Immersion Blender

[firstfrost]

Wow! Immersion Blenders are amazing!

Now, I have never really had a knack for blenders (despite having dutifully bought the brand justom claims works perfectly). My traditional experience with making a puree soup is something like:

• Pour half the pot of soup into the blender. Miss and pour some onto floor. Pour some onto hand and squeak.
• Turn on blender. Discover that hot soup plus air, when blended, equals soup plus hot air, and hot air is much larger(*): blender top flies off of own accord, flinging soup about the kitchen.
• Manage to remove excess air. Blend some more. Hot soup jumps out of spaces between plastic and rubber bits of blender top. Wonder why the top half of the veggie bits aren't being sucked down to the bottom. Stop blender, take top off, try to circulate by hand. Get soup spoon caught in pointy bits.
• Remove blender from motor and try to shake. Realize this was a mistake when more soup escapes from the blender top onto my hand. Squeak again.
• Finish blending. Repeat for second half of pot of soup.

So, I had gotten kinda resistant to making puree-type soups. But I really like the things like butternut squash soup...

Anyway, I got an immersion blender for Christmas, and made butternut squash soup tonight. This experience was more like:

• Take pot off burner and put on trivet.
• Put immersion blender in pot
• Capture chunks with the little cage thing and shred them into oblivion!
• Iterate until done.

That was so much easier! First, there's the whole video game aspect (once most of it is pureed) of hunting down the chunks and leaping upon them with the blender cage. Second, you don't have to take anything out of the original pot. Third, it took about fifteen seconds to rinse the whole blender apparatus off. No taking it apart and washing all the bits and stabbing yourself on the pointy bit.

[*: kirisutogomen also taught me this lesson with the booby-trapped hot chocolate mixer. But I seem to have to learn it over and over. ]

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[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

My secret is supermarket salad bars. Everything's all chopped.