I have only recently, as a result of our lockdowns and fears of contagion, become an Amazon shopper. I get what we need but also do my fair share of browsing and "adding to list" even though I am not "adding to cart". Every time I bop over to the big A, intending to get my cocoa butter discs or my favorite dish detergent pods, their analytics and anticipatory predictors show me things they feel I should "explore".
Explore?
I'm not some crevice-crawling spelunker of shopping but feel free use whatever verbiage you like, big A.
Anyway, this morning, I was encouraged to "explore" this nifty kitchen item:
A two sided (not sure why that is important) 12-inch tortilla warmer!**
Now, I do happen to have a fat opened package of corn tortillas in my refrigerator right now! How does the big A know that? Never mind that they've been there for 3 weeks, having only needed four for what we ate back in January. The remaining twenty-one are hanging out, apparently waiting to be stuffed into this multicolored sleeping bag for food.
So, let's break down four of the finer points:
1.) It has sugar skulls on it! I have sugar skull socks, a sugar skull doormat, sugar skull temporary tattoos (a gag gift that has proven surprisingly useful), and I had sugar skull rubber clogs until I wore them so often they uncerimoniously fell apart while I was walking the dog in the rain one night. But a sugar skull tortilla warmer? This I've never even considered.
2.) You can put waffles and pancakes in it and they stay warm for an hour! Ok, so I can't imagine why I would need my waffle to stay warm for an hour, unless my friend Joelle calls me, which she oftentimes does at the 7:00 am breakfast hour, and we yack for a bit. I suppose I could shove a waffle in there until we are done; but then again, Joelle is accustomed to me shoving food into my mouth while we converse, so I guess that waffle isn't going anywhere but in my belly.
3.) It's BPA free! It's for the "health-conscious home"! Oh man, the ol' h-c gets me every time. I think of all the plastic I have unintentionally ingested over the years and the letters B, P, and A strike fear into my bisphenol-coated heart. If this sugar skull taco blanket is free of that carcinogenic substance, and I put a pancake in it, I'm on my way to being healthy, right? Woo hoo!
4.) It's good for Taco Tuesday and Cinco de Mayo! Regrettably, we've never celebrated either in my home. Number one, I can't get my husband to even sniff, much less drink a margarita after the "unfortunate tequila incident of 1998" which left him supine on the bathroom floor for multiple hours (and we only had one toilet and a house full of Day of the Dead party goers back then so you can imagine the horror); and number two, I'd rather go out for Mexican food because all I can manage in my own kitchen is tacos from the Old El Paso kit. I'm not knocking that little dinner assembly set, as it seemed to be the pinnacle of multicultural eating back in the 1970s, but now I'm afraid I'm going to break a tooth on those shells, likely coated with some sort of chemical lacquer to keep them bug-free for as long as they sit on the grocery store shelf. Also, number three, I want to order a chimichanga just so I can say "chimichanga" out loud.
I don't see anywhere that it's recommended for fajitas, but since it's easy to handwash, why not? I used to work with a wonderful woman who would stop at McDonald's in the morning and grab a coffee and a "faJEETa". Knowing full well what she had ordered (as it was just about every day), I couldn't help but josh her a bit by asking "What is that? It smells so good." And she'd holler out, with a mouth full of spicy onions, "chicken faJEETa!". If I were still working at the desk next to hers and it was time for our holiday gift exchange, I'd probably grab this so she could keep her breakfast cozy on the way to the office. I wonder if they have one with roosters on it. She loved roosters.
This seems like a super purchase for a pancake loving bunch or a family who is tired of cold stacks of tortillas, but for me, today, it's just the thing I WON'T be buying.
Maybe.
**And now that I've clicked on it more than once for the purpose of writing this, I'm sure I will be shown a hundred more ways to keep my tortillas warm.
#mushroomtumbler
