When the world blends *No meat in fruit EDIT*

In which our Hero stares at his Mayan Calendar and wonders if it’ll blend

I’ve always thought of the fascination with destruction as a very boy-child kind of thing. Granted my perspective is somewhat skewed by my somewhat more intimate experience with being a boy-child, but I’ve never seen the same penchant emerge except with the very smallest of little girls. Whereas I got through playing Barbies with the Babies when they were middle (single-digit) aged by adding a killer (stuffed) bear who would rampage through the kitchen, eating everything that the screaming dolls had abandoned, and occasionally one of the secondary characters, at least till, “well, pretend the bear didn’t see her so she escaped.”

Whereas most of my childhood involved an awful lot of the verb “smash.” Take our toy cars and smash them into each other. Build elaborate Lego spaceships and fight them with the cousins. Starting with “pew pew” and ending with casts through the air to see who’s ship could withstand a full frontal assault.

Getting older didn’t change things that much. Sure the explosion and smoke that I’d just caused made me kill the power and vent the room, but a small part of me was very excited. And there was no real justification for melting, cutting, squashing, or burning the toys, soda cans, and such. Sometimes it was in service of a higher goal, like the Styrofoam floats we used to try to build a floating fire-pit (Lesson: Radiant Heat will melt the struts). Sometimes it was trying to add lights to a circuit and blowing them apart (Lesson: Double check which side of the power transistor you’ve connected to the LEDs). Sometimes it was trying to get the loudest bang (Lesson: More power!)

But from my friends in the playground through my classmates in Engineering school through to the hyenas from the Lion King, there’s a part of us that’s always looked wide-eyed, and in a high pitched voice exclaimed, “Oooh! Do it again!!”

Mufasa!

I understand that it’s not actually a masculine trait. Rather it’s a combination of curiousity and excitement and discovery, and these are genderless things. But then I inadvertently bought my mother a new blender for Christmas, and I can see a little girl in her eyes who is giggling as she pushes the button to cause mayhem and puree.

How does one inadvertently purchase a blender? Well, the purchase wasn’t an accident, but it was gratuitous, and it wasn’t driven by need at all. I mean, there’s the official reason, which is that my nutbar mother has gotten into nutbar smoothies, and therefore needs a blender that can handle ice. And then I noticed a sale because the fancy pants company that makes them has a new product line and this is last years model. Still absurdly expensive enough that I’m trying to figure out how to justify it as a business expense (Maybe if I take a jar and use it for shredding/slurrying documents?! Doesn’t seem like it’s possible).

But utterly gratuitous since the main reason I got it was that it’s the same blender that you see in the internet videos where another bunch of geeks cram in things like iPhones and glow sticks and brooms, to see what happens. It’s a lot of fun to know this blender can do that. It’s hilarious to think of my mom using it for cooking, like watching her take a muscle car out for a grocery run.

It arrived without any shipping notification. Only reason I found it was because different package arrived the same day and the notification sent me to the door. So I unpacked it, and set it up and that was that for a few hours. Till my mom asked me to show her how it worked.

“I have limes,” she answered when I asked what she wanted to do. She wanted to shred them, so call it a coarse chop. “Can it do that?”

“Beats me, let’s put it in and see what happens.”

What happened was not a coarse chop. What happened was beautiful. It emulsified them. A creamy, pale, zombie-brain green paste. Not the desired outcome, which caused my mom to grumble. But also exactly what she wanted because later she was going to blend some lemons into her new thing, whole-lemon-lemonade. (Which is really bitter with the pith and peel, but not bad otherwise). Still both grumbling and excited by the failure of her immediate objective and success with the later objective, we poured the mix out into an ice cube tray for freezing.

And then I had a jar with little bits of lime in it. Which I could rinse out. OR, I could see if I could make a lime slush. So I got out my GIANT 2 INCH ICE CUBES OF AWESOME!!. Put in 3. And pressed the button. Discovering that there wasn’t room for the ice to move and so they just got shaved a little as they skimmed over the blades. Next attempt, I put in one and it took a while. SO I put in another cube which bounced and clicked but eventually was shaved to a stable round golf-ball sized object that the blender couldn’t get enough of a bite of. Naturally, I added some regular ice cubes too, to see how they fared. The blender pulped them.

So I had a lime snowcone. It was great. And that was that I figured.

But no. No, my mom was peering at the blender and thinking, “Do it again”

So next was cheese. The manual said you could drop cubes of parmesan into it and it would powder them. We had mozzarella, that turned into a lovely coarse grate. My mom wasn’t entirely happy at the size variation, but I was thinking it would be awesome on a pizza. But then my mom wanted to try cheddar. Okay. Tried the same process, and it did chop it into bits, but cheddar is harder, and the result wasn’t as even. And also, clearly, it works better with a smaller batch size so that things don’t get a chance to get gummed up.

That was it for my night, except for the bits of cheese I’d stolen. I heard the blender on and off the next few nights, but I didn’t think anything of it. Till my mother dropped off some fruit at my desk and said, “I put meat in the blender.”

What?

“I ground beef in it.”

Well…. okay.

“It’s not bad, I used a nice piece so I think it’s better than the stores ground beef.”

That’s probably true, I agreed. And again, that was it. Till later, when I came home, and had some of the beef eggrolls that she makes regularly. I took a bite and then… paused.

“Why is this strange?”

(chew)

“Is this fish?”

(chew)

“It doesn’t taste like fish, but the texture is really weird. Did you put in too much potato again?”

And then I realized… My mother had made ground beef… in a blender. And puree’d beef would probably taste about like… this. Oh dear god.

So yeah. Despite her initial grumbles, she’s really pleased. Partly because she has a fancy new blender that lets her continue her reign of mad culinary science. And mostly, I honestly suspect, because she has a fancy new blender that she happened to get from her son around Christmas time. (Which wasn’t even in my mind, I just thought she could make smoothies easier)

*EDIT*

So, yeah. No meat in my fruit. My mom will occasionally cut in bits of chile peppers, but meatshakes are not a thing in this household.

(In my head, I said “Meatshakes” then “Ew” then “Hmmm”)

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