On the subject of tea.

[seiberwing]

I continue to be amused at what happens when I explain to British people that my end of American culture has no conception of the 'electric kettle', and that when exposed to one in England it took me a month to figure out what it was.

They always act like I've just casually stated that we have no cultural taboo against eating our own young.

Comments

[kookaburra1701]

Everyone in my dorm in college had an electric kettle, but we called them "hot pots" and they were used for everything from making hot cocoa to easy mac.

Thinking back on it I'm amazed we didn't manage to burn down the building.

[seiberwing]

You made...easy mac...in an electric kettle.

How.

[kookaburra1701]

Very messily. I'm not sure if Bethany ever managed to chip all the macaroni out of her hot pot. I cooked ramen and minute rice in mine all the time, though.

Basically added the specified amount of water, boiled it, put macaroni in, kept it cooking until the amount of water looked right, stir in "cheese," butter, and milk.

[seiberwing]

Mine's pitcher-shaped. I'm not even sure how you'd do that.

Though it does have a constant stain because I used to just leave the teabags in there when I made iced tea. Iced tea saved my life last summer.

[kookaburra1701]

We all had the same really cheap kind because K-Mart had a sale of them for like $5 or something. They were plastic, about 7" in diameter with straight sides, a lid, and a pour spout, and they took about 5 minutes to boil things.

I now have a proper glass and chrome electric kettle with temp settings and which never has to boil anything other than pure water.

...but I usually make my tea in the coffee maker. (tea bag in the carafe, set timer, go to bed.)

[seiberwing]

Oh, so literally a pot. Mine's...Kroger, I think? Plastic with heating coils at the bottom.

We don't own a coffee maker. A2 uses the kettle to make hot water for her instant coffee, which I find a little sacrilegious.

[kookaburra1701]

My coffee maker is older than me. It's the one my folks had and then replaced with a Keurig, so I got it. It's harvest gold and used to have fake wood paneling sort of stuff on it.

[seiberwing]

Awesome. I never got Keurigs, they seem a prime example of capitalist excess.

[kookaburra1701]

It was kind of neat, but if you wanted to make any volume of coffee/hot cocoa/tea larger than a cup, it was a PITA. And it broke all the time and had all sorts of fiddly bits that got clogged.

And the little cups the coffee came in were all plastic and non-recylable. Drove me bonkers.

Oh and my cat totally hated it. He knew the steaming, gurgling, spitting machine was up to SOMETHING and he'd monitor it closely whenever it was in use.

[mrteufel]

How else do you boil water for instant coffee?

[wrongly_amused]

Wait, you cooked it IN the kettle itself? I mean, I boil soup water in mine, but I'll just pour it in the noodle bowl and cover it up to steam for a few minutes.

o_0 I'm kind of amazed they didn't break on you. The first one I had was taken down by boiled milk. I'd have never thought they'd survive noodles.

[kookaburra1701]

Yup. Cooked all sorts of stuff in the pot. For $5 hunks of plastic they were remarkably resilient.