I know you're compelled to get gifts for your friends and loved ones for various milestone events and holidays, but you don't have to. For the same value provided by the products listed below, you can also give them a kick to the genitals…
Wow, make french fries and other fried foods with none of the fat, hassle, or disgusting cleanup of a fryer? Can it be too good to be true?? Yes.
Isn't the saying “the best thing since sliced bread?” Store-bought bread is full of years of food additive research and professional baking experience that makes it do some amazing things. Chiefly, last more than one day before becoming completely stale and inedible. If you and your family can eat entire loaves of weird extra-crusty bread in one day, be prepared to have your pantry burdened with things like dry milk, more than one type of yeast, and more than one type of flour.
They'll also tell you that it can do fun things like make cinnamon rolls. Well, sort of. It will mix the dough, but then you have take that dough and make the cinnamon rolls yourself. Why not just make the dough without the machine? In fact, if you're deep into bread anyway, why not just do it all without the machine? I could see how this might actually do you well if you lived in the remote wilderness or something, otherwise another counter space waster.
Deep fried food from a restaurant tastes great because they have big gas-fired fryers that are capable of keeping the oil consistently hot. Your consumer-grade fryer cannot do this1). The food will instantly lower the temperature of the oil, the unit will have to heat it back up, and in the extra time required for this, your food will be a soggy oily mess. You might as well just have a deep pan of oil on the stove rather than waste your time with one of these. Keeping it on the stove also helps vent away the smell of food cooking in oil. If you're not keeping your electric fryer underneath the vent hood, your whole house will smell like a carnival for days at a time. Even if you take precautions, it will probably smell like a carnival for many hours. After all this effort to get inferior food, you then have to try to clean this beast. It will never be entirely clean, ever…
Let's get this straight: It makes ice and takes up space? Brilliant. So the ice maker on my freezer has a filter on the water line. OH wait, this doesn't have a water line coming into it, so I have to add water to it from a pitcher. Like a pathetic primitive animal. Totally worth the effort for like a dozen ice cubes that taste somehow worse than tap water. I hear they sell ice at stores now too…
Man, you have to really love waffles to burden any of your precious storage space with this thing. You can make exactly one waffle every half hour, or that's what it will feel like when you're trying to make waffles for everyone. The first person served has finished theirs by the time you the last one gets served. As usual, it's impossible to clean.
From time to time I wake from a nightmare, only to find myself in a far worse place: a world in which the yogurt maker exists. No monster in my nightmares is as fiendish as the evil bastard that thinks this would be a good gift for anyone.
If you've ever had the experience of purchasing yogurt at the store, you've already had more fun than you'll ever have making your own. Who is this thing for? Who really wants to purchase and ruin milk for entertainment purposes? Might be worth it if you own a dairy. That's the only thing I can think of…