Saturday: appliances

On Friday night our food processor died.

We bought it nearly two years ago at the Thrift Store, for £25, so it's done well. It was an amazing purchase, really. One of the Moulinex Ovatio range, with a large bowl, a good size blender, a citrus juicing attachment, and it even had storage space for most of the tools inside the main bowl. I used it for coleslaw, for grating cheese, for squeezing fresh oranges for juice and lemons for cooking, for making pastry and cakes, and even - at first - for kneading dough for bread. Late last year it started making rather painful noises when kneading dough, so we thought perhaps it was wearing out.

We decided to spend some Christmas money on a breadmaker, which has been a wonderful buy (used nearly every day) and so the food processor was used a bit less. But we'd overworked it, and on Friday it finally decided to give up altogether. I was trying to grate some cheese at the time, so it wasn't a huge problem. I just got out the old-fashioned hand grater. Richard said perhaps we should think about buying a new food processor because it's such a useful gadget. We even had a load of points on our Orphanides card, giving us £20 off so on Saturday morning we went to see what was available.


They did have the Moulinex Ovatio duo 3 model in stock. But we were rather shocked to see that the price was £100 - which, considering that's Cyprus pounds, is about twice as much as it would cost from Amazon UK. Unfortunately Amazon don't ship appliances outside the UK. There were some other food processors that were a little cheaper, but none of them looked nearly as good.

Richard asked what we mainly used the food processor for, and I realised that the most important thing was citrus juicing. I needed to make some lemonade that morning as we'd run out. We still have oranges on our tree that we should pick and juice in the next couple of weeks. So we looked at juicers. There were nice-looking expensive juicers that would do carrots and apples etc as well as citrus fruits, but I didn't know how often I'd use one.

There were smaller versions of the same, but they didn't look very strong. And there were ordinary citrus juicers of varying shapes and prices. One of them was only £8, so we decided to go with that one. It has a pouring spout, a lid, and two size of cone for squeezing different sizes of fruit, so it seemed like a good model.

Then we thought we might look at the Thrift Store on the way back. They sometimes have second-hand food processors there - unknown or cheap models, but since I didn't need one for juicing or kneading, I thought we could pick up any old thing. The only time we'd ever seen a Moulinex food processor there was nearly two years ago when we bought it.

There weren't any in the usual place.

Then Richard spotted it, nestling behind some other appliances. Smaller than the one that had died, but it looked almost new: a Moulinex Ovatio duo 2. For £26.

We bought it. We tested it. It even has a centrifugal juicing attachment for making apple and carrot juice! We won't be using this food processor for kneading bread, and we won't be using it for citrus juicing since the new citrus juicer works well, so perhaps this will last longer than two years.

Amazing coincidence? No, I don't have the faith to believe that chance could dictate our finding exactly what we wanted, at exactly the right time, twice. Particularly when we've never seen Moulinex food processors at the Thrift store any other time in the eight years we've been here. Evidently God really does care about even our smallest needs.

(PS I had not realised quite what a difference in quality there is between our old digital camera and the one we bought last summer. The first food processor picture was taken on the old one...)