This afternoon I was reading some Amazon reviews on mini-salad spinners, as you do. OK, it was because I wanted something I could… You know what? I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t owe anyone an explanation. There’s no law against reading Amazon reviews, or mini-salad spinners, or reading. YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. I DO WHAT I WANT. So. Salad Spinner – reviews of. I ran across this opening line in a review of a mini-salad spinner:
“My late wife kept asking me for a salad spinner for a long time, but I always demurred because the ones that I had seen were designed so poorly as to foretell breaking soon.”
Your wife, rest her soul, wanted nothing more than a simple implement to help her rinse and crisp leafy produce. Something to save hours of pounding the lettuce on the rocks by the river and hanging them on the line to dry each and every salad day [n.b. – I am not 100% certain this is how one processed salads before salad-spinner technology was developed, but it seems likely.] and you, parsimonious to the point of qualifying as a Grade-A Cheap-skate, determined that this was not necessary. Based on what knowledge, exactly, was that judgment made? Did you make salads, or indeed any foodstuff for the home? No. You did not. You wouldn’t know the difference between iceberg and romaine lettuces if your salvation depended upon it. You wouldn’t recognize arugula if it marched onto your plate carrying a sign “I AM ARUGULA – SPICIEST OF THE SALAD LEAVES!” You neither know – nor care about – the secret of emulsifying a vinaigrette, or how the right crouton can transform a dull side-salad into a zesty main dish. And it is to you, a salad ignoramus of the highest order, that your late wife (may she rest in peace) had to apply to get just one little gadget for the kitchen.
I must ask, sir, was this not a grown-ass woman? What could possibly be the reason she was not permitted to select her own small mechanical helpmeets? Perhaps she once absconded with your charge card and spent $18,320 at Williams-Sonoma on assorted ergonomic citrus reamers, onion goggles and a sous-vide machine and could no longer be entrusted around kitchen implements. Was it that her quest to find the perfect garlic press left you with over 136 of them moldering away in the garden shed, when everyone knows you can just use the flat of a chef’s knife, for fucks sake, added strain to your marriage. Maybe her careless use of a dehydrator led to the political de-stabilization of a small central american country. I don’t know. But it seems like, just this once, you could have humored your late wife and “allowed” her to get a salad spinner.
“Go ahead, Ethel,” you could have said in a fit of magnanimity, “Pick out your favorite salad spinner. And why don’t you choose which jello to use in the jello mold tonight. After all, it is Christmas!”
But no, Melvin, you didn’t say that. Because some latent oracular talent presented itself and “foretold” that such an item might eventually break. As if none of your household goods may submit to the law of entropy . And now you sit, alone with only memories of your sainted wife daubing gently at damp baby spinach leaves as you permit yourself the luxury of spinning your own salad in the one appliance she ever desired, but could never have.
You disgust me.
nerdycellist 