Misadventures With a Kitchen Appliance

They say machines and women don't mix. I just found out they sometimes don't mix with men either. Especially kitchen appliances; cheap juice extractors in particular.

I just bought a Pensonic juice extractor for less than 100 ringgit because I thought it's time to wean myself off coffee and switch to something healthier. It was doing funny things to my kidneys or bladder or both. So, with a juice extractor in the office I can just fix myself a healthy glass of fruit juice at the press of a button. Or so I thought.

After unpacking the gadget and poring over the manual, I was ready for my first do-it-yourself life-preserving fruit juice. I hopped over to the fruit stalls across the street and selected a few ripe succulent Siamese mangoes. The likes of Mat Bahadon and Procek think anything Siamese, except the cat, is succulent. . Well, anyway, here come healthier juice-drinking days fo me; goodbye mamak foodstalls serving sugar-spiked watered down juices!

Yes! Notice how you get a particular high whenever you gain control over certain aspects of your life? This was one of them. I was floating in that same kind of euphoria as I peeled the mangoes, cut them up into small pieces and threw them into the machine. One jab at the button and I waited in anticipation of my first stream of health giving Siamese mango juice. But, no juice.

I stuffed in some more mango flesh into the machine and still, no juice. Maybe a little water would help it along. No wonder those mamak guys added the water, I thought they were cheating us. But, after about half a bottle of mineral water, still no juice. All I get in the whirring machine was a mass of mango puree, too thick to flow out through the small hole. And by the time I realised that disaster was about to strike, it was too late!

The gooey stuff was beginning to seep through and flowing down the sides of the machine when I detected a burning smell. I quickly switched off the machine, opened it up and poured everything out into any container I could find. I got gobs and gobs of the yellow stuff all over my table and floor. Phew! I managed to save the new gadget but spent the rest of the evening cleaning up everything.

When you're on a good thing, you cannot just give it up. You've to persevere, right? But I wasn't ready to take the easy route by sticking with apples, carrots and starfruits. No pain, no gain. So the next day I bought some mangoesteens. I reckoned I was going to get lots of juice out of them because they were, well, juicy and not as pulpy as the mangoes.

And yes, I watched with a sense of achievement as the thick pinkish mangoesteen juice began to ooze out of the tap. I was fun to see how the machine scraped the stones clean and spat them out all over the floor. After about a quarter glass, it stopped flowing. No problem, just add some water. Still no flow and... Oh no! Not again!

Later while cleaning the parts, I realized that the filter had been clogged up by the skin of the fruit stones. It was the same problem on the previous day too, but I didn't see it because the fibre and the flesh of the mangoes were of the same colour. But the manual didn't say anything about that. But now I know and I'm passing down this wisdom: Juicers and the mango don't tango.

I'll stick with apples, oranges, carrots and starfruits fron now on. However, handling sticky goo two days in a row didn't do any good on the ego. So, I went down to Kak Timah's and ordered coffee. The kidneys and the bladder will just have to bear with me in the meantime.