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If you grew up in Australia or England during the last fifty years, your mother probably owned and used a Kenwood Chef mixer. I remember podding peas with the special pea-hulling attachment when I was a kid. There was an attachment for almost anything.

The Kenwood Chef went on sale in 1950. It was the first home food processor, and was designed to take much of the physical labour out of cooking. Ken Wood had been an RAF engineer: he built the Chef to be a serious piece of machinery. It became an emblem of modernity, one of the original labour-saving devices. It was designed to make cooking faster and easier, to help women get out of the kitchen to pursue their own interests. The Kenwood Chef made the world a palpably better place.

I’d coveted a Kenwood Chef of my own for a long time. I finally got lucky at the Coburg Trash ‘n’ Treasure and picked one up for only fifty bucks. It’s a classic model A701, probably older than I am, and still looks quite new. It’s got the white Pyrex bowl and the K beater, but no other accessories (although they’re easy enough to get on eBay). Next I need to find a mincing attachment: the goal is to try making my own sausages (I live a real wild life).

Kenwood UK offers manuals for its products in PDF format for free download, even for the old Chefs. Which is great: few companies bother providing online information about heritage products (SEGA being another).

The manual for the A701 can be downloaded here. It’s a big file–about 23Mb–but it’s worth the download, even if you don’t own a vintage Chef, because it includes the recipe book that came with the mixer. It’s a good and varied selection of recipes and, given the prominence and popularity of the Kenwood Chef, of considerable historical interest.

Technorati Tags: Australia, cooking, culture, gadget, Kenwood, kitchen, mixer

Maybe two years ago, I was shopping with my friend Julie and she dragged me into the sports section of a K-Mart to check out the gym balls. I’d never seen the like before: sure, I’d ridden on those big rubber inflatable balls with faces and horns on them, when I was a kid. But I hadn’t been keeping up with home exercise fads. I thought ‘Pilates’ was pronounced the same as ‘pirates’.

Julie had decided she was in the market for a gym ball, but I kind of ridiculed her out of the purchase. The sales droid tried to up-sell her to the Reebok model, which was three times the price of the generic model but it had a Reebok sticker on it and featured ‘anti-burst technology’. When he told us that I burst out laughing. Then I saw a workout video starring Gay Gasper and became hysterical. The droid got annoyed at me and we left, empty-handed.

Fast forward to, I don’t know, a month or two ago, when my physiotherapist recommended I get a gym ball for myself. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I would have forbidden any exercise device from entering my home. But this was not the most humiliating advice that I have been given since I injured my back. The most humiliating advice was to purchase a tennis ball to sit on and wriggle when the muscles in my right buttock became particularly tense. And yes, I bought a tennis ball.

The tennis ball only cost me sixty cents. A gym ball was going to cost a lot more, even if I got the cheap pro-burst model. Luckily, a friend had a hand-me-down gym ball (an impulse purchase? A passed-by fad?) which she handed down to me. Guess what? It’s got the Reebok sticker on it.

So I lie on my back and lay my legs on top of the ball and do various exercises with the thing. I think it has worked: I can feel the hard muscles in my abdomen, beneath the layer of flab, like the flesh of an over-ripe peach covering the hard stone in the centre. Or a bean bag with a block of concrete in the middle.

The problem with hand-me-downs is they don’t always come with all the pieces. In my case, I’ve got the ball but I don’t have the pump (or, for that matter, the video). And the ball’s gotten hellasaggy. If I try to sit on it I wind up sitting in it.

Here’s the problem: the ball doesn’t have a valve, just a hole with a little plastic plug. Nothing to put your lips to. Nothing to fit a bicycle pump to, or to attach to a compressor. I’m going to have to go find a ball pump. Which is a bloody scam.

And damn me if there isn’t an aftermarket for gym ball pumps. I favour the ‘Blaster Hi-Speed Power Pump’ from Yoga-Mad®, which looks exactly the same as all the other pumps I’ve seen online except, I imagine, it’s got a different sticker on it. And maybe racing stripes. Broom broom!

Or I’m going to have to go to a sporting gear shop, saggy ball under one arm, and ask them very nicely if they’ll blow it up for me.

Oh man.

Technorati Tags: exercise, health, injury, Pilates, spine