I found this little gadget at the Habitat Restore a couple of weeks ago. It was $2 and is intended to dice vegetables. I bought it because I liked the diced sweet potatoes that Smoothie Cove Cafe puts in their salads. Yesterday, I got around to trying it out. I took a slice of sweet potato, put it on the grid, closed the lid, and nothing happened.
I tried a thinner slice, and still nothing. I decided that the gadget didn’t work, at least not for sweet potatoes, and because I don’t usually keep white potatoes in the house, I was going to let it go.
This morning, as I was washing the gadget in order to donate it again, I thought, “why bother? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for me, and it’s not going to work for someone else, and nobody else needs to pay two more dollars for something that doesn’t work so that they can re-donate it. Just throw the sucker away.”
Then I wondered if I could do anything else with the machine. A friend of mine uses the old manual clunky credit card swipe machines as miniature printing presses. Perhaps this gadget could be an embosser. I tried to take the plastic squares out, and they probably will come out, but only destructively by breaking some plastic piece with a screwdriver.
I tested embossing a sheet of notebook paper.
Lay a small piece of paper on the grid, crunch the lid, and see what I get. I’m not tons of impressed, but it is an interesting design. I could see writing something in the middle, and letting the texture surround the text.
This is why my house is full of stuff. The challenge would be remembering that I own it and remembering that I can use it, if and when my heart takes me in the direction of embossed paper.
I do wonder if it ever worked.
By the time I got around to reviewing this post for publication, I changed my mind about keeping it. It’s toast.
