OK, time for my 2 cents. I've been baking, preserving, and cooking for more than you are old - that's fifty years if you want to count. My recommendations are just from experience and, of course, always frugality. If you buy a good piece of equipment it should last your lifetime - prorated over 50 years the $200 cost in negligible - but a $1,000 piece will never recoup its cost not matter how much stuff you preserve. On the other hand, if you buy a $10 piece of junk only to replace it in 1 year, and every year thereafter, cussing it all the while, that thing has less value than dirt in that it causes stress, breaks at the crucial need, and is risky to use, poorly constructed, and maddening to use, and expensive in the long run. Cheap junk is still junk. Using a cheap plastic mandolin that you are afraid of is dangerous. Even with a Kevlar glove (buy them at Walmart in the fishing department - for cleaning fish - if you already have one) it will make the chore unacceptable - too bulky/clunky, but it still does work - time quality is a factor here. An expensive professional mandolin is pure pleasure and if you plan on canning for many years, the only way to go. My pro chef SIL gave me his old Bron mandolin (new is probably $150). "Wow" is the only word to describe a professional piece of equipment - kinda like buying a maslin pan! The thickness of a slice is easily adjusted; it makes julienne and french fry thicknesses in one pass with a turn of a knob, and also endeared me in that it makes a cute wavy cut if I so desire. It comes with a guide plate so that you never have to get anywhere near the cutting plate and therefore it is totally safe. The blade can be sharpened to razor edge but my SIL said that he used it for 17 years without having to do that and to me it is way sharp enough for my cukes. Zip-zip. As for mini choppers (half an onion - minced, 2 cups of diced peppers, 6 garlic cloves - minced, etc.) I recommend the little mini food chopper (1 to 2 cup size) by Black & Decker, for about ten bucks. Available at chain drug stores (CVS, Walmart, and the like). Never makes paste of nuts either (just "finely chopped") so it is used a lot here instead of the stupid scrunch and grunt upper hammer nut "grinders". I bought a burr coffee grinder for spices. It is a simple mechanism with adjustments for "granular" size that is irrelevant for hard spices - longer whirring works the same. It was about $15 at Target. It depends on what the outcome for which you wish to achieve. Note that it is super for leaving tasty traces in the hopper and then when you are grinding fresh coffee beans viola! Yum to cinnamon sticks followed by dark roast coffee beans. As for full sized food processors - I use the attachment made for my KitchenAid mixer. Shredding 10 pounds of carrots is a snap, chunking tons of cabbage for slaw is a simple change to a different sized cone (three come with a set and 10 more are available), and for making piles of cheese for crackers that just goes through like butter. The problem is that you have to have a KitchenAid stand mixer to attach it to. One simple little tool for twenty bucks that has me watching infomercials again is the Vidalia Onion Chopper, a.k.a. Sweet Onion Chopper, and the like. It uses the force of your hand/arm to press down on a template over a steel honeycomb-shaped plate. I cubed enough sweet onions for 40 jars of relish in about 10 minutes, enough zucchini for 20 jars of relish, and the steamed carrots for pickled relish in 5 minutes. Then I used it to cut up sweet and hot peppers, red onions, and dried apricots for about 20 jars of Habanero Gold Jelly in just under 10 minutes. It does not work for softer things like cherries and plums, but I will try it for tomatoes, whenever they decide to ripen, when I make more tomato preserves. As for a dedicated food processor - buy only the one with the widest bowl you can find. If it has a narrow bowl you may as well just buy a blender and forget chopping with it. I have a "harvest gold"-colored food processor from about 1970 that has a very wide bowl, no safety features, and limited options, that suits me just fine for chunk shredding, fruit puree prep (before it all goes into the Squeezo), and using just the cutter blade alone for making great pie crusts and for coarse chopping big nuts. It is worthless for making nicely sliced cukes for pickles, or for precision shredding or slicing for anything else. If I were to buy one today, I'd go with the snazzy KitchenAid KFP750. It is what all the pro chefs on TV use and they have to determine "quality or junk for their standards - give or take rebates. That model also comes with the mini bowl so the B&D would not be needed. (Though I would not give up my B&D mini for anything after all these years.) At your young age, and the interest in preserving food you have shown over the last 3 years, an investment in quality equipment is akin to a painter who has to choose between a throw-away brush and one that will last 10 years. Duh! Initial investment in quality tools will outlast throw-always by far. If you don't believe me, come see me chop cabbage in the harvest-gold FP sometime!!! Your whole investment in good quality tools would be in the $15O to $550 range. Throw-away paintbrush or 50 years of quality? Nancy

san, as you know, Elery bought me a big Kitchen Aid food processor for my birthday a couple of months ago. Have I been convinced that it's worth the counter space? Not entirely. I did use it to chop the onions and peppers for those 36 pints of salsa I canned, but no matter how I try, they are still a little too fine or a bit too big, it just doesn't do it the way I want them. It's passable, acceptable, but not exactly how I want it and so I'll go back to chopping it all by hand. I don't use it for bread because I have a bread machine that I love and use several times a week. Studies have been done showing that neither stand mixers nor food processors knead bread as well as the bread machines which were designed to do just that. Of course, you and I both know that you aren't baking a bunch of bread, LOL. I made pie crust but it got too hot and I had to put it in the freezer to chill before I could use it. Not much time savings there, although I suppose with a LOT more practice I might make it passable. So, bread making, pastry and vegetable chopping? Not ideal for any of those, at least not for me. What does it do? It makes spectacular and short work of a batch of hummus, which I love. It's better for Jessica's lime chipotle marinade/glaze, the cilantro tends to gum up the stick blender and the regular blender doesn't make enough. It made short work of the dough for the Cheddar Thumbprints with Habanero Jelly, because that dough needs to be frozen anyway, no matter how it's blended. Finally, I've used it to shred cabbage for slaw and it works great, much faster than a hand grater. It makes a smooth liver pate. Oh, and I ground up a bunch of dried hot chili peppers into bits, small enough to put into a shaker. It was so easy with the food processor. So, bottom line, I think you need to decide what you really use it for and whether another appliance would do the same job. Then decide. I like mine and I appreciate the fact that Elery thought enough to get me one but I still wouldn't buy one myself if it broke. Annie

I know that there are huge fans of Cuisinarts here, and I have one from, er, maybe 1981. However, I have had to replace too many parts over the years, and the Lexan and plastic bits became very brittle. I found the locking mechanism increasingly difficult to engage over time. I have been using a Magimix 4200XL for several years and really like it a lot. I find it operates more smoothly than the Cuisinart. The Magimix takes a bit of reorienting because the bowl handle is in front when operating, I made sweet potatoes to absolutely rave reviews using the mash and puree attachment over Thanksgiving, which is our big annual holiday here. Had the larger version with the chrome base been available years ago, I probably would have gone for it. The XL have the wide feed tube, which is a necessity to me. I still use the little Cuisinart for chopping spice mixtures sometimes. It's much cheesier than the big machines.The kids use it more than I when they are here. Here is a link that might be useful: Some reviews available here. This post was edited by kitchendetective on Wed, Dec 4, 13 at 9:31

The thing I disliked about the Cuisinart was the fact you had to take it apart, empty it and then put it back together again before proceeding. Making cole slaw for a crowd, I had to empty it four times or more...a real pain. The Hamilton Beach, I can do a whole head of cabbage, onions and carrots all in one process. Not to mention, it's very easy to put together. You can slice a wide cucumber in it, a large onion without cutting it in half, a whole tomato, I love it!