Kitchen-Aid Mixers - The Potluck Chef's Best Friend

The Mighty Kitchen-Aid Mixer!

If you do potluck cooking, you are frequently called upon to prepare food in mass quantities. You can do this, of course, with quite ordinary kitchen have a lot of time on Friday's to get something ready for the church potluck next day, then I'm here to tell you....

Industrial strength kitchen tools are essential!

The one I'm going to talk about today is the inimitable Kitchen-Aid mixer. Let me warn you they are NOT cheap. We inherited ours from a friend when she passed away or I would never have known the joys of having the mighty Kitchen-Aid in our stable of kitchen tools.

This powerful and versatile stand mixer allows you to prepare stuff in a hurry or to multi-task, something we all have had to do when getting ready to feed hungry visiting academy choir. Here are some things specific to potluck preparation the size and power of the Kitchen-Aid allows you to do.

1. Bread-making - You can go off and leave the dough hook kneading your while you peel potatoes and prepare the baking pan for your rolls or bread loaves.
2. Potatoes - Great for whipping up enormous batches of mashed potatoes or potato salad.
3. Cakes -  Homemade cakes and cobblers are easy to whip up with a stand mixer. Just toss all the ingredients into the mixing bowl and run with the batter attachment. You can do other stuff while the ingredients are mixed up.
4. Vege-Meat/Food Grinder - The Kitchen Aid has a power hub and a bunch of attachments including a meat grinder. If you've  made up some gluten "wheat meat" or just want to make burgers out of something else like choplets or vegetable steaks. Just run it through and you've got burger.
5. Cookies and biscuits - For heavier mixtures like cookie or biscuit dough, the batter attachment is a whole bunch easier for blending in shortening with flour and eggs and stuff of different consistencies. Makes a big bunch of biscuits or five or six dozen cookies.
6. Whipped cream and meringue - For stuff that needs to be whipped up or beaten for a lengthy period like pudding, a mixer like this is great. With the whipping attachment, you can go off and leave it whipping while you work on something else. Works great.
7. Pasta - There's a pasta-making attachment that lets you make all sorts of homemade pasta like
   
   spaghetti, egg noodles and lasagna noodles
8. Ice Cream Maker - You can even make homemade ice cream with the ice cream attachment. Saves all that hand cranking or using the more awkward electric version of the hand-cranker. Great for small group parties or you can make it up and freeze enough for a potluck.
9. Grain Mill - The grain mill attachment allows you to make flour from a variety of whole grains - oats, rice, soy, flax, almond, corn, and even dried coconut. Multi-grain bread is a lot of fun to experiment with and you can get all sorts of grains and nuts in the bulk foods section of many grocery stores.
10. Food Processor - There is even a food processor attachment for chopping up vegetables and stuff.  Saves you some room on your counter and the attachment hardware is one tough magilla, unlike so many stand-along food processors.  

 

If you've got work to do, this invaluable tool helps you cook faster and better. The Kitchen-Aid is the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner of kitchen tools. Man, you gotta get yourself one of these!

© 2017 by Tom King

Making Meal and Flour with a Blender.

The Old Osterizer in Action

Here's a neat trick for adding a nice nutty touch to your vegetarian potluck dishes.

If you find yourself in possession of a quantity of pecans, flax seed, walnuts or practically any tasty nut sort of thing, you don't have to spend extra buying it in a meal form suitable for cooking. You can do it in your blender.

My first experiment was with a bag of flax seed someone gave me which I had no idea how to use. Someone on my Facebook page told me about this and it works great.

Simply crank up your blender, pour the seeds through the little hole thing in the lid while the blender is going and the blender will quickly reduce the seeds or nuts to a nice consistent meal.

I use pecan meal in all sorts of oatmeal patties and loaf dishes and used to be able to get big buckets of pecans back in Texas. Not so much up here in the Pacific Northwest. So if any of you want to box up some Texas pecans and send me a care package, I would not be unhappy, just so you know.

You can also use your blender to make flour for your multi-grain bread.  Just toss in some oats (rolled or instant it doesn't matter), some rice or other grain and run the blender for a while and it will reduce it all to a nice smooth flour-like texture suitable for baking in bread, noodles or biscuits - pretty much anything you're brave enough to put in your recipes by way of experimentation.


Learning this technique gave my blender a new job now that my daughter sent me a Ninja smoothie making thing. I'd almost decided to retire my stainless steel blender. This gives me an excuse to keep this macho machine on the cabinet and it would be such a shame to hide this beautiful kitchen tool in the cabinet.

Voila!  Flax Seed Meal!