Jason & Susan

One of the privileges of being upper-middle class residents of Shanghai, in addition to being a DINK (double income no kids) family, is that we have quite a bit of spending cash to purchase frivolous things like a food processor. We got ourselves a Braun CombiMax K600 last weekend. No, this is not frivolous at all! This is a life saver! As you all know, one of us has a very limited diet, eliminating 99% of the food in China. Every visit to the U.S. means 10 trips to Trader Joe’s and Whole Food to stock up on truckloads of organic, gluten-free items. Unfortunately, our carrying capacity across the Pacific is limited, so after the stock is depleted, the alternative is to shop in overpriced import stores like Pines and City Shop.

Now all this will change with our new best friend. There’s so much we can do with our new food processor!

This is a list of some of the different things we can do/make with the food processor:

• Chop onions ~ ah, the tears of joy!
• Ground chicken (cannot find except in overpriced import stores)
• Organic homemade peanut butter
• Fresh apple sauce
• Our very own Cold Stone Creamery
• Shaved ice
• Knead bread dough
• Make our own meatballs
• Easy meatloaves
• Turnip cake (萝卜糕）
• Chopping napa cabbage for dumplings
• Grating cheese
• Easy Thai salad
• Cheap baby food!! (although not applicable to us)

The possibilities are endless!! This is all very exciting! Not only can we make special food, the food processor saves us so much preparation time! Two weeks ago when we had a dumpling party, it took a LONG time to chop up the napa cabbages! We had another dumpling party this weekend using the leftover ingredients from last time. It took the food processor about 2 minutes to chop up 2 super large napa cabbages!!

Tonight, Susan bought some organic peanuts from Carrefour to test whether she can make peanut butter using the food processor. Indeed, it was half creamy half chunky organic peanut butter that has the same quality (or almost) as the p.b. from Trader Joe’s!

Wow ~ life before the food processor . . . how did we ever survive?!

If any one is interested in getting a food processor, the Braun K600 was purchased for 715 RMB + 25 RMB shipping from Taobao.com. Susan would be more than happy to help you with the purchase.