Salad Bowls, Salad Spinners and Sleep

Preamble
I indicated in last week’s email that I’d been having a bit of a tough time in August and for a variety of reasons that has gone through into the first week of September. This has resulted in very little sleep on some nights recently. So, in the middle of the night earlier this week I found myself at a loose end and decided to watch Steven Bartlett interviewing a chap called Matthew Walker. He was billed as the worlds number one sleep expert, so I pricked up my ears. His background is as a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sleep resets the body
“Sleep”, he says, “is the single most effective thing that we can do to reset our brain and body health.”. And he continues “I don’t say this flippantly, I’m not dismissing exercise or diet, they are critical.”.

But he continues,  “were I to deprive you of exercise for a day, water for a day, food for a day or sleep for 24 hours. Were I then to map your brain and body for impairments. It’s not even a competition, that one night of lost sleep, relative to the other things, dwarfs the other results.”. He adds, “the only thing that wins out over sleep deprivation, is oxygen(deprivation!).”

Food for thought!

To product
I thought, as its hot, it would be very appropriate to talk about Salad Bowls and Salad Spinners and so I have two products for you that, you never know, you might just need. Both are from the Joseph Joseph design house. One I like very much, and the other not so much.

Joseph Joseph Uno Salad Bowl with Stainless Steel Servers £50

This is an expensive but beautiful product, which when seen in the “Plastic & Stainless Steel” is, if not great value, an object of desire. It is large, at 29cm across, with a generous 13cm of depth and will take a sizeable salad for say 6-8 people with ease. It’s moulded in an off-white plastic that has a ceramic look and feel to it (but not the fragility or the weight) and I think the greens, reds and yellows of a salad are beautifully set off by it.

Hanging handily on either side of the bowl are the salad hands, two elegantly shaped stainless steel paddles that allow you to serve yourself without getting your digits dirty.

For me, this is a beautiful piece of design at a fairly reasonable price. It’s £50. If shopping online use code JJ20 to get 20% off and bring it down to £40 or tell us who you are if in Cobham or Reigate.

Joseph Joseph Multi Prep - Salad Spinner - Grater - Slicer - Spiraliser £50

This product I reluctantly agreed to write about because when we tested it out, it surprisingly did all the things that it says it does on the box. Personally, I still wouldn’t give it house room because I dislike multi-purpose tools… but this is my bias, I’ve just got an aversion to the principle. If you’re of the same mind, stop reading now and finish off your early morning tea in peace.

But if I haven’t put you off completely, here are the salient points.

It’s a salad Spinner, medium in size.
It’s a Colander. The Salad spinner basket has small enough holes for it to be used as a Colander…clever!
It’s a Grater. Which for safety, also has a Food Holder/Guard to stop you grating your fingers.
It’s a Slicer/Mandolin (non-adjustable) that produces approx. 2 or 3mm thick slices. The same Food Holder/Guard to stop you slicing your fingers.
And it’s a Spiraliser. This was perhaps the least convincing part of the test when we did it, so suggest that you start with a Courgette and work your up to an Aubergine!
 

It’s usually £50, but use the same code, JJ20, to buy it for only £40!

That’s it for this week.

I’ll leave the last word to Leonardo da Vinci

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself.”

Profound stuff!
 
I hope you have a pleasant and peaceful weekend.

Kind regards

Andrew

Andrew Bluett-Duncan

Director