Mix and Stir Friday Five

From Songbird over at RevGals:

In a minor domestic crisis, my food processor, or more precisely the part you use for almost everything for which I use a food processor, picked the eve of the festive season of the year to give up the ghost. A crack in the lid expanded such that a batch of squash soup had to be liberated via that column shaped thing that sticks up on top.

Can you tell this is not my area of strength?

Next week, I'm hosting Thanksgiving. I need your help. Please answer the following kitchen-related questions:

1) Do you have a food processor? Can you recommend it? Which is to say, do you actually use it?

Yep. Have one. Planning to use it tonight in the making of French Onion Soup (food processors are great for slicing large quantities of onions). It's just the classic Cuisinart one, without any fancy attachments. Oops...am now treading into the territory of question two:

2) And if so, do you use the fancy things on it? (Mine came with a mini-blender (used a lot and long ago broken) and these scary disks you used to julienne things (used once).)

I use the disks for slicing onions and other veggies, and for grating stuff (good to grate zucchini for zucchini bread). Right now, I'm missing the little white insert you put in the top to keep stuff from flying out. This is a bit of a problem, but placing a towel over the opening seems to be working fine.

3) Do you use a standing mixer? Or one of the hand-held varieties?

My KitchenAid standing mixer is my very favorite kitchen appliance. I love it. I use it all the time. I also have a KitchenAid hand-held mixer, good for smaller things like whipping cream. But for a big batch of cookies or bread, there's nothing like the standing mixer. It's one of my favorite Christmas gifts of all time. And one of the things which, when I saw it on my countertop, caused me to think, "Wow - I'm a grownup now."

And isn't that color delightfully retro?

The aqua is, admittedly, super cute. However, having grown up surrounded by harvest gold and avocado green appliances which were also 'super cute' in their heyday, I've decided to stick with white appliances. Even though there are a ton of charming colors in the land o' standing mixers.

4) How about a blender? Do you have one? Use it much?

Have one. (I was about to write that my excuse for having all these kitchen gadgets is being fairly recently married, thus the registry, but then I realized that I had all of these particular gadgets as a single person. No wedding gifts represented here at all. So I have no excuse, except that I really like to cook.) I probably use the blender less than any other kitchen appliance, but I have recently discovered a Winter Squash Soup recipe which requires use of the blender, and I love it. So said appliance may be getting more year-round use, branching out from its regular summer routine of margaritas and fruit smoothies.

5) Finally, what old-fashioned, non-electric kitchen tool do you enjoy using the most?

Well, now I do have to get into the wedding registry gift items. One of the great things we received was a set of very nice kitchen knives. I have to admit that, although I poo-pooed the expense of such knives for years (when I couldn't afford them, mostly), it turns out that a good knife is worth its weight in gold. We recently had them sharpened after four years of use, and I think we need to make that an annual event. I would give up a lot of other gadgety-type things for a good set of knives.

Bonus: Is there a kitchen appliance or utensil you ONLY use at Thanksgiving or some other holiday? If so, what is it?

This year will only be the second time we've hosted Thanksgiving, so I have no real traditions in that regard. But, growing up, we did have an electric knife which only came out for Thanksgiving, the use of which was utterly fascinating to the kids. I might have my dad bring that over just for old times' sake.