Gadget Girl

Last week we acquired a few more gadgets - a microwave oven and a blender. The microwave was prompted by the last floods in Gurgaon when Rod took hours to get home and his dutiful wife (that would be me) had no easy way of keeping his dinner warm for him. I put it in the oven on low, but as it turned out, that's not the best way to ensure basil marinated chicken had any mosture left in it at all by the time moisture sodden husband returned from wading down Golf Course Road.

The microwave has a grill feature, so I decided to follow the instructions in the manual (I am a girl, I read instruction manuals) and make myself a toasted sandwich for lunch one day. You press these buttons, it says, place the sandwich on the low rack and turn it over when the machine beeps. I can do this, I think and press the buttons. The display comes up and suggests it will need 11 and a half minutes to toast my sandwich. That can't be right I think, and I was correct. It only needed 9 and a half minutes. Thankfully we packed our George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine in the crates, because the sandwich wasn't really worth waiting that long for!

The blender, however, was an inspired choice. The kids haven't been consuming as much dairy produce since they arrived, what with the milk being different (in taste and not homogenised, so it separates), yoghurt they recognise is expensive, and the cheese is also different. Imported cheese is pricy and local cheese is ...different. Cheese slices come wrapped in plastic, and they can taste less plasticy (obviously that's a real word AND spelled correctly) than some of the cheese not wrapped in plastic. So for the sake of their bones, I decided we would make milkshakes! A glass of milk, some Indian icecream (think the stuff you'd give the kids not the stuff you'd eat yourself) , assorted flavouring and the blender. Hey presto! Mum's a star!