You "process food" in it of course?
When I first got my Cuisinart I made Pizza. I made the dough in it, sliced the onions, sliced the pepperoni and grated the mozzerella.
I learned that it's a sanp to make dough in it, that pepperoni slices very well but it's easier to buy pregrated mozzerella!
Make cole slaw....make onion soup, make a sandwich spread out of leftover cooked meat....chop nuts...grate dry bread for crumbs.
Once you get started it will be hard to stop chopping and slicing and dicing!
Linda C

Hmmm, let's see, I just got one for my birthday in May and my favorite use is for Jessica's Lime Chipotle glaze. I like it on salmon but my boss likes it as a salad dressing. Jessica says her friends use it as chip dip! I'm also a heat wuss, so I use ONE chipotle, LOL, use as many or as few as you like.

Lime-Chipotle Sauce
Food processor:
1/2 cup honey
2 tablespoons minced canned chipotle chilies in adobado sauce (WAAAY too much for me, the heat wus)
3 tablespoons brown mustard
1/2 cup lime juice
1 1/2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Season with salt and pepper
Serve sauce as a marinade grilled meats, poultry, and fish if your guests don't get to it first with tortilla chips. Makes 1 1/2 cups.

I also use mine to chop meat for homemade sausage, because my old hand cranked food grinder is just too much work. I use it to make bread crumbs too.

I've still not been able to chop vegetables to my satisfaction, they turn to mush or are too big, I can't get a satisfactory middle ground there. I don't use it for pastry dough because a second or two too long and your dough is too warm to handle and it has to be cooled, taking more time.

It's great for making shortbread cookies that are going to be baked in a pan, though.

Oh, and I use it to blend frozen strawberries and my homemade yogurt for a great smoothie.

annie

Annie....there are 2 techniques for chopping veggies in the FP....each give different results.
One is to put what you want into the FP with the metal blade and pulse it...blip blip...Do NOT turn it on and off....just pulse. The more food you put into it the more UN-uniform the pieces will be...big ones and little ones. So just add a small amount at a time.
Another technique is to drop pieces of veggie through the feed tube with the motor running. Works very well for things like parsley...because what is chopped, spins to the outside and doesn't turn to mush.
And still another way is to use the 1 MM slicing blade, cut something like celery carrots or into strips and push through the feed tube and slice into small uniform pieces.
It also works great to slice up lettuce for tacos or salads....
Linda C

LindaC, you're just better than me. I've tried the "pulse" thing. I either get big chunks or mush, or a combo. I've tried dropping the stuff through the tube. I get big chunks mixed with small chunks, or mush. If I use the slicing blade, I get slices, not a chop or dice.

So, in spite of using it for 7 months now, I still haven't gotten it to chop the blasted veggies to my satisfaction. I still do it by hand, even when canning those endless jars of salsa.

Annie

1. Check the manual that came with your food processor. Lots of good ideas and recipes.

2. It's a great tool for making homemade sauerkraut.

3. Try Martha Stewart's pastry recipe.

4. Yeast breads.

5. Quick breads (including loaves, batter bread, coffee cake, doughnuts, and muffins.

6. Cookie dough.

7. Check the cookbook section at your local library for Food Processor cook books.

-Grainlady

Homemade bruschetta is fun and simple thing to make in the food processor and you don't need to go getting all fancy.

About 3 medium regular tomatoes
2 cloves garlic peeled
3-4 fresh basil leaves
2 tblspoons olive oil
2 tablespoons vinegar (balsamic or white)
salt/pepper to taste

pulse chop the garlic and basil leaves
add the oil and vinegar
add the tomatoes and pulse chop it a few times to the consistency you like.

Purists will use roma tomatoes etc that need to be skinned but I find the regular tomatoes work just as well.

It's also one of those things that you either add more or less garlic too depending how you like it.

I use mine a lot. I use it for chopping nuts, mixing tuna salad, shredding cheese, grating carrots, chopping onions, straining grape seeds from the pulp, making bread crumbs...It's a real time saver for tedious tasks.

