Home Care Horror Monday

My three kids spend most of their time trying to invoke Natural Selection upon each. I suppose I should step in and try and broker peace, but I figure that at least they’re harassing each other and not me. As a result, we spend a lot of time at home. Lest they carry on like that in public and it reflect negatively on my public image.

Other than the internet, I get most of my daily contact with “the outside word”, via the mail. It’s also my 2 minutes of freedom and fresh air as I make the trip down to the end of the driveway and back to check the mailbox.

I’ve become slightly addicted / obsessed / reliant on junk mail. I’m a bit of a self-declared expert on the subject, even.

Enter the Home Care catalogue. I eagerly await this quarterly magazine, as it never fails to send me into fits of grossly unladylike snorting laughter. So much so, that I decided to pay tribute to it with a dedicated segment on my blog. Surely I am not the only person to have seen this catalogue and thought to myself WTF?!? with every turning page?

And so Home Care Horror Monday was born. I’m super excited to share this edition with Mum’s Lounge, and I hope you all enjoy the craptastic unawesomeness to follow.

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Today’s theme is food preparation – garnishing and presentation. Specifically, I’m getting all passionate and hard core about the core.

Okay so it’s not the dumbest thing ever invented. It may possibly have some merit, somewhere, in a distant land where they refuse to eat strawberries unless they are perfectly evenly and symmetrically sliced. In my house, we wash them, cut the stem off, and they are gone before you can say “how many dainty little slices would you like?”.

I give this item some degree of acknowledgement on account of some chef somewhere finding it most useful in creating fancy-pants garnishes for fruit salads and the side of cocktail glasses. I wonder what said Chef does with the rogue strawberries that don’t fit the perfectly symmetrical shape of the slicer? Probably keeps him awake at night fretting about them.

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Having become accustomed to the novice non-professional method of mango slicing (ie with a knife), I would dearly love one of these. Only, what do you do if your mango has a seed that is larger than the centre blade? Perhaps I shouldn’t get one, just to avoid the heartache and disappointment that would surely follow. Also, mangoes are crazy expensive here, so we really don’t eat them all that often in our house. The last thing I need is another useless item alongside the strawberry slicer in my kitchen crap utensil drawer.

If you live on a tropical island, or anywhere that has a plentiful supply of standard-sized, symmetrical, affordable mangoes, then by all means, go out and get one of these.

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After seeing this little ripper, I went to my local market and found that none of the pineapples were of a uniform size. They must feel terribly shunned to their little pineapple cores, to know that they will never be touched by the plastic slicing blade of this bad boy. You see, while the slicer does helpfully come with two attachments for “various sized pineapples” – that only accounts for the LENGTH of the pineapple core, not the diameter of the core itself.

I know, I know, I’m getting all technical on this one, right?

You go to the supermarket, careful to select a pineapple you think will marry beautifully with your swanky new slicer. You take it home and put the slicer to the test…only to find that you have either taken out half the edible flesh with the narrow core. Orr alternatively, only removed half of the thick core, and you need to hack away at it with such an inferior and heathen device as a knife in order to remove the remaining core. Oh the devastation.

A barely noticeable nod of acknowledgement goes out to the creator, purely for effort. I’m giving them the “Consistency” award. The award you give to the person who is really quite crap at what they do, but keeps on trying nonetheless.

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In conclusion, I have one key criticism of these items. They are all designed to work on uniform shaped fruit. As much as I’d love to shun a strawberry for being misshapen, I don’t. I’m just not that mean and heartless. In fact, it’s safe to say that I probably tend to go for the misshapen strays, so clearly these items would be of no use to me in my kitchen.

So, listen up Homecare inventors. You are obviously living in a standard-issue, standard-size world, and wherever that may be, I sincerely hope it has padded walls and somebody has responsibly removed all trip hazards and sharp corners.

For more bite sized giggles and big juicy chuckles, don’t go miss more of Parental Parody’s Home Care posts – all infused with that mishappen (but delicious) sense of humour that we all love! I’m sure that rolling around on the floor laughing hysterically will whip you into shape…even if the poor fruit is done for!

You’ll find more fabulous Home Care Horrors here: