Another week of personal failure and humiliation, so I might as well get it off my chest. So hear now, my tale of woe.
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THE DASH D™ RAPID EGG COOKER
A friend of mine who knows I don’t have a stove in my apartment was interested in seeing that I didn’t die of starvation, so she gave me a small, compact device called the Dash D™ Rapid Egg Cooker. The handy little device makes soft-boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, and omelets. My favorite is fried-over-easy, but Dash D™ hasn’t learned how to do that yet.
B—that’s my friend—also knows that I recently changed my middle name to Doofus (and why I did so), prompting her to give a demonstration after delivering the gadget. I watched carefully as she stirred the ingredients, reassembled all the moving parts, added water where it was needed, closed the bubble top, and turned on the cooker.
We sat in my living room (which also happens to be my dining room) while we waited for the little thing to perform its chore. Well, the buzzer (actually, a high-pitched, shrill screech) went off signaling the omelet was done. Except it wasn’t. She’d added a little too much milk which required more cooking to reach the required consistency. We also discovered that too much condensation on the bubble top causes the cooker to alarm, as well.
The result was a very good egg, bacon, cheese, and onion omelet. The first I’d had in many a year, I can tell ya. And the service was almost like in a restaurant… except she left the mess for me to clean up. Knowing me as well as she does, the last thing she did before leaving was to shove the instruction manual into my hand.
Saturday morning, I decided I wanted an omelet with ham instead of bacon. The first thing I learned was that I should probably do the mixing in a bowl rather than in the little round plastic container called an Omelette Bowl (fancy, huh?) that comes with the cooker. At that point, I considered consulting the instruction manual to see if it had any more useful tips, but I was on a tight schedule that morning, so I didn’t bother.
Once the ingredients were properly scrambled and poured into the Omelette Bowl (without too much of it being spilled) I put it on the stainless steel plate of the cooker. Next, I filled the water measuring device to the level labeled "Omelets," but couldn’t find any place for it, so I dumped it in the bowl with the ingredients. Well, that filled the container to the very top, making it difficult to put it back in the cooker without spilling more of the contents. Next, I took the little flat, round, perforated plastic device—that served no purpose so far as I could tell—and put it on top of the bowl. Then I turned my new Dash D™ on.
I hadn’t even gotten to my chair in the living room before the thing started shrieking. I turned it off, checked everything, and decided to clean off the dome even though there hadn’t been time for any condensation to form on it. No luck. Hit the on button, shrieked, turned it off, unplugged, turned it on…shrieked.
Time to get the instruction manual out. Seems I’d done a few things wrong. Like ignoring the warning to never set the Omelette Bowl directly on the burner. Okay, that’s easy enough to fix.
At least I thought so. But the bowl wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t move in any direction. Ever inventive, I got a butter knife and tried to pry the partially melted plastic bowl off the burner. Had to go all the way around it, levering it a bit each time to finally free the blessed thing… without spilling any more of the ingredients, I’m proud to say. According to instructions, I used the Poaching Tray (that round, brown thingy) to keep the bowl off the hot burner. That solved another problem. The water from the measuring cup went into the receptacle containing the heating plate. That done, I turned the cooker on, and it did just that… cooked. I had to add more water couple of times because the ingredients were so goopy with all that extra water in the wrong place, but when I finally declared it done, I enjoyed a very good meal.
While my heating plate is somewhat discolored from coming into direct contact with a brown plastic bowl and my brown plastic bowl is rather rough from having its bottom halfway melted from said contact, that magic little cooker is right on my counter, clean and ready to have another go at it.
You know, just talking about this made me hungry. I’m going to take out my Dash D™ Rapid Egg Cooker and fix me an omelet (or is that omelette?) for dinner.
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