A few months ago we went to dinner with some friends who had one of these nifty little gadgets. Now before you roll your eyes heavenwards and think 'not another gadget I won't use and don't need' I am hear to tell you that after trying out the Soiree Classic Wine Aerator at our friends, I went out and bought one!
Why? because when you open a bottle of red wine you can pour it straight into a glass and it will taste amazing! We did a taste test pouring a little wine into a glass and tasting it then pouring a fresh amount out through the Aerator. There is simply no comparison between the two - it really does work!
It's a pretty little glass bubble that you put like a cork into the top of your open bottle of wine. It works by infusing oxygen into the wine which improves the taste and enhances the flavour and instead of decanting a whole bottle into a decanter you can do as little as one glass. It works with red, white and rose wine and there is absolutely no mess. It comes with a storage stand which you need as it is delicate. This would make the perfect present for those that like to drink wine and will be a welcome household gadget you won't be sad you've bought.
I bought one from a local shop but they are on sale now on Amazon.co.uk for £19.50 - well worth the money!
A new purchase to replace our normal water filter is this fabulous Bobble water jug. We have one in the office and the water really doesn't taste or anything - it removes the flavour of chlorine and other water additives - especially found here in London. I love the smooth design shapes too although it doesn't fit into the fridge door. Fortunately I can fit it into the salad compartment as the shelf above is broken - it's called making the best of a bad situation.
The best thing is that each filter lasts for 150 litres before you need to change the filter, and it comes with one free. I don't often buy things for my kitchen (or household items in general either if I'm honest) but couldn't resist. Unlike my other filter which allowed water to get trapped between the jug sides and the top where it festered and occasionally went green this filter has no-where for water to get trapped so is much better. It holds 2 litres and has 4 colourways (our local shop had just two and I thought white went with everything really). The filters are £10 each so coming with a spare one was brilliant value as the complete jug/set came to £20.
The carbon filter has a slight electro-positive charge so chemicals and impurities are attracted to it and as the water passes over the negative ions of the contaminants are drawn to the surface of the carbon granules - that is why this water really does taste so pure.
I do love gadgets, from my ipad to my kindle I'm a fan and can't imagine a world without them. In the dim distant past when I first started working I used an electric typewriter, a phone with a cord and a telex machine (yes, a telex with tickertape and everything). And now I blog, Tweet, photograph, Facebook, Instagram and read content all from my phone. I'm genuinely so glad that I opted for a Samsung Galaxy SIII when it came to an upgrade as I really do appreciate the bigger screen and the quality - well, 'wow' to be honest.
I always like to see things before I buy so I took a trip to my local Carphone Warehouse to see what my options were before making a decision about upgrading. At first I did hesitate as it seemed just too large and I don't have particularly large hands. However within a couple of days of using it, all other phones seem really small, with tiddly screens and low-res. I can even watch films and TV on it and get a clear picture, and it's just about big enough.
It's easy to use, has a huge range of apps and as you can tell I'm just a little bit in love. Here are some pictures that I took last weekend on top of the Yorkshire moors.
I use my phone to take shots of everything from food to friends and street scenes. No-one is safe so if you see me coming, run!
I'm just a teensie weensie bit excited. And I know this is a bit sad but if you only knew the love affair that I have with coffee then you would know that the slow and painful death of my beloved Gaggia machine has been a daily sadness for me.
This is what it would look like new today...
It has served me well with fresh, frothy lattes virtually every morning for the past 5 years. It is a kitchen gadget that I cannot live without unlike the ice-cream maker, the pasta maker and the sandwich maker, this is a prince among kitchen gadgets.
But it has reached the end of it's life. It drips like an old man's nose on a freezing morning. It has bad athsma. It lacks froth (well don't we all in the morning but it's not supposed to). I come home to a brimming splash tray. It's a sad and pitiful sight indeed.
So I decided that as I didn't make up my mind as to what I wanted for my birthday then a new coffee machine was as welcome a present as any. But I hadn't realised the sheer size of the choice I was going to have to make! Did I want a machine that ground the beans before making the coffee? Did I want an industrial strength machine more suitable for an office but that would say that, in coffee terms, I had arrived?
Did I want an external or an internal milk frother? Colour? Bright and bold, or sleek and black?
How much did I have to spend to not miss out?
Even with the glories of the internet I was confused. So I went to John Lewis where I knew I could talk to a middle aged woman just like myself who would UNDERSTAND.
And I did. She swiftly disregarded about two thirds of the machines after I told her what I wanted. This was her suggestion... How gorgeous is that? The Nespresso Citiz with Milk by Magimix is beautiful and uses those little capsules which keeps coffee fresh. Now it isn't as cheap as using ground coffee in bags at around 29p a cup but this is one of my few vices and I think I am worth 29p per morning. And I get to try out a smorgasboard of different types of coffee which come with the machine so I know what to order in bulk. I am so excited I can't wait for it to arrive and please excuse my blogging if it becomes a little 'wired' - it's just a caffeine high!
PS. It's arrived and I can see why it is the coffee of choice for The Fat Duck in Bray and Sketch in Mayfair - good enough for Heston Blumenthal is definitely good enough for me and the coffees provided are absolutely divine!
So it may sound like we're a bit gadget mad in our house but really we are just playing catch-up and we do tend to have spurts in buying gadgets when everything seems to come to the end of it's lifecycle all at once. So it's often the case that the vaccum cleaner will die at roughly the same time that the freezer conks out too and a week later it'll be something else... it's known as the law of Sod.
These all have to be replaced as they are, to my mind, household essentials of vital importance. However there are some gadgets that are there for the sheer pleasure of having them, and the Sonos is one such gadget.
We heard our first Sonos on a trip to visit husband's sister and her man in Yorkshire. It was obviously a fairly new toy for him too as he took great delight in playing what we now refer to as 'the Sonos game'.
'Go on, what song would you like to hear?' he asked. The normal response would be 'what have you got?' or somesuch, but this time an Apple Touch was thrust upon us with the request to 'put in any song you would like to hear...'.
Which we did - and miraculously said track immediately started to fill the house with it's melody. And that was it - we were hooked and what followed was two hours of trying to catch the thing out.
Now to some people reading this, they will know exactly what a Sonos is and how it works but for the uninitiated I will explain.
The 'Sonos' box is a speaker and receiver which downloads tunes directly from Napster (for which you pay a monthly subscription) and plays them back. By using a special handheld control or something like an Apple Touch, you can search for tracks or artists and create playlists so you don't constantly have to be fiddling around if you'd rather be doing something else.
We bought one for husband's birthday and (after a few false starts getting Napster to work, why are things never as simple as they are meant to be?) we now have 100,000 tracks at our fingertips. We have just the one box but you can add others throughout the house too. And for those of us which grew up with a Dancette and 6 inch singles the leap into the 21st century is not just the immediacy of all that music but, and this is something us children of the sixties have to understand, you don't actually own the music, but are just fleetingly downloading and playing a track from a site.
You don't own the CD or the vinyl or anything tangible like that. So even though it's a wonderful toy with a great sound, if you love something enough you will still go out and buy it to physically 'own' the piece. What it does do, if you like discovering new music or rediscovering old stuff, is allow you to trial out a far wider range of music than you would normally do without the cost - and that is something you can do, in the privacy of your own home.
Music can be streamed through a variety of music sites like Spotify and itunes too. Prices start at around £300 for the Sonos system. You can add your own stereo and your own speakers too - it really is that versatile.
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