Soar Like An Emu

Happy New Year Dear Readers! How was your break? Mine was exhausting. I need a holiday after my “holiday”.

A couple of highlights for you (in no particular order). Dad putting Dynamic Lifter on the lawn before the afternoon storms hit, yet again sending the neighbours into fits of rage (it’s chicken poo – it STINKS! I mean singes your nostril hair stinks).

My nephew bringing ‘Stan’ the pet lizard into our lives who was like a real life ‘snake in a can’ gag.

Winning the meat tray at the pub not once but TWICE, and realising my friend was in a cult.

I love to cook. It’s something I take a lot of pleasure in. My friend Petra, on the other hand, does not. It’s just not her thing and in the hope of improving her non-existent culinary skills, her husband bought her a Thermomix.

In case you have been living in an outlying solar system, it’s the fancy- schmancy blender that costs about two grand. **SIDEBAR – If we can make a fancy blender that steams, chops, stirs etc, WHY can’t we event a mammogram machine that doesn’t hurt like a truck running over your boob when you’re being tested?

I never really got what all the fuss is about, and then I saw how it changed my dear dear friend. She was on holidays without her “Thermy” and, in a nutshell, her life had been compromised. It was like she was Tom Hanks in Castaway, surviving whatever way she could.

It started when she popped over to borrow our blender – which is from 1980, as everything is in our house because that’s the year Dad built it – TO MAKE SOME PANCAKES. What now?

AB: “Of course you can borrow it, but why do you need it for pancakes? Doesn’t your unit have bowls and a whisk or egg beater?”

Petra: “Yeah, but you know…”

AB: “Not really..

Petra: “Well, I don’t have my Thermy, so I’m improvising.”

AB: “Your what?”

Petra: “My Thermomix. It’s changed my life.”

AB: “I hear they can do everything but drop the kids to school!”

Petra: “Oh, so you’re one of THOSE people.

I’m not anti-Thermy, in fact I applaud any appliance that saves time in the kitchen and encourages people who don’t like cooking to get more involved. But I can’t quite figure out why this appliance polarises people the way it does.

I don’t recall people getting in a flap about bread makers late last century, do you? I wonder if it’s also because they are so expensive people feel the need to defend them so vigorously.

A few days later I dropped in for a drink and there was my blender with glue in the bottom of it (the flour and water from the pancakes). Petra then tried to convert me to Thermomixism.

She was almost evangelical as she told me that she made dishwashing powder in this magical device and gave boxes of it to the kids’ teachers as gifts for Christmas.

(Bet they were thrilled with that present! My friend is teacher at a posh private school in Sydney – her Christmas loot was extraordinary! Including a four-hour deluxe spa treatment at an exclusive salon in Rosebay. I think I got my teacher lavender soap on a rope).

I worry about what this means for us as society. It’s this same kind of thinking that leads to frightening headlines like the one I saw the other day on news.com “Australia facing a nationwide shortage of garlic bread”.

Did we run out of bread? No. Garlic? No. Butter? No. Turns out that the company supplying garlic bread to the major pizza chains and supermarkets had to stop production for a short time due to foreign matter being found in their bread.

Don’t get me wrong, Dear Reader. I love garlic bread. The thought of a national shortage is terrible and according to the follow-up article, “consumers were surprisingly outraged”.

Fortunately, three short days later the problem was resolved. I wonder why these “surprisingly outraged consumers” needlessly suffered through a garlic breadless world.

Really, all they had to do was turn on an oven, mix garlic with butter and spread it on some bread and Voila!

All I’m saying is I’d hate to see people turn into emus. The emu lost its ability to fly, researchers say, because, 1) many of them owned a Thermomix, and 2) their ancestors WERE LAZY!

Scientists at the Australian National University believe with few living predators, the emu’s only real threat was from dinosaurs.

When dinosaurs became extinct, the emu had no reason to to fly, so it didn’t. Over time, emus with weaker flying ability would have been removed from the gene pool by dinosaurs.

But they managed to survive and reproduce, because the threat was gone.

Use your wings people.