[Bakewell]

Hi

I thought I'd share my latest purchase with you, as some of you may find it as useful as I have. After much research and reading of reviews I've got a Morphy Richards Intellisteam and have already found it really useful. In fact, since unpacking it on Sunday I have used every day for at least part of our evening meal, but usually the whole meal. It's not cheap and retails for £99.99 in some places, but shop around if you're interested - I unfortunately missed a graded one for £39.99 on ebay, but bought mine for £54.00 from Tesco direct and collected it in store. The Amazon price varies but is around that, too. It does have a 2 year guarantee though - and I can say from experience that Morphy Richards customer service is excellent, so that instills confidence in investing a little more.

There is a demo on the Morphy Richards website. It's a steamer that's has various compartments and is designed to cook complete meals for up to four adults. It's completely programmable - you just prepare the food, set the times for each compartment, and then you can relax while the steamer turns on the various compartments at the right time so that everything is cooked to perfection at the same time. Then it automatically goes into keep warm mode for 40 minutes. The website has some lovely recipes for complete steamed meals and I'm working my way through them. The best part is that they're not even designed to be slimming meals particularly, but because of the healthier cooking method I've found them to be quite low in points (if you substitute low fat coconut milk for the normal one in recipes that need that!). It also cooks perfect soft boiled eggs; something I can never seem to manage!

I won't bore you all with all the details as the info is all on the website, but feel free to ask any questions.

The negatives that I can see are:
1) It's quite pricy but worth it if you will use it as often as I am.
2) It doesn't have a delayed start timer which I think would be useful, but the 40 minutes keep warm function does give you some leeway with time.
3) It's quite bulky.

The positives are too numerous to mention - it is certainly making my life a lot easier as I'm someone who doesn't have as much time to cook as I would like. Healthy eating and convenience earns it a big gold star from me!