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Spanakopita filling tastes good in other kinds of crust besides phyllo dough.

ell.victor:

All those things that food processors can replace - whisk, pastry cutter, grater, mortar and pestle - are also smaller than a food processor and easier to clean.

And more time-consuming to use. And if you have any kind of RSI, as I do, a machine to exert brute force is a godsend. And we all have days when we just don't have the energy to cook, and sometimes a food processor will stretch your remaining energy just far enough.

In short, I'm with lemons:

When I bought it, I felt as though I had bought a fur coat.

Amen. I've owned a food processor for about half of my adult life. My first was a Cuisinart, and I think it was purchased after the firm had gone downhill for a while. I had to start replacing parts after about a year. I finally gave it up when we were homeless for a while. It did have an attachment specifically for whipping egg whites and cream, which worked OK. I now use my stick blender for those tasks.

A few years ago I bought a Kitchenaid, which has held up much better than the Cuisinart did. Its most frequent task is kneading bread dough, which I simply do with the chopping blade (I've never been impressed with dough blades; I don't see why their blades are so short.) Most any other dough goes in there, too.

Oh, and quarts of homemade salsa in tomato season, and fresh fruit (or cucumber!) sorbets in the summertime, hashbrowns any time of the year. "Mashed" potatoes, too - boil and grate 'em, then stir in cream and butter and all that. The chopping blade would just turn them to glue.

And another vote for hummus (almost typed "yummus" :)). A food processor makes it cheap enough to be a fridge staple. Wow, I could sure go for a hummus/cucumber sandwich on homemade bread right now :D

seriousb,

We have the "mini" processor bowl insert for our KitchenAid food processor, and I don't think we have EVER used it -- you have to clean the big bowl too, every time you use it!

I'm extremely sensitive to onion fumes, and yet I adore onions - so I use the mini-bowl for those times I need to chop one onion, and it's a godsend. The big bowl gets a quick rinse, the mini-bowl gets washed in the usual way.

The thing is, it occurred to me that the food processor blades are at least equally dangerous. You can't leave either out.

Absolutely right. I didn't have the cash for a big fancy blade caddy, so I keep my slicing and grating blades in a breadpan in a cupboard; they stand on edge quite politely. The chopping blade lives in the processor bowl or on the shelf. (For what it's worth, when I cut myself in the kitchen, it's always on a knife; I believe I've cut myself once on a food processor blade in the twenty-five or so years I've been working with them.)

The one attachment I halfway regret buying is a julienne blade; I think I've used it twice since I bought it.

Liverwurst on good sturdy whole-grain bread with a little onion sounds heavenly to me right now. It's been about two years since I had any at all, so it's about time. Every few years I just have to have it – then I tire of it, about the time I finish an 8-oz. package.

Selections are limited here in California, but even Farmer John's in the half-pound chub will do, when the fit is on me.

(I'm reading this the day after.) Last night we had an almost-vegetarian pot pie: cabbage and leeks, mostly, with fresh herbs, topped with Mark Bittman's savory tart crust.

With that went an improvised dish of okra, tomatoes, onion, garlic and more herbs, and a little too much cayenne. No water; the tomato juices were just enough liquid. Okra isn't slimy if you don't boil it to death; it's succulent and picks up savory flavors easily.

Tonight we'll finish that okra with some simple white beans with fresh herbs and shavings of a local Parmesan-like cheese.

All cooked in the solar oven for about 5 hours. I love my solar oven (www.solarovens.org).

Ohdeargod, home ec class. Well, mine was circa 1968 or '9. Believe it or not, I was mistakenly assigned to a shop class on the basis of my first name, an uncommon feminine variant on a common masculine name. I thought it might be cool to learn to handle a soldering iron and all that stuff, but I took one look through the classroom door and knew I just couldn't face a crowd of middle-school boys. So I backed down.

