I GOT back home from holiday to find a new gadget in the kitchen. I was a bit miffed because I'm supposed to be the gadget person and all new gadget ideas should be run by me first. But in my absence they had gone out and bought a juicer. This is no ordinary juicer. I've had one of those. The sort you put 16 oranges in and get a small tumbler full of juice. Very nice orange juice, but about as expensive as a glass of vintage champagne, and you have to get rid of 16 partly de-juiced orange skins. This juicer is a much more powerful model, which juices just about everything and apparently they had been doing just that. 'Our favourite,' they said, 'was carrot, tomato and mango.' Not wishing to find out what kind of mind related to me could possibly have come up with the idea of mixing carrots, tomatoes and mangos, I merely mumbled that that sounded a winning combination. This prompted a few more examples of a stomach- churning nature, most of them containing tomatoes because my Big Boy tomato plants have been coming up trumps this year and when I checked there were few of them left. I think a mix of Big Boys, strawberries and apples were among the favourites and, from what I could tell, they had been spending a large part of my time away consuming raw vegetables and fruit in liquid form. The only problem with juicers, and any other gadget, is that they usually take longer to wash-up than if you merely did the job by hand. This is a job which can't be neglected because the dried remains of carrot, mango etc on the side of the thing can set like concrete and needs blow-torching off. By the time I got back the juicer was looking a bit neglected because the novelty had worn off, and it will no doubt end up besides the smoothie maker I bought two Christmasses ago, which is fine except it needs an enormous amount of milk to make the drinks and I got fed up with never having a drop to put in my tea and hid the beater bit. My daughter has now found little cartons of ready made liquidised fruit and veg which have some interesting combinationss, ie orange, carrot and cranberry, and my grandson loves them. He's really taken on board the 'five fruits' message and he loves vegetables so this is an ideal and quick way to consume them. Far better than having to sit down and plough through a plate of veg. Perhaps one day we'll all have food like this, like astronauts. Except me, because I have an aversion to drinking anything that is thick and with bits in it, even soup out of a cup. On the gadget front, I've been very good lately, mainly because of lack of room but there's been a certain amount of willpower there too. I managed to keep myself under control in Germany even though I love German gadgets. I confess to buying a pepper grinder, which was incredibly cheap and is the best one I've ever had. Most pepper grinders (and salt grinders) fail after a few weeks. They're like vacuum cleaners; the first week they work so well you congratulate yourself on having found the ultimate in vacuum cleaners, the best machine you've ever had, then the next week, in the case of a vacuum cleaner, they refuse to pick up a feather and in the case of the pepper/salt grinder they suddenly won't grind anything bigger than an atom. I've tried for years to find grinders that work for more than a few weeks. I had high hopes of Italian ones, the sort with two hands you gripped and squeezed, but after a short time these fell into lots of pieces and you had to have the skill of a rocket scientist to fit it together. I had several tries with superglue but only succeeded in sticking the thing to my hand, the kitchen counter and the various pepper corns lying around. My new one, which cost less than £2, is fine. So far. I also bought a giant clothes peg, which is to keep coffee packets closed. A wonderful idea this; Oh, and I did buy a knife. But that's it. My downfall was a visit to Somerfield in Liskeard. I wouldn't have classed Somerfield as a Mecca for gadget seekers, but they suddenly started selling a range of German goods, which puzzles me. Perhaps they've been taken over by a German company and I haven't noticed. Anyway, I fell for the nifty little Parmesan grater, which has a little container under the grating bit to catch the cheese. Parmesan graters are another failed gadget in most cases, they tend to be made by people who don't realise that Parmesan is the hardest cheese in the world and can, and does, bend most metals. This one worked fine, and I bought a little Parmesan lidded dish to go with it. Now I just have to find an excuse to use Parmesan in every dish I make (excluding steak and kidney pie) to justify the cost. The only other gadget to appear was sent by my son, who is an apprentice gadget buyer. He impulsively purchased an avocado slicer. Now all we gadget buyers know that it is perfectly possibly to slice an avocado with a knife, just as it is perfectly possible to perform most kitchen duties with a knife rather than having special slicers for eggs, tomatoes, cucumber etc. And it is also perfectly possible to pick up an olive without having to buy a special little gadget with a tiny grab on the end. But that's not the point. My son's new gadget didn't, he said, work. It squashed his avocado so he sent it to me. I was able to inform him that it worked fine, the problem was you had to peel the avocado first. Goodness me, I've just realised how boring I've become. Obsessed with gadgets when I ought to be going to wild parties and not worrying about how to work a cherry stoner. I'll have to drag myself back from the brink of sinking into old age. But not before I've tested out the new pasta maker secreted under my bed!
