Mixin' It Up Must Have

As most of you know I'm soon heading to Toronto to be with my sister and her family while they welcome their newest addition.  As such I've promised friends and family who won't be able to attend the birth, I'll be baby blogging non stop while I'm there...  So before all the baby post flooding starts, I thought I would write a quick post about something that is definitely on my must have list! 

Last Christmas there was a Kitchenaid Mixer under the tree for Jon and I.  I didn't really understand all the fuss over these babies until I used mine!  There is nothing it can't do from making pizza dough, to mixing up all types of batters... and it's taken all the guess work out of getting the right consistency with icings and meringue.  I absolutely love this mixer!  (And Jon loves the tasty treats that I whip up with it!)

My favorite thing about the mixer though, is my favorite thing about most things... Accessories!!!  There are SO many cool accessories to this mixer that I have got to get my hands on!  Here are my top 3!

The first one is kind of a two-fer.  It's The Fruit & Vegetable Strainer & Food Grinder Attachment.  This is the food grinder with the attachment for a fruit and veggie strainer (Yes... an accessory for an accessory!!)  This would be such a life safer to have with a little one around.  When the day comes, Jon and I plan to avoid processed food for our kids as much as possible, and will mostly be staying away from the store bought bottled "Gerber" style stuff.  We both really like the theory of baby eats what we eat...  So this is definitely a handy little gadget for when that day comes, both for grinding up meats, pastas etc, and for fruits and veggies to make a homemade applesauce without all the sugar and junk thrown in.  Not to mention, it would be perfect for puree-ing pie fillings, and other baked yummies.  

Kitchenaid is clearly after my own heart, because they have an accessory, for the accessory of the accessory...  Yeah, this is the Food Tray.  It just sits atop the Strainer & Food Grinder to give you a bigger surface area and be able to put more food through at once.  All about the optimization!  

And finally, my last mixer must have is the grater and slicer attachment.  There is nothing I hate more that grating...  I have no idea why, but I just really feel like we should be farther along as a society and should have come up with a better way to get little shreds of food rather than scrapping it repeatedly over a metal board.  Maybe that's just me...  But this, I love... and it slices too!!  Easy peasy salads all the time!!  Love love love!!

I think Kitchenaid saw me coming when they designed this mixer.  The list goes on and on for the accessories you can put on this thing.  At the end of the day these ones are the ones I think are most useful, and the ones that will actually get pulled out and used.  Yeah... they had to have seen me coming...