Anyhow, home ec class was pretty bad. The cooking program took two sessions to produce a beverage made of powdered milk, sugar and some sort of flavoring (cocoa powder?) This was by way of getting up to speed, I suppose. By the end of the semester, we were more or less up to producing some kind of complete meal, and for dessert were allowed to choose between some kind of fruit pie (I think) and "potato pie." I chose the fruit, but when the "potato pie" turned out to be sweet potato pie, I was disgusted at the opportunity I had missed.

The sewing wasn't much better. We did far too much fiddling with bias tape. Other girls managed to produce creditable headscarves - a little triangle of fabric with bias-tape straps to tie under the chin - but mine was a thread-snarled horror. I simply could not figure out the thread tension – or how to get help.

About the child-care segment I remember nothing, except noticing a difference in dialect between my white Caucasian and black African-American classmates: the way they pronounced the letter "R" (not the sound /r/, but the way they said the name of the letter. Most of the African-American girls in the class were from the South, I suspect). So one day, during one of these dull and incoherent lectures on child care, I passed around a note: "Say the letter R." I confirmed my observations, momentarily bewildered the teacher, and got a scolding.

Around this time – maybe even at the same time – my mother took over my domestic science education. On a Necchi sewing machine, she guided me through the process of making a culotte jumper, for which I chose an eye-popping brick-red corduroy with a paisley print. It fitted perfectly and I wore it till I outgrew it.

Oh, and she was teaching me to cook from her wall-o-cookbooks – dishes like Potatoes Anna, sauce hollandaise, pepper steak.

When I was in my teens, my mother did her level best to turn me into a foodie - and it worked, but not for about ten years.

I married young, and detoured into an intense and evangelistic health food phase. It didn't kill us, but we did eat some weird crap. None of it, however, was actually revolting. And I did learn some things about vitamins and minerals.

Then I devolved, until our meal rotation was based on things like "meatless lasagne" - which had no lasagne in it. You simply mixed elbow macaroni, canned minestrone, plenty of cheese, canned whole tomatoes, and the ingredients for a halfway decent low-rent spaghetti sauce. Then you baked it until it was hot and the cheese melted. It was stodgy, gloppy and bland rather than actively revolting.

I was in the middle of assembling my umpteenth batch one evening when I realized, "My mother would be ashamed to serve this. I know what real food tastes like. I need some cookbooks! The next week I subscribed to Sphere - like Gourmet, only less intimidating - and never looked back. So, yeah, I guess I'm grateful to that cheap, retro casserole for shaming me into cooking real food again.

Well, let's see. Something like they say to my face: "Mom, you're a genius." "Today's bento was delicious." "If I could cook one-quarter as well as you do, I'd be a very happy man [Daughter's boyfriend]." "Yes, that's the way [name of dish] is supposed to taste."

And yet my cooking is so much simpler than it was even a few years ago.

Well, I believe "all food aspires to a state of barbecue," so I've been putting smoked paprika into almost all my savory dishes lately. And we're mostly vegetarian. It's great in almost any bean dish or even a vegetable stir-fry with, say, a little oyster sauce.

I also like garam masala in spice cake and similar baked goods. Or in a carrot-raisin salad. I've been promising my family garam masala date bread for Christmas for about ten years now, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Stir them into a pot of rice. Add a little cream if necessary. Would probably work with white beans, too.

Make a savory "upside-down cake" with a batch of biscuit dough.

Serve them as a side dish with your next roast or other slab-o-meat.

A few years ago, one of those knockoff cookware companies was selling something called a "Pancake Puffs" pan with a set of cheap plastic accessories - but the pan itself was a good sturdy cast-iron aebleskiver pan. I waited till after Christmas that year and snapped one up for ten bux. Never regretted it. I generally make up a batch of cornbread batter, or this sweet potato pancake recipe - http://bit.ly/2mfb2n - for "skeevers," as we call them at our house. Mind you, I use 1 c. flour, 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda, and a little salt instead of the pancake mix.

If it's a kabocha, it'll bake up a little dry. Braising is probably better. Kabocha are wonderful sweet squashes. There's one sitting in my kitchen at this moment, making Bambi eyes at me.

Somehow I keep finding myself sitting down to a quesadilla (homemade). That and tomato sandwiches, á la Harriet M. Welsch.