Look, Learn and Process…

My food processor, now around 20 years old, took advantage of my momentary absence  last week to dance its way off the kitchen worktop, yanking the plug out of the wall and shattering some components of high functional importance when it crashed onto the floor-tiles. At the time it was working at normal speed, kneading dough… how messy was that?

I browsed around the internet for a replacement, and having selected what seemed to be a popular choice, I read the reviews.

“Instructions are a bit crap…”

“Superb processor, but instructions leave a lot to be desired…”

“Fantastic, once you get the hang of which pieces go where…”

Undeterred, (because instructions are to me what personal modesty is to the Kardashian women) I sent off for the machine of my choice and it arrived the next day.

I was impressed; food processors have become a lot smaller in the last 20 years, and although there were still quite a few accessories, many of them were multi-functional.

I turned to the instructions.

Uh-oh… diagrams and illustrations. My stomach began to sink.  Spatial ability is not my strongest point; I know this for a fact.

Not one single accessory was labelled. There was no “this is the slicing disc, the grating disc, the kneading tool…” neither on the accessory nor in the instructions.  And so far as assembly went, the diagrammatic instruction showed various numbered components hovering above the main core of the machine, which my husband later explained represented the order in which they were to be assembled. He didn’t seem to have the same problem as me identifying which parts were which … but then he’s an engineer.

I turned to the part of the instructions where it showed you what each unidentifiable component was to be used for processing  … wait for it … which unidentifiable food item. I managed to identify a carrot at first glance (though it could have been a parsnip) and a wedge of cheese (principally because of the holes in it). You don’t actually see that many holes in cheese, except in Tom and Jerry cartoons, but I was fairly confident I’d made the right assumption.

I didn’t know what the round things were… possibly coffee beans, or black peppercorns. Probably the black peppercorns were the smaller ones beneath though. Anyway, on the basis that you wouldn’t actually ‘grind’ peas, I opted for coffee beans for the large ones at the top of the section and the jury remained out on the illustration below it.

I was stuck for a while on what looked like a baby’s bottle, but my husband, who later rattled through most of them, instantly, identified it as a cucumber.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had occasion to process a cucumber, but at least if I want to in the future, I  now have the wherewithal so to do.

After a lengthy study,  I gave up on a crumpled square box.  At this point I didn’t see the ears of corn adorning the side of the box, but in any case I tend not to process cornflake packets, or any other cereals for that matter.

Two speckly things, one of which resembled an acorn were eventually identified as potatoes, one half- peeled, and I guessed the things looking like garlic cloves were probably onions. I have another smaller and much simpler device for processing garlic anyway.

I identified a soup dish with a soup spoon for the blender tool, and also the illustration for fruit smoothies and vegetable smoothies. But some marbles had me foxed until I noticed the frosty symbol above them.  Ice cubes?

And then there was this pot on top of a fire, but I realised later that this was in fact a pot of soup with some vegetables at the side.

Therefore the previously identified soup dish and spoon (above) must be a frying pan and a pile of pancakes. Well, to be honest, it was my husband who identified the pancakes…yeah okay, and the soup.

The gold ingots were also identified by my husband as chocolate squares.  He’s good isn’t he?  Though even now he’s still  mystified by the ‘smaller than coffee beans’ item, since we both believe that it’s the illustration beneath that one which represents nuts.

Unless of course they’re differentiating between shelled and unshelled nuts? Yes, that will probably be it.

I was greatly reassured, however, to find that I had no problem with the accessory for whipping ice cream and scrambling eggs.  And in fact, now that I know what all these things are, I can’t for the life of me see why it wasn’t perfectly apparent to me in the first place.

So there we were, all ready to go. My personal resident engineer showed me how to assemble it all this morning and I’m looking forward to getting started, just as soon as my finger heals. Yes, it did advise care in using the accessories, and that you should always keep the blade unit in its guard pack, but it didn’t say anything about handling the slicing discs wearing armoured gloves.

As I rushed off to find a plaster, I heard my husband muttering “Good grief, there’s blood over everything and look… there’s still a piece of your skin stuck to the slicing blade.”