In the Kitchen With Mattie

I think I should tell you first that I am not someone who buys stuff from infomercials. I prefer to see and hold my purchases in my hand before I plunk down my money. That being said I saw this item at Sams on a recent shopping trip and said to my husband, I wonder if the boys would like these for themselves and their children. I picked it up off the shelf and the first thing I noticed is that although it is made of plastic (what isn’t these days?) it seemed to be made of a high quality thick sturdy plastic.

I belong to several Yahoo cooking groups and one of the owners of those lists then opened a group for the appliance so I joined the group. I listened for  actual users comments and noticed that they were happy with it’s performance, there wasn’t one complaint but most were just using it for smoothies. I monitored the group for almost a week.

On our next trip to Sams I put one in the cart, hubby just rolled his eyes. I knew what he was thinking…….in a house overcrowded with kitchen gadgets and machines why was I buying this.

On arriving home I unpacked the machine and various containers and washed them up. After they were dry I tried crushing ice, the machine performed flawlessly if a little loudly, but you would expect that level of noise as it is crushing/chopping ice. Next I peeled an onion and cut it in quarters, a few quick pulses and voila, finely chopped onion pieces and no mush or water. Onto celery, again a few quick taps and I had a chunky dice, a few more and I had finely chopped celery and no mush or water. I was beginning to love this machine!

Onto the potato test. We love potato pancakes…….real potato pancakes that is. You know the kind your grandmom made by shredding the potatoes on an old fashioned knuckle busting box grater. I have several other food processors here, and have never been able to turn out a pancake with any kind of distinction from any of them, they all over processed the potatoes, resulting in gluey pancakes no matter how carefully I monitored the machine, one extra pulse and glue was the result, one less pulse and you ened up with hard chunks of potato in the pancakes, I didn’t really expect this little Ninja to be able to do any better to tell the truth. I peeled a few potatoes and cut them into large chunks, dropped them into the blender jar and attached the motor. I was able to get a nice textured batter with a few taps of the hand. Were the pancakes the same as hand grated? Honestly, no. What they were, was a quite acceptable substitute when you have to make them for a crowd or your hands are a little tired from age. I had never been able to achieve a consistancy that close to hand grated before with any machine, and I have tried to for years.

Next I made a smoothie for hubby, he suddenly realized this house had a definite need for this new machine. His smoothie was SMOOTH with no ice chunks, just pure creamy texture from start to finish.

So I would say this has a definite place in the home if you like smoothies or protein shakes, or if you have a need for some quickly chopped celery, carrots, onion and so on. It is simple to operate and simple to clean, and even better, it does what it says it will!

 By the way it also made wonderful vegetable cream cheese in under 15 seconds, I won’t be paying almost $7 a container for it at the deli anymore!

Get one, you will love it

Mattie