You know how some small little machines make much more noise
than little ones? Well I ended up with a mini electric food processor at some
office Christmas party last year. It was the soul survivor of a vicious game of
“Dirty Santa”. Let me tell you right now, trying to cook with a mini food
processor is like cooking with a little kid. You are going to end up doing the
work for them after they are done and when all is said and done, they are both
going to need a bath. I had to chop everything up smaller and smaller to make
the food processor work.
It was a beautiful night and I haven’t been outside much at
all, so I decided I was going to grill out. I made the perfect beef tasting
half chicken burger ever. It was half ground chicken and half ground up
portabella mushrooms. I call them chick-a-bella burgers…”mush-ken” didn’t sound
all that appetizing. I decided to fire up the grill (to burn off the rust…that’s
normal right?) and I took my mini food processor outside too…cause I am an outdoorsy
kind of guy. What I didin’t realize was how short my processor cord was. It was
mini too. I’ll bet it was about five inches long. So I went out on the patio
and found a flower pot I could turn upside down to rest it on. I sat there in a
wicker chair feeding mushroom chunks into my mini processor only a handful at a
time.
That thing was so loud! It sounded like some kind of power
saw. Well this caught the attention of my neighbor. The one that heard me
scream like a white woman when a rabbit jumped out of my storage shed. He’s a
great neighbor but he is one of those guys that knows how to do things. He
doesn’t just have power tools, he knows how to use them… and has. He built an
entire privacy fence; including digging all the post holes and filling them
with concrete, all by himself. Yeah, he’s one of those. Well he heard the sound
of my mini food processor and reacted like a cat to the sound of a can opener.
I heard a “Sounds like somebody got some new tools!” I gave a quick “oh yeah”
and fired up my spinning blades of death to drown out the rest of the conversation.
I then heard a noise and looked up and he had done a little pull up to look
over the fence just long enough to let out a “What the……?” I fired up the blades again. I
looked up after it stopped and there he was again white knuckling the fence
with just his eyes showing, “Is that…..a food processor”?
Oh holy mancard ding…what could I say? I told him that is
was and that I was getting ready to grill on my huge gas grill with the new
tank that I had installed ALL BY MYSELF, and I may or may not have used the
word “chick-a-bella” ramble, ramble, and then I went back inside the house to
mix the mushrooms with the ground chicken and to find my pride. I just kept re-living
that peek-a-boo moment and wondering how completely absurd it had to look to my
neighbor to think he was going to look over the fence and see someone cutting
some wood for some kind of man project only to look over the fence and see me
sitting on the patio in a wicker chair, using a mini food processor that was
sitting on top of an upside down flower pot. Oy. What part of “privacy fence”
does my neighbor not understand?
Oh my word, I really hadn’t planned on doing much
landscaping this year but it looks like I am going to be in the yard doing
manly things for a while. I may even trim a tree…or cut one down. There will be
loads of mulch; that’s for sure. “Chick-a-bella burger”…really…that sounds like
a sandwich you would get served inside Cinderella’s castle. Say what you will,
those chick-a-bella burgers tasted just like beef burgers…I mean exactly like
beef burgers. I think I am going to change the name…maybe to “Manwich”. All I
know is that I am going to go out and hunt for a big food processor, a diesel powered
weed eater and a couple of tall evergreens. Dirty Santa….Dirty Santa indeed.
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