Opinion on New Stuff

I often share things I’ve bought and while I don’t generally share normal day to day appliances and gizmos, I share those that are a bit out of the ordinary, or to me they are anyway.  Do you ever wonder what I think of them after having used them for a while?  Well, here you go! :)

ironIt’s been a while since I bought this T-Fal iron.  I got it for about $30 at Amazon, where it’s no longer available.  I love it!  Doesn’t leak a drop, and has great steam.  I am using bottled water in it because our water goes through the water softener and it says not to use softened water.

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The BlackBerry . . it works as it’s supposed to work.  I’m not one of those who lives with the cell phone attached to my ear.  In fact, most of the time I don’t have a clue where it is but when I’m traveling, it does what I need for it to do.  The other day I was out and wanted to know the name of the auto audio guy here in our town so I got out my phone, googled “auto audio Nevada, MO” and up popped the shop with the phone number.  I clicked on the phone number right there and called the shop!  That’s pretty neat! As far as doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s great.  As far as whether I could live without it . . yes, I could but I have to have some kind of cell phone so I’m glad I have it though if I could only grab one thing to take with me, I doubt it would be the BlackBerry.

rice

This was pretty pricey as far as rice cookers go and I wondered if I’d regret buying it but my old rice cooker was pretty worthless.  I can cook white rice great on the stove but some of the more exotic brown rices gave me a hard time and I often didn’t have a spare burner on the stove.  This rice cooker is amazing!  I’ve made several types of brown rice (Golden Rose is our favorite) and they’ve always turned out perfect!  Even Vince thinks it was worth the price and that doesn’t happen often . . Mr. Bargain Hunter! :)

kindleNot sure I can describe how much I love this little gadget.  It isn’t for everyone but if you’ve been wanting one and it’s in the budget, please order it!   I had read about it for a while and then kept wondering if I’d rather have the Kindle DX or the Kindle 2 so I waited til the DX was out, read reviews and decided the Kindle 2 was for me.   I love it!  Did you know that you can download the first chapter or some small portion of a book for free to decide if you want to buy it or not?  Even with authors that I love, there have been times when I bought a book and just couldn’t get into it.  Being able to read the first chapter pretty much tells me if I’m going to want to read the book or not.  I’m so glad I got this!

OK . . that’s it!  I’m not buying anything else for a very long time but for those who wondered how I like some of my recent purchases, now you know.

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The Best Reason

We love steel cut oatmeal.  If you even halfway like oatmeal or even if you don’t, and you’ve never tried steel cut oats, you owe it to yourself to try the steel cut oats.  They’re so different from regular, mushy, gooey oatmeal.  Our preference is McCann’s Irish Oats but there are other brands.  A brand we can get locally is Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats.

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Steel cut oats take 35 – 40 minutes to cook which means . . well, if you’re going to have them for breakfast, you’re having to get up earlier than you’d like to have oatmeal on the table for breakfast.

But, with the new rice cooker, I put the oatmeal and water in the rice cooker the night before. 1 part oatmeal/3 parts water.

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I set the timer so the oatmeal will be done at 6:30 a.m.  I use the porridge setting.

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I go to bed.  I sleep like a rock.  I wake up . . which would be a whole lot nicer if I were waking up at 9:00 a.m. instead of 6:00 a.m., right?  The oatmeal is done when I’m ready for it to be done . . no waiting for the water to boil, no stirring, no falling asleep at the stove.

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Last night I had taken strawberries out of the freezer, wishing I’d bought 10 flats of strawberries instead of one, so this morning we had oatmeal with strawberries.  No work, no fuss . . perfect oatmeal!

This rice cooker moves right up to the top of my favorite appliance list, mainly because of how it cooks this oatmeal.

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