Inoted this week that there is a website for people who grow giant vegetables. Now giant vegetables have always fascinated me. Not the vegetables themselves but the reason why people want to grow them. My grandmother was a whizz at growing really big marrows, but these were nothing compared to what you will find at a giant vegetable show. Actually I know why people grow them, it's so they can get into record books as having grown the largest radish in the world. As Andy Warhol said, everyone has to have their 15 minutes of fame. Some do it with a death defying leap from the world's highest mountain, others have to do it with behemoth turnips and pumpkin sized radishes. As a vegetable grower and a cook I know that what I aim for is small and delicious. Which is the opposite to the needs of gvgs. They want large and totally inedible; leeks you need a chainsaw to cut down, cabbages the size of a compact car, pumpkins which need to be brought in by low loader. It has to be said that it is mainly men that grow big veg. I'm sure Freud would have been able to say something about that. Up North there are societies devoted to big leeks, and competition is fierce, sometimes leading to blows. I once saw a television programme which followed a giant leek grower, well, he was small and rather timid, but his leeks were magnificent. He spent a huge amount of his time tending them, practically all year round, and his wife saw little of him except when he fell into bed late at night exhausted from hours of cossetting his babies. The marriage was, you feared, heading for the rocks, or certainly heading for him coming home from work one day and finding his wife had made an enormous pot of leek and potato soup. Nearer to home, I've visited an annual Cornish Giant Vegetable Show, where I saw some of the biggest pole cabbages I'm ever likely to see, huge pumpkins and marrows, giant tomatoes which, under the hot lights, were bursting out of their already tight skin and leaking all over the table and very heavy carrots. The entrants were, again, all men and one of them told me he had entered his giant cucumber in no less than three shows in the past two or three weeks, always the same cucumber. It was big, but I wondered where he kept it when it wasn't in use. could he possibly risk it in the fridge? His wife might have had the sudden fancy for a salad and bang would have gone and inch or two of the prizewinner. I didn't like to ask, just saying 'nice cucumber you've got there!' was risque enough for me. He did offer me one of his spares, but I refused because it wouldn't have fitted into the fridge. Pumpkins are the most rewarding though. The largest was grown by a small boy, who proudly showed off his entries. His dad told me he was the third generation of giant veg growers and had done all the hard work of feeding the thing (which could have passed for a Triffid) himself. The website, which looks quite new, had a picture of someone called Kevin holding a strange looking, but very big, swede above his head and below him was a picture of the most wrinkled marrow I've ever seen. It actually looked as if it had been blown up but now the air was leaking out of it. Perhaps this is the way they do it. The website was good, lots of tips on growing and feeding and lots of pictures. Kevin seems to be a real champ, in one picture he was holding a marrow which was the size of a small canoe, in another, a big cucumber. Kev is obviously into gourds in a big way. In another there was a water melon weighing 148lbs, owned by someone called Ian. What do people do with these things when the shows are over? No-one could possibly eat them, there's only so many melon balls one family could take. As for the heavy carrots, they are grotesque things, like something out of Alien. It's a whole new world out there. Half of me is jealous because I can't grow a carrot the size of a pencil to save my life, half of me wants to say 'grow up and grow something useful for a change'. Still, each to his own. If you wish to investigate the website, it's on http://www.giantveg.co.uk">www.giantveg.co.uk