Hasta La Ideas

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that growing up in my Kansas family wasn’t like growing up in other families in other parts of the country. I regularly wore a bonnet until I was 10 and my grandmother took me on picnics in cemeteries and I learned to shoot a rifle before I started kindergarten. Additionally, I learned how to control field fires and identify snakes. I also learned domestic skills like how to sew and can food and iron and wash laundry in a tub by hand. For reasons unknown, my parents and grandparents wanted my brother and me to know how to survive like farmers who lived a day’s ride from town by horseback. (They also insisted we learn how to live like sea captains on boats, which is especially perplexing since it was land-locked Kansas, but that is a story for another time. Just know I am also really good at tying knots and folding sails.)

Anyway, picking berries from the garden and off bushes that grew on the edge of the timber was an annual event for the women in my family. My grandmother taught me how to know which of the berries were ripe, which were poisonous, and which ones didn’t taste great on their own but were perfectly yummy when made into pies or jam. We’d make a few pies and then use the remainder of the berries for jam, which we would can and eat throughout the year. Most of the specifics about these trades have slipped from my brain and into the ether, but some things I do remember were that the process wasn’t hard, it meant I could hang out with my grandma, and we certainly didn’t have any need for a FreshTECH Automatic Jam and Jelly Maker:

The most obvious way to make jam is to heat berries using a pot on your stovetop. If you don’t want to sit by the range, you can use a slow cooker or even a bread maker (if you happen to have one) or put a pot in a low-degree oven to heat the berries into a sugary mush. If you’re a modernist, you can even use your microwave and have jam in 15 minutes — GASP! A special device just for making jam and jelly honestly seems bizarre to me. Well, bizarre and unnecessary.

I personally struggle with knowing when to adopt new items for convenience and when to stick to the older, traditional method of doing things. When a newer way to do something isn’t any more convenient than an older, traditional way, however, I know adopting something new only for the sake of new isn’t worth the money or cupboard space. These types of objects always, always, always end up being clutter in my home.

Thanks to reader Tia sharing this unitasker with us and I hope you were all at least partially entertained by my walk down memory lane!

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