All year I have meant to tell you about this blender:

Ninja Professional Countertop Blender. It was with huge regret that I let go of my old blender, a Braun with a glass pitcher that was with me through two decades of pregnancy smoothies and baby food and frozen coffees. I’d replaced the little thingie on the bottom when the plastic part finally gave way, but then it finally gave way a second time and the replacement part was no longer available. I resentfully put “blender” on my wish list, and my parents bought me this one for Christmas last year, and it was an adjustment but now I love it.

The main thing I love about it is that it comes with two travel cups that fit with their own attachment to the blender base. I don’t know what my problem is with “getting the whole blender dirty for just one smoothie” or whatever, but it’s a hurdle I couldn’t get over, and these cups remove that hurdle. All summer, nearly every single day I made myself a frozen coffee drink. And if Paul wanted one too, he used the other cup. It is wonderful. It does a great job pulverizing ice for slushy cold drinks. I recommend it.

While we’re discussing sentimental kitchen appliances, I will say a thing or two about my new coffee maker:

Cuisinart 14-cup Programmable Coffeemaker. I bought this in January after the sudden demise of my old coffee maker, and I love it. I like that the coffee filter and coffee go in under a top-lifting lid. I like that the burner will stay on for up to 4 hours, and you can pick how long (I chose 2 hours). I like that the coffee is nice and hot. I like that the carafe is clear. I like that I can program it to be ready when I come downstairs in the morning. I like that I can switch off the option of a beep that tells me the coffee is ready. I’ve just been really happy with it overall.

 

This is on one hand ridiculous and on the other hand it works great, which makes it a good gift idea for someone who likes kitchen toys:

Partu Sous Vide cooker. (Sous vide is pronounced like the woman’s nickname Sue, followed by the first syllable of vida in Living the Vida Loca, with slightly more emphasis on VEED than on soo. Soo-VEED.) Combine with a sous vide container (we started with the 7 quart, which I’d say is about the right size for a normal household, but now Paul would kind of like a bigger one) and, if the gift budget will stretch, sous vide weights.

Paul ordered one of these after seeing it on a cooking show, and I was so eye-rolly and grossed out about the whole thing. It seemed like a way to take something simple (baking a piece of meat) and make it super complicated; plus, it means cooking meat in a clear bin on the counter, which is gross. But I have been completely won over. I have cooked pork chops or chicken breasts in foil, in water, in literally in half an inch of oil to try to keep them from drying out in the oven, and the sous vide is SO MUCH BETTER than any other method I’ve tried. It is WEIRD, yes, but it makes VERY GOOD MEAT. I notice the difference particularly with drier meats such as pork chops and chicken breasts, but it also makes nice tender steak, even if you use a cheaper cut. You can also make YOGURT in it.

Also: Paul is a happy-go-lucky sort of person, and I don’t trust happy-go-lucky people to have enough anxiety to care about food safety, and the sous vide means that when he sets it for the Safe Meat Temperature, it always achieves the Safe Meat Temperature. I can look suspiciously at my piece of chicken, but then I remember that the sous vide cooked it, and I do trust the sous vide.

 

Hot Sauce Advent Calendar. It’s too early to put this in a post of tried-and-approved purchases, because it is not yet December so Paul has not yet tried a single hot sauce. Maybe they’re terrible! Who knows! But he was SO PLEASED to get it. I bought it impulsively and had it shipped addressed to him, so he opened it thinking it was something he’d ordered and was completely mystified, and then he spent like half an hour looking at it and being pleased with it, and he’s mentioned half a dozen time since then how much he’s looking forward to December 1st, so it’s already been well worth it. Another picture on the listing shows how cute it is when you open it up, with little numbered cardboard drawers to pull out:

I’m planning to have him save the structure so I can re-use it to make another calendar for him for next year with assorted things in it—maybe some hot sauces, some chocolates, some little bottles of booze, etc.

 

My Amazon account tells me I have purchased this same fan five times and I am not surprised:

Honeywell HT-900 Fan. I like to have a fan on me at night all summer, and this one is large enough to work from where it sits on a bureau across the room, but small enough (and with adjustable angle) so that I can direct it just on me and not on Paul, since Paul does NOT like to have a fan on him at night. It’s small enough to bring with me to a hotel, large enough to be worth bringing. The first one I bought has lasted me for YEARS, so I bought a second one for downstairs, then one for each of my older kids when they went to college, then one more as a back-up in case one of my fans ever breaks, so that I don’t have to go a single day without one.

 

40-piece scrunchies. Elizabeth bought these with her own money and I was just CRINGING because I KNEW they would be disappointing: when Claire’s sells scrunchies for $4.99 each, you just CANNOT expect to get FORTY good scrunchies for under $10.00! You just can’t! I warned her! But they came, and they are great. There was one issue, which is mentioned in a lot of the reviews, which is that you don’t necessarily get the exact assortment of colors shown in the picture—so if you wanted one specific color shown, you might be disappointed. But Elizabeth wanted “an assortment” and didn’t care about the particular shades of colors, so she was really happy.

 

Vintage Rainbow Shirt. I love this shirt. It’s so soft and comfy and cute. I normally wear a women’s XL Tall in Old Navy sizes, for comparison, and I ordered this in a women’s XL and it is the right size—a little bit snugger than Old Navy XL Tall but the right fit for me (I have another shirt in this same brand in XXL, and it’s a little roomier than I’d like).

 

These ridiculous little rainbow flower spoons. They’re too small to be sensible, but I love them so much every time I see them in the drawer, and every time I want to spoon sugar into coffee, and every time I use one to stir Edward’s powdered medicine into his little juice cup. They’re just so pretty and cute and charming. You could buy a set and put a couple into each of several stockings, keeping your two favorites for yourself.