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This toaster oven is, um, toast
(by Tracy Beckerman - April 09, 2008)
Goldilocks has nothing on me. She couldn’t find a chair that wasn’t too hard or too soft.
Me? I’m on my fourth toaster oven in two weeks. Yes, it’s an addiction. I have major toaster oven issues. I am officially ready for toaster oven rehab.
It all started when the first toaster oven – the one we’d had for pretty much our entire marriage – decided that everything we put in should come out blackened. We decided differently.
With heavy hearts, we said goodbye to old toasty and I went out to find a new one.
The store had a dizzying array of choices. Our old toaster oven had two settings, bake or toast. But in the 15 years since we bought our old toastmaster, the toaster oven industry has really ignited. We could get a convection toaster oven, a digital convention toaster oven, a toaster/broiler, a toaster/broiler/rotisserie, and even a toaster oven that offered conventional calrods and infrawave technology. Certainly I didn’t know what calrods were, but if they didn’t turn my toast to a charred briquette, I was in.
I plunked down the equivalent of a down payment on a car and brought home a new toaster oven with all the bells and whistles I could pronounce. I proudly demonstrated it to my family. But when the little digital beeps went off to let us know our toast was done, the dog freaked. With his tail between his legs, he bolted from the room and took off for the floor above.
“What’s with him?” I asked the kids.
“Mom, that beep sounds like the electric fence,” my son informed me. “When you make toast, he thinks he’s gonna get shocked.”
This was not good. On the up side, I could cook just about anything that I wanted using conventional calrods and infrawave technology. On the down side, if I used it, my dog was going to have a nervous breakdown. It was a conundrum.
“Bring it back,” said my husband, the voice of reason.
I stroked the gleaming black and chrome exterior. “Maybe we can train him to get used to it.”
“We can’t even train him to stay,” said the voice of reason. “Bring it back.”
I packed and cushioned all the calrods and infrawaves and brought it back to the store.
Then I picked another toaster that wasn’t digital. It wasn’t as pretty as the first one, and I felt a little sorry for it. It was the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of Toaster Ovens.
When I got it home, we dragged the dog back into the kitchen and made some toast. This time there were no beeps. Only dings. He looked unfazed.
“Success!” I crowed. I unplugged the toaster oven and put it in the slide out drawer where we keep our toaster oven when it’s not in use. But much to my horror, it didn’t fit. It was too big.
“Argh! The other one was too scary. This one is too big. I need one that is just right!”
Back to the store I went.
“I have to return this toaster oven,” I said to the salesgirl.
“Is it defective?” she asked reasonably.
“No, it’s too big. And the other one made beeps. I need one that is smaller and dings, not bigger and beeps.”
She looked at me sympathetically, the way people do when they know they are talking to someone who is mentally unstable.
…Which brings us to our fourth toaster oven.
“Do we like this toaster oven,” my husband asked, eyeballing the new appliance.
“No,” I said definitively. “This one is too small.”
“Does it beep?”
“No.”
“Does it fit in the drawer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Does it make toast?”
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Sounds like a winner to me.”
I brooded for a couple of days over the lack of largeness of our new toaster oven, debating whether or not to bring it back and try another. Then, about a week later, my husband approached me again.
“So, are we keeping this toaster oven?” he asked cautiously.
“Yeah. Whatever. It’s fine,” I responded.
He looked relieved.
“… But we need a new fridge.”
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