Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Picture this; me at the stove happily stirring a bot of boiling blueberry lemon syrup. Visions of pancakes with real blueberry sauce danced through my head as the deep purple berries sputtered and popped. A delicious blueberry, lemon and muscovado sugar haze floated through the air and brought my hubby and son wandering into the kitchen, sniffing and wide eyed at the fragrance. The last step in what turned out to be an easy, but laborious project (try washing, de-stemming and sorting two pounds of fresh picked blueberries, not to mention carefully slicing inch long strips from a lemon making sure to leave off the bitter white pith) was to bring the temperature of the boiling syrup up to 200 degrees. For some reason the thermometer never registered the temp and after ten minutes of careful monitoring I decided that the syrup must just be done by now. I pulled the thermometer out and set it carefully on a stable surface where the end tip wouldn't touch anything and then removed the syrup from the heat to cool off before transferring it to a pretty, but functional bottle. My kitchen was pretty messy, a colander filled with blueberry pulp leftover from the first boiling, measuring cups, spoons, knives, a juicer filled with seeds and pulp, so I decided to start on the clean up, humming happily as I went, its nice to clean up when you feel you've accomplished something nice. That's when I noticed that the thermometer had a crack in it, when I picked it up I realized it wasn't just a crack, half of the end bulb was missing and there was only one place it could be, in my now finished and cooling pot of blueberry lemon syrup. The syrup that I'd just spent almost three hours making. So, all because of a cheapo unsafe thermometer I lost $13 in fresh picked, organic blueberries, $2 for the muscovado sugar, $.99 for the lemon and three hours of my time on a food that I couldn't even taste for fear of eating a glass shard and dying a painful, blood gurgling death. Arrgh, pretty much sums up my thoughts on this terrible themometer.