I'm a cookster!

When two people wed, they each bring a wide variety of personal belongings to the marriage. If they get married young, as M and I did (and "young" is relative, I realize, but I considered us young at 24 and 23, respectively), there's much less to consider than people who get married later, when they've built a career, their own homes, etc.

From what little we had, M and I brought some of the same types of items to our marriage, namely, a shitload of music CDs. Thankfully we had only a few dupes, so we each benefitted from the music merge. I thank him to this day for my appreciation for country music, although I'm pretty sure he's still iffy on my hip-hop and rap.

M had been out of school a year longer than I, and had moved to a different state (two, actually) and multiple apartments, and therefore had a good jump start on accumulating various household items. And Christmas decorations. The boy brought more Christmas decorations than I had seen in my life, which should have been a clue about the future external illumination plans he had in mind. But I digress.

We each brought different things that have served us well over the years. I brought books, he brought tools. I brought the ice tea maker, he brought the mini-donut machine. (Really? A mini-donut machine? Yep. You can tell he was a single dude living on his own for awhile.) That sort of thing.

One of the things he brought was the Toastmaster Snackster sandwich machine. WTF is that? I've only recently developed a fondness for hot samiches, so the Snackster has remained crammed in a cabinet with about 400 muffin tins (again, WTF? We've made muffins like a dozen times in 11 years of marriage...who needs that many muffin tins?), a bagel slicer, the plastic two-liter bottle holder for our fridge, cake pans (which really should be called brownie pans, because that's all they're ever used for), the George Foreman grill, a juicer, a steamer, a Toastmaster Chopster (apparently the Toastmaster company feels the need to add "ster" on the end of every single one of their products) and a handheld blender, among other things. In other words, it resides in the deepest pit of The Cabinet That Holds Rarely Used Kitchen Stuff, or TCTHRUKS.

Thanks in part to Stef and her colleages at the world's finest nationwide bakery-cafe, I've learned that I really, really like hot samiches (also called paninis, if you want to be all fancy-like). And sometime in the past week or so I remembered that we have a samich maker machine thingy somewhere in the pit of TCTHRUKS (I pronounce that like Blues player Keith Tkachuk's name is pronounced, with an R thrown in the middle somewhere). Tonight, it was time to dive in there and retrieve the Snackster from its lonely, unused existence. Why? Because I'm all about the whole make-it-myself-and-save-a-few-bucks thing. Some people call it stingy, some people call it frugal, I call it "road to a D300." And I've kicked the Starbucks habit, by the way. Or rather, replaced it with a CoffeeMate habit. Just as tasty, but a helluva lot cheaper.

Anyway, I honestly can't remember ever using the Snackster while we've been married, so it was fun to pull it out, plug it in and realize that I had no earthly idea how to operate it. A quick call to M in Atlanta and I learned that within three minutes I could have us a nice toasty little meal, and that while the "real" directions recommend using butter on the bread, M assured me that it wasn't necessary. (He was right, by the way.)

I also cooked some soup on the stove, and by "cooked" I mean I dumped it in the pot and set the pot on a hot burner and stirred every once in awhile, and kept it from overflowing which is actually more than I can say for the regular cook around here who feels that a meal isn't complete unless he's overflowed a pot or two.

So, despite the fact that I never really cook, Zoe and I had a delicious meal as opposed to my nuking leftovers that M makes sure to stock the fridge with before he goes out of town. I was quite pleased with myself, and highly recommend the Snackster. I also highly recommend not storing it in your own TCTHRUKS because it can be quite dangerous. I nearly sustained a massive appendage injury when the mandolin slicer fell out during my foray into the cabinet. Okay, not really, but it did crash to the floor and make me jump.

By the way, in searching for images of the Snackster (because why shoot my own Snackster when the wonderful world of Google provides free images with just a few clicks) I realized that although our Snackster is over a dozen years old, it still looks pretty much the same as today's Snackster. Why mess with perfection?!