‘n Egg' has a mind of its own, and can time the toast to be ready exactly when the egg is poached.

Which frees up, what, three whole minutes of your life? Think of what else you could achieve in those 180 seconds! The downside is that if you just want toast, it takes a lot longer to cook than a normal toaster. So any time saving you make on this single appliance that takes the ‘multi' out of ‘tasking' is lost. Surely?  Unless, I suppose, you also have a normal toaster for when you just want normal toast.

OK. Stop right there! The world is going kitchen appliance crazy. How many kitchen appliances can one household use? And more importantly, where the heck do you put them all?

Sure, there are the standard electical appliances we all take for granted these days:  Toasters. Kettles. Microwaves. Maybe an electric frypan.

In my kitchen cupboards you'll also find a cake mixer, a sandwich press, and a hand held stick blender. Somehow - just, somehow - I've been managing to survive without a food processor/blender for a few years now, after the one I bought some 20 years ago started chomping into itself. Choosing a replacement from the array on offer is too damn daunting, as is figuring out where the heck I'd fit one in my cupboards again.

I'm also told that slow cookers, rice cookers and breadmakers are the ants pants, but somehow we're getting by without those too. Have you heard of those things called saucepans, and stove tops? And ovens and casserole dishes? I guess I'm just living in the dark ages. Face it, I'm so last century.

Well, maybe once my house and kitchen renovations are done I could upgrade a little. But, tell me, how big will I have to make my new kitchen to accommodate all these must-have appliances?

I decided that a field trip was in order, just to see what else I might be missing out on, and what to put on the wishlist for the new kitchen. A trip through the local department store soon had my eyes glazing over, and my mouth gaping in an unsightly fashion.

If the average home has a kettle, why would you need to buy a special appliance that ‘does hotwater in seconds'? Isn't that what a kettle does? Are we that time poor that we need a mini urn in the house because boiling a kettle now takes too long?

Of course there are many different coffee makers - espresso machines - whatever they're called. If you have one of those, it looks like you should have a plug-in grinder as well. And lots of bench space.

You could turn your kitchen into a café with all this stuff. Juicers. Juice ‘fountains' (must be special, those). And milkshake makers, and of course the café grills. How would you justify ever going out for lunch? And what did we do before George Foreman?

If grilling isn't your style, there are electric deep fryers... and whoa - what are those monstrosities? Three tier steamers.They are humungous! If I had one of those on the bench there wouldn't be any room to cut up the vegies!

I know, I know, I'm sounding like a catalogue here. But I'm starting to doubt my status as a 21^st Century homemaker. How on earth am I coping without an omelette maker, a ‘Pie Magic', a pizza maker and something claiming to be a ‘Snack Creations'?   And a hotdog maker, donut maker, popcorn maker and a ‘Dutch pancake maker'? And slicers, and cookie factories and can openers and electric knives?

Or, indeed, a ‘Toast ‘n Egg'?