Breaking Things in the Kitchen

This morning I boiled water for my coffee in a kettle missing the handy flip-top spout cover that makes the kettle whistle. So, I really focused my pre-coffee brain on not forgetting I had turned the water on to boil.

That's important because I didn't want the water to boil away and leave the kettle cooking dry. I know that's a bad thing because I ruined my last kettle by cooking it without water. Doing that makes the black interior lining flake off into your coffee.

You may be wondering why I don't have a coffee maker. I broke it.

I also broke my food processor recently by banging the lid against the edge of the counter. I just so happened to crack off the gizmo that allows the lid to lock. And we all know the lid has to lock or the processor won't turn on. (That is a good thing... I need that type of protection.) Fortunately, my patient engineer husband figured out how to jam a chop stick into just the right spot to override the locking mechanism. So, technically, the food processor still works.

But, instead of using the technically-working-food-processor-chop-stick combination, I generally just use the blender. It still works well, though lately I have been smelling that distinctive "I'm going to die" smell whenever I use it. That will give me an excuse to replace it. For the last six months, I have been using it without the little clear plug on the lid. It fell through the lid once when I was pureeing soup. The lid part was ground into a million tiny plastic shards in the 10 seconds it took me to realize why the blender sounded so funny. (No, we didn't eat the soup!) So now I have to blend things with my hand over the hole and that's just gross.

And then there's the vacuum...