I'm a KitchenAid Slut

Hi. My name is Fern, and I'm a KitchenAid slut.

For years I eschewed getting this tool. I kneaded all my bread by hand. I mixed my batters by hand or with cheap, small, underpowered hand mixers. I was hands on! I was ecologically minded! I avoided using electricity and tools where they weren't needed!

Being .... me .... that is, cheap .... I go to a lot of garage sales (after mapping the newspaper listings out using a map, to save gas going from one to the next). A few years ago at a garage sale near city hall .... there was a Kitchenaid standing mixer for sale. With most of the most important part - the blending paddle, the dough hook, the whisk, the pouring shield. Wish it had the meat grinder, but.... Anyway, it was $70. I NEVER spend that much at garage sales. I tried to pass it up. I even called the husband, who said I was nuts if I DID pass it up.

How good a bargain is this? A friend of my friend Jess found one for Jess, sans the pouring shield, for $100, and Jess got teary over THAT bargain.

The Kitchenaid came home with me.

But it didn't get used.

I guess I was intimidated. Again, I had spent a LOT of money. But I had a history of doing my hand made foods .... literally by hand. It was new to me. It wasn't my tradition.

Fortunately, my son didn't have my history. He took a look at it, and took a look at a few episodes of America's Test Kitchen (ATK), and started baking. Chocolate cake, of course. With chocolate frosting (but for that he used the $6 garage sale food processor, that I also use).

I kind of snuck up on the idea of actually USING the thing by watching my son use it. And by watching Alton Brown use them on Good Eats, and Christopher Kimball use them on ATK.

It was the ATK recipe for Pizza Bianca that drove me to actually start using the mixer. Not that I exactly followed the recipe (forgive me, Christopher Kimball, for I have sinned. And I sinned beautifully). I used the mixer for the pizza dough, but did the toppings for the Chicken Flatbread pizza from our favorite (and now dead) restaurant, the Pomo Grill.

It rocked. It rocked unbelievably.

Today, I have two types of bread rising, both batches started in that Kitchenaid stand blender. Mixing and kneading is done in a fraction of the time of doing it by hand, and I'm never tempted to underknead.

I've become 'easy'. I'm just a Kitchaid Slut.

Frondly, Fern