About living on a third world budget, or, please give me a blender

I am fighting to cook a mussaká for dinner. To all of those who do not have a clue about what this delicious meal may consist in, let me enlighten you: A mussaká is, in short words, a Greek lasagna in which you use potatoes or eggplant instead of pasta.

Ok, so that's my goal: the mussaká. I peel off several good-sized potatoes and set them in the stove so they cook. No sweat. Now, the first real difficulty: I forgot to unfreeze the meat. Mmmm. Tricky. It's frozen solid; it could qualify as a blunt semi-deadly weapon. I stare at it intently, summoning my dragon-breath powers, but once again it's proven that the pollution in the air has deprived me of them. So I come up with an Einstenian plan: I place the meat strategically beside the pot in which my sturdy potatoes are cooking. This way, my logical mind states, the steam from the pot will heat up the meat and thus unfreeze it. I come back half an hour later and find the potatoes have cooked, but the meat is trying to recover from the irresistible laugh attack brought upon by my (to me) infallible physics. So I say, 'To hell with it. No piece of meat is gonna laugh at me.' So I enclose the meat in a Ziploc bag and, overcoming all the family ingrained prejudices against doing so, I sink it in the water the potatoes were cooked in. That ought to teach it no piece of cow ever laughs at me.

I shouldn't have felt victorious so soon; there was still the matter of the tomato sauce to deal with.

I have no (as in, without, deprived of) blender. I have what is called a metate in these latitudes, which is an artifact that was state-of-the-art around 5,000 B.C.

Historically, blenders are a new thing. Ask your grammies: all of them must have used some form of metate in their time. My own Grandma did. So, at first, I wasn't so put out. I pictured a beautiful rustic image (preferably engraved in wood) of myself patting sweetly some pretty red tomatoes with the metate's hand , while a banjo sounded OS and my lovely kitten awaited at my feet. No such thing happened. When I tried to bring my idillic image to action, the tomatoes were unmoved by my caressing touch.

You can picture the rest: I finished up hammering those motherfuckers to pulp, while the neighbors tried to tear down the door in hopes of helping whomever was the victim of the growling troll that must, judging from the sound, be in here. The walls of my kitchen, I'm sorry to say, are completely covered in red goo.

Then I stopped and came to blog the event, completely covered in the evidence of my crime. Tomato seeds and skin drip down my hair and onto the keyboard. Now I'm gonna get up and finish the goshdarn mussaká.

Please, give me a blender.