What Makes a Good Blender?

Today I'm going to take a break from recipes and herbs and things, and write a few words about a very useful kitchen tool that often gets slightly but significantly misunderstood. The blender, that wonderful thing that lets You make creamy soups in seconds.

It's basically a blade on a stick, with a motor to rotate it faster than a human could. So what's to write about? Well, firstly, about how useful it is: I seriously didn't expect I'd be using it so much, but if You have one, You can make soups from more or less any vegetables. Not just carrot cream, but broccoli, onion and cheese, cauliflower... I recently made a soup of celery root and leek which didn't live long enough to cool off. And that's just the start - there's all sorts of dishes, relishes and sauces that are a breeze to make with a good blender.

So what makes a good blender? Well, if I had a choice now, I'd have chosen a model that has different extensions, so I could have a blender and eggbeater and mixer all in one. But that's secondary matters. Apart from the obvious things like "good manufacturing" and a long enough cord to fit Your kitchen and detachable extension for easy cleaning, what makes a good blender is mostly a good cook holding it.

Many people I've talked to - one of them this weekend, which inspired me to write all this down - think the necessary thing is some huge destructive power of the motor ; they expect a heavy-duty sawmill machinery and complain about "flimsy" and "low quality" products. They also often happen to be impatient people who don't pay attention to what they cook, and, incidentally, often complain their dishes are a disappointment. What they don't remember is that tools are there to make work easier for You, but won't make it instead of You. Piling up those vegetables in a pot, giving them five seconds in boiling water and then expecting the blender to somehow create a soft poem of silky taste is not smart cooking. It's the cook's job to prepare the ingredients properly, to give them time to boil and soften and give their taste to the broth, to reach, in fact, the point at which the thing can be safely mashed into a smooth cream because it's almost that already. Remember, before we had electric blenders, it was grinding stuff up in mortars or on sieves, and that would not work with raw carrots.

Okay, that's enough rambling about electrical appliances. You'd have thought I'm selling them or something. To wrap things up, here's a list-in-progress of my recipes that require a blender.

• Absolutely not Ajvar
• Carrot Cream Soup
• Monastic Relish (the original recipe from the monastery actually said to use a crank-powered meat mincing machine, but, uh, no thanks)
• Celery Root Soup
• Very Green Lentils
• Leek and Potato
• Cauliflower Cream