Suburban Rite of Passage: Filling Up Your Kitchen With Appliances You Never Use, EXCEPT a Juicer.

One of the things that happens to you when you move to the suburbs is that you start accumulating a lot of new stuff.  I’ve written before about how one of the big challenges in making the move is buying all the new furniture you need to fill up your new home, after spending years in a cramped city apartment relying on “transformer” furniture: tv trays that become coffee tables, couches that fold out into guest beds, collapsable end tables that turn into seating for six, stuff like that.

The effect is even bigger in the kitchen.  When I lived in the city, I pretty much had one appliance: a toaster.  That was it.  To the extent that I might have had any culinary ambitions, they were pretty much limited to recipes that relied heavily on browning slices of bread.  The funny thing was that I don’t actually eat a lot of toast — I rarely eat breakfast, and toast is not really a dinner food.  But when I got my own place, my mother got me the toaster, telling me that having a toaster was a sign of maturity, a sign of settling down.  I honestly never knew that a humble toaster could say so much about a person.

Nevertheless, that toaster stayed with me for years, prominently featured in my tiny little kitchen, just sitting there like a scrub basketball player at the end of the bench waiting for the coach to call him into the game, patiently biding its time until the day that I would have a dinner party featuring 15 different varieties of warmed bread

Now, of course, it didn’t really matter back then, because I never cooked.  Two people with full time jobs living in a small apartment with no kids and access to about 100 restaurants that will deliver food to their door have little need to roll their own pasta. But now that I’m in the suburbs, and well outside the Lenny’s delivery zone, I’ve suddenly found myself cooking more.  And as a result, my toaster has suddenly spawned a whole new array of cooking appliances:

• A food processor, which according to most people who cook is the one indispensable cooking appliance.  To me, it seems like the one indispensable way to cut off a few of my fingers.
• A pasta maker, which I haven’t actually used yet because I can’t figure it out.  I’m not sure that I have all the pieces, because it just looks too flimsy.  I need to do some research.
• A slow cooker, which I think we might have had in the old apartment in the city, but it was always stored in an upper cabinet above the refrigerator, and required me to get a stool to pull it out, and it was heavy, and I am very, very lazy, so that was pretty much it for slow cooking back in the city.  Now it sits on the counter, just waiting for me to fill it with vegetables and meat and then find something else to do for six hours or so.
• A waffle maker, which is just about the most frivolous appliance you could possibly have.  It does one thing. One thing!  And moreover, you only need that one thing at most once a month, unless you really, really like a lot of waffles.  To paraphrase Robin Williams, a waffle maker is God’s way of telling you that you have too much space in your kitchen.

That’s all on top of all the new pots and pans we have stored away in our ridiculously big cabinets, including a couple of cast iron pans that I like using just because it makes me feel like I’m some scrappy short order cook in a diner or something.  COOKING WITH IRON!

One thing I will NEVER get, though, is a juicer.  I’ve had a juicer. It was horrible.  I think a lot of people at some point in their life fall victim to the hype about juicers — that we all need to drink more juice, it’s so healthy, so tasty.  What no one ever tells you in those commercials is the amount of sheer pain that goes into making a cup of juice.

First, you have to buy an absolutely ungodly amount of fruit.  I had no idea how little juice there was in an orange until I tried to make orange juice. You need like a whole SACK OF ORANGES to make a decent glass for just one person.  You want to make juice for your friends coming over for brunch?  No problem, just back up the car to the produce stand and start emptying it into your trunk.  Why haven’t those geneticists come up with an orange that is nothing but juice, that you can basically stick a straw into like a coconut?  Something to work on, you scientist geeks!

Second, once you have your crate full of oranges, you have to actually CUT them before you can stuff them into the juicer’s big scary sharpy maw.  But doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of the juicer?  If I wanted to sit there and cut oranges all day, I could just squeeze them to make my juice.  I don’t even need you, Mr. Juicer.

Third, once you’re done stuffing 87 orange halves into the juicer to make a small cup of juice, now you have to actually clean the juicer.  And it’s not like cleaning a juicer is like cleaning a pan — the juicer has this sharp, complicated blade that is perfect for severing more of my fingers, and which ends up all matted up with dismembered orange parts. “Scrub scrub scrub the blade,” sings the juicemaker!

Bottom line, if you want a nice cup of juice, expect to spend about half an hour between the cutting and the stuffing and the cleaning.  And that’s for oranges, which actually have a decent amount of juice in them.  You want, say, carrot juice, with all those helpful anti-oxidants or whatever it’s supposed to have, figure on an hour.  For a cup of juice. A cup.

The one thing a juicer does is give you an enormous appreciation for those stores that will sell you a big glass of freshly squeezed juice for like six bucks.  After you’ve owned a juicer, you’ll never begrudge paying that money for juice again. Six Dollars!  Think about it — it’s the same price as a large cup of coffee, but I can make all the coffee I want pretty easily at home.  I don’t even know how those juice places can stay in business, or keep their employees for more than one shift.  I’d rather dig ditches than make juice for other people.

So my advice to new suburbanites is this: never ever under any circumstances ever ever EVER get a juicer.  Otherwise, when it comes to appliances filling up your kitchen counters and cabinets, go crazy, if only so that you can make your visiting toast-eating city friends jealous.