dispense me

When I used to live at Tim's apt between the hours of 7pm (which is when he'd pick me up from work and go to his house for dinner) and 1am (which is when he'd take me home), if we wanted to drink tea, we had to boil water in the kettle. Before I moved away and donated my kettle to him, we boiled water in a saucepan. Now. Some of you out there may not find anything weird with that. In fact, that might be how you do things as well. But I. I am Chinese. That means the demand for hot water at one's fingertips is great. So someone, in Asia I will assume, invented... {drumroll please!}... the hot water dispenser! It is probably the second most important small kitchen appliance, after like the microwave (which is crucial to some people's survival). Chinese people must have their tea, their hot water.

As I have mentioned before, Tim has quite the functional apartment and we don't really actually NEED most of the things on our registires, but we need this. It is the only thing I really wanted to put on our registry... a Zojirushi hot water dispenser.

(Source)

To my great delight... and to push back further the discussion of my wedding dress (haha, sorry)... I discovered TARGET... yes the great American Target, carries the Zojirushi hot water dispenser! Yes yes yes!!! It is now on our registry. :) Granted it could probably most likely definitely be found for cheaper from some Chinese appliance store, it is on our Target registry. :-D I never searched for it because I didn't think American stores would carry it!

(::Edit:: Tim read this and was like... "You said we only need this.  I hope we don't get 5 of these things from Chinese stores that we can't return."  :oP  Oops.)

Now there are other hot water dispensers, some at half the cost of the Zojirushi one, but you really get what you pay for. (See 1 star vs Zojirushi's 5 stars. haha) I'm not particularly attached to the Zojirushi brand but it is currently what my family is using (the same one as the picture above, but 4L) so I figured it's good. :)

Hot water dispensers are awesome because you can make tea, hot chocolate, instant coffee, instant noodles, instant oatmeal and other delightful dehydated edible things INSTANTLY!  Hot water dispensers really come from a long line of awesome Asian inventions like... rice, gun powder, stir fry, sushi, Korean bbq, the PlayStation, paper, pandas, and toilet paper*.  Go Asians :-P

What is your favorite small kitchen appliance? Or what was your favorite item on your registry?


* Claims to Asian inventions may or may not be true.  I only did a brief Google search and did not double check my sources.  :oP