Small Appliances

It's not just the big appliances that I need for living with ALS, not just things like the wheelchair, commode chair, power wheelchair, slings, lifts and so on. There are lots of small appliances I am beginning to need more and more, the kind a great many people have in their homes, yet I have never had in mine.

The other day I was peeling potatoes. It's that time of year, time for big dinners with plenty of mashed potatoes. Except it took me a heck of a long time to peel those potatoes, and I was pretty much worn out by the end of the exercise. So I thought about it. Why do I have to do all that work? There are electric potato peelers out there. So I went out and bought one, a "Rotato" by Starfrit.

This is something I would have called an unnecessary gadget in the past, a piece of plastic junk designed to litter a counter or sit in a cupboard unused. It isn't. not for me. I've had an apple in the fridge for a week but haven't eaten it because I didn't want to put the work into peeling it. No, I'm not lazy. Well, perhaps a little. In the end, it wasn't worth it for me. Yet my little Rotato peels apples, oranges and all kinds of things. So I used it, along with my manual corer and slicer, and ended up with apple slices to eat.

Opening cans is getting pretty tough too, so a few weeks back I got one of those little can openers, the kind that sits on top of the can and rotates around it, opening it without leaving edges exposed. I don't know why I waited so long to get something like this. I suppose, once again, I saw it as an unnecessary piece of gadgetry, offering me no value, until now.

The other small appliance I purchased yesterday was a replacement for my hand mixer, the wand kind that you hold with one hand. My old one broke and I've been hand whipping for a while. I simply cannot keep it up anymore, so I bought the needed replacement. Only this time I bought one with a small chopping attachment. Chopping onions and peppers is getting to be quite a task, so I thought this might be a better option. We'll see.

I like doing a lot of my kitchen stuff by hand. I have an electric hand-held beater which rarely comes out of the cupboard. Instead I have a couple of different hand whisks and mixing spoons for various beating and blending tasks. I don't have a big mixer with bread kneading blades. Before today I didn't have any sort of a chopper or food processor. I preferred to do it by hand.

But my hands are getting weak. My arms getting weaker still. I get tired easily and can't finish the bigger jobs. The truth is that I need these small appliances just as much as I need the big ones; that is if I want to continue cooking and baking. I do. It's something I love to do. So I will take these gadgets, gone from unnecessary to probably useful, and do what I can to keep going.