As I've mentioned previously, there's enough spices in my kitchen/freezer/fridge/pantry/garden to make the Silk Road traders of old quite envious. In fact, my pantry has essentially been converted into my personal apothecary. A buddy of mine loves to stick his head in the cupboards and inhale quite deeply. To be fair, I also huff my spices- but that's because I've had my fair share of blind idiot moments.
I once tried to put parmesan cheese in a vaporizer because it looked just like the Morton's salt.
Recently I was making some pan fried taters (I don't use the oven much anymore unless I have a friend/sous chef with me so I don't add more scars to my collection) and they were coming along quite nicely. Until I realized that I hadn't actually grabbed the paprika--which is of course the 'happy spice'. Nope! There was definitely no taste of happiness, as I had grabbed the Cayenne pepper instead. That stuff is a wonderful styptic and I have it all over my house for just that reason, but dammit! It's not the happy spice.
So, I grabbed what I thought was the paprika and added it to the taters. Again, without investigating it like a little raccoon, which I usually do. Well, guess what? That wasn't paprika either! I gave up on that bit before I ended up adding every other type of spice from all corners of the globe, and balanced the flavour out with some basil. The taters came out rather tasty, but they weren't what I had wanted to make in the first place.
And unrelated to spice mix ups, I once tried to pay for some snacks with my library card, along with a whole bunch of other dumb things. But, there is an amazing little gadget called a Pen Friend.
It's made by a British company called RNIB. I was lucky enough to get one from my state's Commission for the Blind. They get limited grants and the Pen Friend isn't cheap.
How does this relate to anything I was just ranting about? Well, lemme tell 'ya all about it!
The Pen Friend is this nifty lil gadget that looks like a cross between one of those big multi ink pens crossed with a microphone. It comes with a set of white labels that you can use to record various things, and there's even a set that you can get that are washable and machine safe so you can label your clothes. It even doubles as a media player, which I use to listen to some of my prayers and meditation music.
The way it works is by storing the information that you record by programming the lables and you can add things to it like a media player by plugging it in to a computer.
Using the labels goes a bit like this: say you have spices or canned goods that you can't tell apart. You simply place the lable on the item and hold the Pen Friend above it. Hit the record button and say what the object is. Once you've labeled everything, just hover the Pen Friend over it and the prerecorded description will play.
The labels are reusable---just peel them off and stick it on to another can of sliced potatoes or whatever you programmed it for. Or, you can just reprogram them by recording over them. I love that thing! You can even colour over them to make them easier to see or help differentiate them from other things you've labeled.
I use it mostly for phone numbers, canned items, and my spices. But, because I couldn't resist, I labeled my friends dog to demonstrate. Hehe
No comments:
Post a Comment