Savings

This summer, one of my favorite stores closed. With it, came store closing sales. I went multiple times in June. I probably would have gone more but I was dealing with health issues so I wasn't as active as I normally am. 

On a Saturday where I was feeling better than normal, we went as a whole family and perused the store for a while. During this trip, I spotted a dicing attachment for my food processor which I had been contemplating buying for a while. I hadn't expected to see it because I assumed it would be one of the more popular items which would have been snagged up sooner than later. Who knew it would still be there at 30% off!

We bought it and stored it away in the kitchen cabinet, and it stayed there for a few months. Each time I thought about using it, I just decided I'd dice my vegetables by hand and it would be fine. Yes, it's true, dicing my vegetables by hand is fine, but I had spent money on this attachment and it was non-refundable. 

One morning, I was cooking after picking up the kids from school. For this particular recipe, I needed to dice four carrots, four celery sticks, and one onion. I decided that I would pull out my dicing attachment and use it instead of cutting these vegetables by hand. 

Now this was my first time using this attachment, and I had actually never looked into how to use it. So I spent the first 20 minutes looking up videos online on how to attach the pieces together. This attachment came with two pieces. One had the grid which does the dicing. The other piece has a slicing disk that spins around. So I had to watch a video to figure out how to insert them properly into my food processor bowl. 

The two pieces to my dicing attachment.

Once I assembled the food processor and had everything set up, it was smooth sailing from there. I was able to dice my four carrots, four stalks of celery, and a whole onion in a few minutes. 

Not a bad dice for an automatic tool. 

I wouldn't pass a chef exam dicing like this, but hey,  I'll take it.

Normally, I don't buy attachments like this because they usually make for more work, however, I'm kind of torn on this one. These are completely my own thoughts. This is not a paid review. 

Pros:

1. It dices well. The pieces are mostly uniform. They're not perfect, but it is definitely faster than I could do by hand.

2. I can put in whole sticks. This makes it especially convenient for carrots and celery. Other vegetables such as onions or potatoes would need a preliminary cut in order to get the shape to fit right through the feed tube. 

3. It saves my fingers. Never once did I have to worry about cutting myself with a knife. And I've done that a lot. 

4. It's really convenient for large batches of vegetables.

Cons:

1. Food gets stuck in the grid the very last round because nothing else follows behind to push it out. They do provide a tool for you to use to push food out, but it takes quite a bit of effort.

2. Not good if you want your food to look pretty. There were definitely some misshapen pieces, especially at the ends of each stick of food pushed through.

As someone who cooks a lot, I think this attachment will come in handy for me with specific recipes I make. I would definitely have to plan ahead because clean up is not the simplest so it needs to be worth my time to pull it out. I'm glad I have it and I will use it in the future. However, knowing what I do now, I'm 50/50 on if I would buy it again. 

This is only my first use of this attachment so maybe over time, I might feel differently. But I will say after using it the first time, I felt very satisfied in my "efficiency" and didn't have any blisters on my hand from using the knife. That's probably a huge value in itself.