I've been using my food processor like a maniac over the past few days, and realized I was remiss in talking about it.

It's a remanufactured Kitchenaid that I got a deal on from Amazon in the summer of last year, after breaking my old crappy Wolfgang Puck-branded food processor that I broke trying to make bread crumbs.

Twelve cup bowl, four cup mini-bowl, 700 watt motor, and the usual array of rarely-used accessory blades.

Just between Friday and Monday, I (or we) used this for making the ketchup (which needs to go in the processor twice), the pasta dough, the pasta filling, and a batch of the avocado-mango sauce.

Hummus, of course. The whole reason I replaced the food processor when I broke the first one was because I tried making it without one and was fucking miserable. I don't use it for chopping vegetables often, because a knife cleans up faster, but the exceptions are the vegetables for guacamole or salsa, which I want to be a fairly uniform size and all go together anyway.

Aiolis, of course, now that I know how to make them. Fuck whisks right in their whisk-holes.

Also, and this is a bit of a dirty secret, grating cheese. Not often, but when I need a lot of grated cheddar and I don't want to buy pregrated (or forgot to)? Dig out the grating disk, chop the cheese into feed-hole sized chunks, so to speak, and grate away. Does the last bit smear all over the top of the disk? Yes it does. Do I care? No I don't.

If you're buying a food processor, the first thing you want to look for is how many buttons it has. If it's more than three, it is fucking with you. On. Off. Pulse. Get the biggest one you can manage, and if you can get a minibowl with it, even better. But coping with a bowl that's too big is easier than coping with one that's too small, and 12 cups seems like a lot until you're filling it.

I figure about half the stuff in my kitchen, if someone broke in and stole it tomorrow, I'd live without it for quite some time, and only replace it if it was required for a specific dish. If my food processor vanished tomorrow, I'd be poking around on Amazon or hunting down those Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupons. Or probably both.