My Favorite Small Kitchen Appliance

I'm always finding new ways to use my Kitchen Aid Mixer - it's my favorite, most useful small kitchen appliance (thanks Caroline!). I have a food grinder attachment and buy roasts on sale and grind them into hamburger for a fraction of the cost of lean ground beef. Now even Marc has learned to do this! We've made sausage too as you can see from a previous post and bread. I made pizza dough two nights ago, using our home made Italian sausage and it was delicious! If you want the dough recipe let me know.

So, I have this attachment that I think they call the Roto Slicer Shredder or something weird like that. It comes with four "drums" about 4 inches across on the front. I inherited it from Mom. I'm not sure what exactly she did with it - I think I recall her shredding cabbage to make coleslaw. It's stainless and aluminum but the new ones are made of plastic.

It's my new favorite toy in the kitchen. I used to have it squirreled away in the closet under the stairs and had to move 25 things to get it out so I rarely used it. I wasn't sure what I'd do with it anyway.

But now, in my quest to save money I found a fabulous use for it - grating cheese in bulk. I quit using pre-grated cheese a while back, not because of the cost, which is staggering if you do the math, but because they add something to keep the cheese from sticking together, and I can taste and feel it when I eat it. I used a hand grater which gets old fast. So now I buy cheese in bulk and if you pay attention you will find that it's on sale quite often. I just got several types for $2.99 per pound recently. I grate a whole block (1-2 pounds at a time) with the Roto Slicer Shredder thingy and it takes about 5 seconds! I store the cheese in a Pyrex refrigerator dish.

I remember Dad making potato chips when I was a kid and he used this gizmo. He was always making some really weird dish like potato chips or donuts. He never made run of the mill meals. So last night I wanted sweet potato oven fries but I got a wild idea that we'd have sweet potato chips! The potato I used was huge, so I had to cut it in half and I used the thin slicer drum and even though sweet potatoes are hard to slice it worked great! Most of the slices were paper thin, a few were a little thicker. I fried them in 350 degree oil in a cast iron pot until they were golden then drained them and sprinkled coarse (kosher) salt on them. We snacked on them while dinner was cooking - they were great with a beer... Even Marc, who does not like sweet potatoes, liked them.

So I wondered if the chips would be good today and they're still crisp so I will be having some with lunch.