The Cuisinart soup maker

I'll wager that even the most dedicated of my husband's fans are unaware that he writes a monthly column for a technology magazine called T3. It's one of those magazines that has models in bikinis on the front holding small items of new gadgetry made of brushed aluminium. Every month we are sent a piece of technology that he has to write about.

The joke being that my husband has a nervous breakdown if you suggest he so much as uses the "search inbox" function on his email. I can completely fuck his life up by setting his phone to Silent, because he won't notice or be able to put it back.

He was once sent a replacement mobile phone that wasn't a Nokia and hated it. But rather than ring up and send it back and get a Nokia, he drove himself into blurry fits of hatred and confusion and semi-tearful wobbles of frustration and despair trying to make it work. Every tantrum ended with a wail of "Why can't it just be 1930?" (Answer: because war would break out in 9 years and we'd all die.")

Anyway, he was too much of a tech-retard even to go onto the Nokia website and just buy himself a new sim-free Nokia. So after four months of this and of me finally snapping and screaming "Shut the FUCK UP up about how much you hate your stupid fucking phone!!" I went onto the Nokia website and bought him one myself.

Anyway, this is the kind of man we are dealing with, here. He hated the iPhone we were sent, and the 3D TV, and the XBox Kinetic. The Tom Tom HD traffic was more of a success, although the novelty C3PO voice got on his nerves after a while.

And then this arrived, the Cuisinart Soup Maker. Surely the most pointless and silly thing ever to have been invented by man. It's basically a blender that looks like it's been re-designed by Tim Westwood and it chops and cooks - yes it COOKS - your raw ingredients before whizzing them into soup

But soup is ridiculous. A slurry of mushed-up things, the first spoonful of which is nice but then you have to plough through the rest for what feels like years.

And in order to make it interesting you end up eating 16 slices of bread and enough Cheddar to fell an oak tree, when the whole point of eating (drinking?!) the soup in the first place was to lose a bit of weight while you consider doing the Tracy Anderson Mat Workout DVD that you completely forgot that you had bought on Amazon until it arrived at your door.

But when I unpacked the soup maker, from where my husband had dumped it after its arrival and had been nervously skirting around for the last week - like it was a dead body - it turned out to be rather an impressive beast.

And it came with a handy cookbook, which revealed I had been prejudiced and wrong to think that this sucker can only do soup. Not so! It can also do:

Thai fish cakes
Spiced apple chutney
Tikka Masala sauce

... some other stuff...

...as well as all manner of soups such as carrot and coriander and broccoli and stilton. You know the drill. It'll take a lot to convince me that it's worth spending money on, though - let alone the critical cupboard space sacrifice.

I haven't tried it out yet, as I'm a bit busy at the moment complaining about the size of my swollen ankles and lumbering off to the doctor to be stabbed in the arse with massive needles. But I will soon - otherwise my husband won't get round to it because he'll be too scared and will have to write the whole column without having actually taken the piece of technology out of the box. Plus ca change.