The first thing I made in mine was salsa. I just followed the recipe in the instruction pamphlet.

Hummus
Baba Ganoosh (Roasted eggplant dip)
Spinach dip (add chopped carrots or water chestnuts afterwards)
Ground toasted sesame seeds
Cutting in butter when I make any type of dough things
Grahmn cracker crumbs
Pesto!!
Tofu-pate
White bean spread
Lowfat cheesecake, made with gelatin and cottage cheese

I have to remember to use mine. I just replaced my old one with a Cuisinart that I can keep on the counter under the cabinet, heavy dude. Pulling the old one in and out of the cabinet was a chore so it never got used and the feed tube was too narrow. I think I get more use out of the miniCuisinart, so much easier for small jobs. Hope you enjoy yours.

Buy 2 pounds of the cheapest chuck roast/cut you can find.

Chop it into some manageable chunks and give it a whirl in the chopper. I'll be the best and cheapest steak burger you'll find.

I've been told (even though I don't like it this way) you can cook burgers you make yourself at home like this to medium wellness. Apparently, you don't need to worry about hamburger disease because you control a clean environment.

For what it's worth,

Bill

L, I forgot hummus, the food processor makes it a snap and I really like it.

Bill, I'll take mine raw, please. You are right, the food processor makes a nice "minced" beef or beef and pork mixture for meatloaf. I don't know about controlling the environment but you can at least control the ground meat you use, you know what's in there instead of being at the mercy of the grocery store, using who knows what scraps...

Annie

Thanks so much everyone for the great ideas. I was thinking about Hummus the other night and thought that would be good. I was rearranging the cabinets in order to fit the FP in there and was checking out the book.

There are some good ideas in there as well. I will have to check out some of them.

thanks again,
Ruth

Hummus freezes well, so make a big batch and freeze some for later. Same with a lot of these ideas, use them in combo with the freezer, make big batches of stuff so that once you get the machine out and set up, use it as much as possible.

Turn frozen fruit into sorbet (bananas taste like ice cream). Most will require a little sweetening, but pineapple canned in its own juice (freeze and then cut into chunks) pleases most people without any extra.

Make just about anything into spreads, dips, mousses, patees, salsas, chutneys, etc. You can chop up or puree fruit, vegetables, canned or cooked beans, cheese, fish and meats for these. Doing this is particularly useful for frozen stuff where the texture isn't as good as fresh. For example, instead of letting extra cheese dry up or go moldy, I freeze it and then turn it into cheese sauces or spreads. Even cream cheese, which falls apart when frozen.

Shred and chop vegetables. Admittedly, if you want consistent large pieces it's best to do them by hand, but not everything needs that. For example, homemade cole slaw is a breeze. (A tip for more-even small pieces is shred them first and then chop briefly.) With practice it is possible to produce attractive vegetable slices, but not all the slices will be acceptable, so I use the processor only for big slicing jobs.

As noted above, you can chop up your own meat -- important for chili where the meat should be coarser than ground. And fish for gefilte fish or quenelles, or even tuna loaf. Or use it to shred large amount of cheese (I'd rather use a hand grater for a small amount than clean the processor).

I bake low-carb and grain-free so I'm always grinding nuts (even the pre-ground ones can stand being made finer) as well as other ingredients. When I use canned fish (for savory breads) I puree the bones for more calcium. (Or for coarser things like salmon loaf, put the bones in first to puree them while leaving the flesh chunky.) For grain-based baking, it makes dough-making a breeze for even the heaviest or slackest doughs. And turn your stale bread into breadcrumbs.

What doesn't a food processor do well? Large amounts of liquid -- use a blender for that. Perfect cubes of any size. A high yield of perfect slices. And small jobs, like chopping up a few herbs or handful of vegetables, are best left to the mini-processors.

Hey Ruth, I received one for Christmas too and I have been whipping out dough for dinner rolls at least 3 times a week and yesterday I made dough for french bread. I'm really lovin' my FP as I couldn't make a yeast dough to save my butt and now I can in a matter of minutes.