Many years ago a friend who swore by the use of this behemoth kitchen appliance she owned decided she would buy the latest version, having used the one she wanted to replace for quite a number of years and deciding the newer version offered even more kitchen-work capability. She offered me the one she would be replacing. I was intrigued, thought perhaps I was missing something, and this might be the missing link between all the various kitchen chores I took up and achieving greater efficiency. So I accepted her offer gratefully.

This huge thing that took up so much counter space had a handbook accompanying it and I read through it more or less, realizing that it could do just about anything that I did in food preparation, making me, in essence, or my efforts, rather redundant. I began to use it for chopping vegetables, for mixing cake batter, for grinding up meat, that kind of thing, and I soon realized I was using it, and all the paraphernalia that accompanied it, reluctantly. And finally I used it no more. Its use in kneading bread dough would have relieved me from a lot of physical effort, I knew, but it held no appeal to me; I just far preferred to do everything by hand, and soon afterward I gifted it to the Salvation Army thrift store, releasing room on my kitchen counters for items I felt had more usefulness to me.

I guess I'm just attuned to exerting the physical energy required to do these things, and therefore take satisfaction from doing so. Eventually other useful kitchen aids came into my kitchen; never because I had expressed a desire to have them, but because my husband simply cannot resist availing himself of such things, even if they're meant for my use.

When he brought home the breadmaker he eventually bought, I huffed and puffed and said I would continue to make bread dough by hand, and he said fine, he'd use the thing. And over the years, he has. To the point where he makes all the bread I eat daily, over no protests from me.

Then came the counter-top convection oven, and the handy little toaster oven and the large-size microwave too big to fit on the microwave shelf but which had a handy-dandy under-shelf specifically for baking pizzas. And we do a lot of pizzas. And it bakes them to perfection; crusty the way we like the dough to bake, and crisply, the way we like the toppings to be well baked.

I do use all of the latter cooking devices, and appreciate them enormously. Most of my baking goes into the convection oven and I swoon over the results. Cupcakes come out fragrantly moist, and the last cheesecake I baked was delectably light and creamy-smooth. I use the little toaster oven for small casseroles, not for making toast. It's also more energy-economical.

So I guess it's a toss-up; I like bustling about my kitchen doing the things that I've long become familiar with, in my own particular way. But I'm certainly not averse to using some of the useful tools that modern technology has introduced us to. There's a lot of satisfaction in all of that, personally, for me.