This is one of those appliances that you see used all the time on cooking shows. For some reason, we almost never use ours. With all the telescoping plastic interlocking pieces, it seems like a lot of work to clean up. You can grate cheese by hand faster than you can clean up a cuisinart. I hear it is good for pie crust—for getting the dough to pea-size consistency before you proceed to work by hand. I usually just use a handheld dough cutter.
The food processor I do use is our little Black and Decker Oscar. I use it for chopping almonds for my English Toffees each year. Even though I chop about 10 pounds, I still use the little Oscar instead of our larger cuisinart. Maybe one year I'll see if the larger one chops just as well without creating too many fine particles. I think the reasoning is that if I overprocess, it is limited to a small amount.
Bottom line is that these little processors, though usually lacking in slicing or grating attachment blades, do just as well for most chopping jobs as their larger counterparts for a fraction of the cost. Cleanup is simple and they take up very little space.
