Mass Suicide of Small Kitchen Appliances

They must have formed some kind of sick pact, our small kitchen appliances. In recent months the following have decided they've had enough: toaster, Crock Pot, toaster oven. And so out has come the plastic once again.

I need them all, those small devices.

I have a piece of toast for lunch every single day--with some preserves I buy each summer at Szalay's Farm and Market down in the nearby Cuyahoga Valley National Park--I alternate: strawberry, blackberry, apricot. The bread is from a multigrain sourdough loaf I've made, and I try to use prudence (my mom's name!) when I slice it so that the slice is sufficiently thick but still able to fit in the toaster slot. I like it a bit dark--not burned, mind you. Just darkish. Like a wannabe Darth Vader who can't quite find the shade of black he wants, settles for one of the fifty shades of ... you know.

We've had a Crock Pot since early in our marriage back in late 1969. This will be the third one. The first--I think we broke the crockery by doing something stupid ... can't remember exactly what it was, but I'm pretty sure it involved Impatient Me. We used to use it for lots of things; now, however, we've sort of dwindled to two principal functions: chicken soup (from stock we've made--with some contributions from a bird, of course) and hot cereal (in the winter we alternate weeks: steel-cut oats and cornmeal mush; we're having the latter tonight).

The second Crock Pot just flat died a week ago. Decided it would stick on the "Warm" setting and eschew the "Low" and "High." Not good. We'd had that particular Crock a long time--decades--so although it was sad to see it go, I was not all that surprised. Just annoyed when it ruined a batch of mush (and that is hard to do!).

I've used a bit of literary license re: the toaster oven. It actually died last fall, but I needed three examples here, you know? (All cool things come in threes--Larry, Curly, and Moe; Tinker to Evers to Chance; etc.) We use it for all kinds of things--from toasting bagels to broiling turkey burgers to reheating pizza, etc. This new one is great. One of the problems with the previous one (as well as with the previous Crock Pot): the electronic display had dimmed so much over the years that I needed to use the flashlight function on my iPhone to read what it said!

So ... there we are. Newly equipped and waiting for the next fatality in the kitchen.