Lost in Suburbia: This Toaster Oven is toast - Independent Press - NJ.com

Goldilocks has nothing on me. She couldn’t find a chair that wasn’t too hard or too soft.
Me? I’m on my fourth toaster oven in two weeks. Yes, it’s an addiction. I have major toaster oven issues. I am officially ready for toaster oven rehab.
It all started when the first toaster oven – the one we’d had for pretty much our entire marriage – gave up the toast, I mean the ghost. One day it decided that everything we put in should come out blackened. We decided differently.
With heavy hearts, we said goodbye to old toasty and I went out to find a new one.
The store had a dizzying array of choices. Our old toaster oven had two settings: bake or toast. But in the twenty years since we bought our old toastmaster, the toaster oven industry had really ignited. We could get a convection toaster oven, a digital convention toaster oven, a toaster/broiler, a toaster/broiler/rotisserie, and even a toaster oven that offered conventional calrods and infrawave technology. Certainly I didn’t know what calrods were, but they sounded very impressive, so I was in.
I plunked down the equivalent of a down payment on a car and brought home a new toaster oven with all the bells and whistles I could pronounce. I proudly set it up to demonstrate it to my family. But when I plugged it in and turned it on, the kitchen lights went out.
“What the heck?” I wondered.
“It’s too powerful. It’s overloading the circuit breakers,” said my husband. “Bring it back.”
I stroked the gleaming black and chrome exterior. “Maybe we can get a generator to handle the extra power?” I suggested hopefully.
“Bring it back.”
I packed and cushioned all the calrods and infrawaves and brought it back to the store. Then I picked another toaster that wasn’t nearly as fancy or powerful. Truth be told, it was kind of big and clunky looking and I felt a little sorry for it. It was the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of toaster ovens.
When I got it home, I plugged it in and was happy to note that the kitchen lights stayed on.
“Success!” I crowed. I unplugged the toaster oven and put it in the slide out drawer where we keep our toaster oven when it’s not in use. But much to my horror, it didn’t fit. It was too big.
“Argh! The other one was too powerful. This one is too big. I need one that is just right!”
Back to the store I went.
“I have to return this toaster oven,” I said to the salesgirl.
“Is it defective?” she asked reasonably.
“No, it’s too big. And the other one was too powerful. I need one that is smaller and weaker.”
She looked at me sympathetically, the way people do when they know they are talking to someone who is mentally unstable.
…Which brings us to our fourth toaster oven.
“Do we like this toaster oven,” my husband asked, eyeballing the new appliance.
“No,” I said definitively. “This one is too small.”
“Does it make the lights go off?”
“No.”
“Does it fit in the drawer?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Does it make toast?”
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Sounds like a winner to me.”
I brooded for a couple of days over the lack of largeness and fanciness of our new toaster oven, debating whether or not to bring it back and try another. Then, about a week later, my husband approached me again.
“So, are we keeping this toaster oven?” he asked cautiously.
“Yeah. Whatever. It’s fine,” I responded.
He looked relieved.
“…But we need a new fridge.”

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