Today’s entry is a very different from my usual offerings (don’t worry, we’ll be back to ‘normal’ tomorrow).

It turns out that our much loved, much used Philips food processor “sort of” died. “Sort of” meaning that one of the critical plastic parts which was perished finally broke meaning we can’t use the machine to grate cheese, carrots, nuts and so on. So, the search was on for a replacement.

We finally settled on a smart looking Russell Hobbs machine which had similar functions to our trusty Philips. Unfortunately, said machine is incredibly poorly designed. I suspect they know about the issues as the manual does reference some of the problems but their suggestions for avoiding the issues are ineffective.

Here’s a picture of the shiny, new instruction manual that came with the machine.

So, with a picture being worth a thousand words, here is what happened when I grated 1 Kg of chilled (straight from the refrigerator) Tasty Cheddar cheese.

About 800 g of cheese resulted in 162 g of soft ungrated cheese at the top of the machine. Once I’d grated the remaining 200g of cheese, I put the ungrated cheese back into the machine and after that was left with 80g of useless, ungrated cheese which was far too soft to do anything with.

In addition, when transferring cheese part way through the process, some inevitably falls into the middle of the machine as in the photo below.

Sadly, the story does not end there. Cleaning this particular model was beyond difficult. The chute through which food passes on its way to the grating blade is two units which have been joined together in such a way that trapped food is almost impossible to dislodge. Said units cannot be dismantled for easy cleaning.

Also, the lid of the food processor has been really badly designed as soft cheese gets wedged into part of it as shown by the red area in the image below. It’s impossible to adequately describe the level of frustration experienced when attempting to get this device cleaned. Did I mention that the food pusher itself has ridges on the bottom rather than being flat further complicating the cleaning process.

Today’s Gratitude Item: That we can get our money back and return the machine reviewed above with ease.