[The American Years]

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Greetings from Japan, where appliances are different. Better? Worse? You can decide for yourself, but I think they're pretty ingenius.


A few standouts are below.


Dishwashers are counter-top, one meal dishwashers. Highly electronic and, I would imagine, efficient.





Next: Cooktops. There is not typically an oven in a Japanese kitchen. Not much of their cuisine requires baking. Toaster ovens are fairly common. Below is a cooktop, with a built-in broiler oven drawer. Pretty clever. If you're pressed for space, it makes sense to sacrifice the oven. The blue cabinets below are actually for storage.


Lastly, and bestly, fridges. They are smaller than a typical American fridge. So there wouldn't be space for the 6 month old half jar of pickled mushrooms that you have at the back of your fridge. It's there. Don't lie.

And the best thing about Japanese fridges, the doors. To keep a fridge efficient, don't let the cool air out. When you open the huge door of your American fridge, you lose tons of cool air, and have to start over. The Japanese has a separate drawer for veggies, meat, ice, freezer. All accessible from outside. So when you open the veggie drawer, you only open the veggie drawer. No other cool air escapes. Brilliant!


*****
Mata Ashta
*********

1 comment:

Giddy said...

My second attempt to leave this silly message:

I just wanted to protest that the half-jar of pickled mushrooms in MY fridge has only been there for 3 months, since Xmas Eve. I reserve the right to serve the other half next Xmas Eve, heh, heh..... But there are plenty of other pickled products that are easily much older. (Anchovy paste anyone?)

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