Regarding my loss of electrickery and my advice to hang on to some sort of directory, this morning, by some sort of spooky coincidence, a local Trade Directory dropped through the door. Really, how weird is that then? It’s going in the desk draw this time.
Anyhoo, about two weeks ago my little nest of vipers was busy preparing a paste that’s an essential ingredient for her food preparation. Amongst the stuff in the paste are chilli peppers, garlic, shallots, lemon grass and a few other weird items.
Thing is, these items have to be pretty much beaten to a pulp separately then mixed together at the end. The pulverising takes place by the simple expedient of a good pounding utilising a pestle and mortar of which we have a huge one.
The other thing is, at one go, she prepares enough for close to a month of cooking and this entails about three hours of her sitting cross legged on the deck pounding away with the pestle. For so many years I’ve watched this and thought nothing of it. This time, she mentioned how it was starting to hurt with the passing of the years.
I thought, how about a food processor? I searched and instantly realised how quickly technology overtakes you as my search turned up an electric vegetable cutter.
Damn! Off to the shop and there it was. It’s about the size of a large coffee mug – or what I’d call a small coffee mug. That’ll never work we thought but the price said, ‘Get me and try me. Not much to lose, eh?’ So we did.
On the way home, I stopped off at a grocers to get something to try it out with. I grabbed a large carrot and went to the counter to pay.
”Is that all you want?” enquired the shop lady.
”Yup, that’s it; just the one carrot. I just want to check it with my chopper.”
At times, infrequent as they may be, I can be pretty damn quick on the up-take and this was such an occasion as I noted the shop lady visibly wrestling with the mental image I’d just dropped into her head. I quickly elaborated my explanation thus, “That would be my new vegetable chopper.”
This clarification seemed to bleach the ladies mind as she visibly relaxed, moved her finger off the panic button and we managed to complete the carrot caper without further ado.
Back home, she cut the carrot into one inch long chunks or, if you prefer, chunks of one inch in length – whichever trips your chopper – and popped them into the little guy, pressed the button, watched, and two seconds later, job done. She was so amazed she was close to tears of delight and so impressed that she right quickly consigned the pestle and mortar to the garden shed.
Note to self: Need to strengthen shed floor.
The three hour paste preparation performance? Reduced to under fifteen minutes all-up - including cleaning the kit. Man, she’s happy. May I humbly suggest to anyone who likes the kind of food that entails hours of pounding certain ingredients into oblivion, or knows someone who does, try one of these little, or similar, suckers. You’ll be, or make someone else, very happy.
So, on a happy note, that’s little onion for this post. Pardon? Little onion? That’s shallot. Bu-by.
Quote; Fran Lebowitz.
"Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter."
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