Zojirushi Water Boiler
I haven't reviewed a non-tech product in a while, but I've been introduced to a new appliance that I think is worth mentioning. I bought a water boiler.
It all started with "I should drink more tea". Why don't I drink more tea? Because I'm impatient and I don't like hanging around waiting for the kettle to boil. I was looking for some sort of turbo-kettle when I ran across this Zojirushi Water Boiler.
Rather than boiling water on demand, these products (and there are a lot of them - Amazon has over a dozen) boil the water once and then keep it hot in an insulated pot.
The one I have lets you set the temperature you want the water at, and I keept it set at 208 degrees, but if you want to make specific types of tea that need water at different temperatures, you can do that.
The cool thing about having a water boiler isn't that you can make tea with it, but all the other things you can do with it. Here are a couple of the uses I've found.
Warming up baby formula. Babies, especially little fussypants babies like ours (my wife doesn't read my blog so I can say that), want their formula a little bit warm. We've been using powdered formula since she was two months old, and what we do is fill the bottle mostly with cold bottled water, and then top it off with water from the boiler. This warms up the overall temperature to something she likes.
Instant Oatmeal. It's great to have hot "instant" oatmeal that really is instant. No waiting for the water to boil.
Instant Coffee. Same with the coffee. Those Starbucks instant packages are pretty good, but I have some regular instant coffee around for emergencies.
Melting butter for popcorn. Normally this would be the microwave's job, but I find that for small amounts of butter I generally end up leaving it in a few seconds too long and boiling the butter. What I do here is put a little bowl inside a bigger bowl, and then pour some boiling water into the bigger bowl. The butter melts while I'm making the popcorn.
I'm sure there are more uses for these things that I haven't come up with yet, so I'd love to hear comments on how other people are using them.
Funny thing? I still don't drink much tea.