Fun Attachments

Getting married comes with many perks, one being a registry.  We had a pile of gift cards left over once we owned everything we really needed for our kitchen.  While going through and deciding what would be a good use of the rest of our money we decided to get two kitchen-aid attachments.

The slicer/grater attachment has already served us well, and I haven’t yet made scalloped potatoes or potato chips.  We have grated a block of cheddar into a pile of toppings for some chili we made this weekend, and we grated some potatoes into hash browns for a treat on our snow day from school and work, and topped them with the cheese we grated.  This tool is very useful for large projects, slicing up even three potatoes is not always a blast, but can be done in seconds with this attachment, and since everything is dishwasher safe, you don’t even have to hand wash the knife!

The other tool we purchase was a meat grinder.  We were both kind of on the fence about this one.  However, I was sold when I found out it also did nuts and Jacob likes toys anyway.  I found out recently in an environmentalism class I’m taking that there can be meat from as many as 200 cows in one hamburger patty, also they are all the leftover pieces from other cuts of meat, yippee right?  Well, the first part is not so important if everything is cooked thoroughly, but the second part: who want’s the dregs of any animal? This way we can grind our own meat, and almost any cut would be better than all random pieces, or at least we think so.

Our third attachment, that my parents are lending us since they have a stone mill is a grain mill.  The wheat I must say, is incomparable to my parents, however we are able to use wheat berries as flour and that is the whole point.  There is a lot of bran, and when replacing wheat flour with white flour in recipes one must start in small increments and maybe increase the added flour to a third of the flour or so.  Never more than a half for normal recipes.  But wheat in cookies give them such a body.  My husband can just blow through a pile of cookies, but with just a little bit of wheat they sink in faster.  More filling, less food, sounds like a plan!

I feel like all of our attachments add to our kitchen experience.  They even help us get excited about exploring the little known (to us) world of cooking.  They also help us remove ourselves from pre-prepared foods, why should I make scalloped potatoes in a box if I have a slicer that will do all the hard work for me and my family can eat real potatoes.

Even though we had to pay a larger amount than, say, a box grater or a hand slicer, it uses the power of a machine we already own.  We just aren’t ready to buy a food processor and the need for one is diminished with these tools.

(As a side note: we do own a box grater, I don’t think it is replacable by a machine, zesting would be quite difficult on the machine, and sometimes one just doesn’t want to get out all the tools to grate enough cheese for one salad.)