Last week I used the special gift my husband gave me for Valentine's Day.

It's big, it pulsates, it does all manner of thrilling and wonderful things and will, no doubt, give me hours of pleasurable experimentation during the long evenings when my husband is at work.

Yes, you've guessed it. He bought me a food processor.

As unromantic as this may sound, it is actually what I wanted.

Until now, our kitchen cupboards have been full of ageing, secondhand gadgets with dodgy motors.

I have an old liquidiser that refuses to mush anything other than overripe strawberries and a clunking mixer that always cuts out before my egg whites have peaked.

The gift was not a surprise. I'd gone with my husband to the shop to investigate what was available.

But he made the final choice. I would probably have settled on something smaller. His maxim, however, is, "the bigger, the better".

So we've ended up with a catering-size model, which will be ideal for all those occasions when we're having a sit-down supper for 20.

Now, I've heard that it is usually wise to read the instruction booklet of any new piece of domestic equipment before using it.

I say it like this because it is contrary to my inclinations. I grew up in a family in which instruction manuals were deemed to be another example of the controlling forces crushing the proletariat.

Hence, I skip the paragraphs in bold print that begin Important: Please Read This First - and usually end up wading through the Why Won't it Work? section.

Anyway, my first culinary experience with my new Magimix involved making soup.

I was running a bit behind schedule (our three-year-old was due at her gym class in 20 minutes) and so I had even less inclination than usual to refer to the instruction manual.

Besides, it looked pretty straight forward. I'd already cooked the vegetables until they were brown and shapeless.

All I had to do was pour the slop into the right container, fit the right blade and press the button marked "pulse". It turned out not to be so simple.

My husband, who was next to me in the kitchen making sandwiches for work, soon witnessed my frustration when the Magimix refused to perform.

"Have you read the instructions?" he inquired in an accusatory tone.

"I've looked at the diagrams," I lied. "It's pretty self-explanatory. There must be something wrong with it. The point is, I haven't got time to sort it out now. Eve and I have to be out of the house within ten minutes."

My husband broke off from slicing his tomatoes and fiddled with the buttons himself. He then rang the shop he'd bought it from to see if they could shed light on the problem.

By this time I'd already dug out the old liquidiser and was busy making a mess in another corner of the kitchen.

"Look," said my husband, putting down the phone and pointing to a page in the manual with the heading How to Work the Magimix. "It says here that if the bowl and lid are not correctly locked into position, the machine will not start."

He decanted some of the half-pulped soup into the food processor bowl, made the adjustments, pressed "pulse" and the machine powered into action.

"All you had to do was read the instructions," he sighed.

I won't, of course. I prefer a bit of mystery and excitement.