Kitchen Appliance Overload
Two bad excuses for my bourgeoise kitchen appliance-owning lifestyle would be that I haven’t always lived this way and that I occasionally cook food for mutual aid. Owning so many electric gadgets in a world where most people don’t have cars, washing machines, toasters or even a roof over their head … I get it.
We harbor four fancy kitchen appliances that will not be useful in an emergency power outage situation but are otherwise a wonderful privilege to possess. Here they are, listed by weight.
#4. Vitamix restaurant-quality blender - a gift from a pizza place owning guy I worked for. It weighs 11.3 pounds. I made countless batches of salad dressings with this at the pizza joint but now it’s mostly used for milkshakes. This thing is built to last and will last forever.
#3. I’ve always been ahead of my time with trends, like the one where young people today disdain material possessions in favor of saving their money or spending it on travel and art experiences. That being said - the vintage early 80s Cuisinart DLC-8 PLUS food processor that I acquired from a free pile in front of someone’s house is my most cherished treasure. It was in mint condition, in the box. This was probably an extravagant gift that the recipient put away in an attic in 1983 that found its way into the world again a quarter century later in 2010. It’s heavy. Lack of counter space meant I was keeping it in the basement and schlepping it upstairs for use but recently some cabinet real estate near our kitchen became available. The whole unit with the original blade (but not all the other specialized attachments I never use) weighs 14.1 pounds.
#2. A Kitchen Aid stand mixer is expensive but essential if you’re doing pizza dough - which is the only bread-related thing I know how to make. Other members of the family use this all the time. The model we own weighs a whopping 24 pounds.
#1. The heaviest and least used appliance in our privileged American home is a Cuisinart ice cream maker - also a gift from my pizza-restaurant-owning former boss. It weighs in at 24.7 pounds. So why don’t we make our own ice cream every night? Because the essential ingredient in ice cream - cream - is so expensive that it makes supermarket ice cream seem affordable. This appliance is only dragged out for special occasions when we want to add unique ingredients to custom batches of pricey, artisinal dairy desserts for the elites. Those elites being us.
—Alex