Kitchen Appliances

Basic Kitchen Appliances

Small Appliances:
- Food Processer: This a great tool and one I use frequently. It can chop, slice, grate, shred, grind, mix, puree, and even make bread dough.
- Blender: Perfect for making smoothies, pureeing soups, mixing drinks, mixing herbal tinctures, and crushing ice. You can purchase them with either glass, plastic or metal containers. If you plan to use your blender for making herbal concoctions, consider purchasing a heavy duty model that won’t burn up when you throw in a hunk ginger root or horseradish inside.
- Mixer: You can either purchase a hand held model or a stand alone model. Some mixers come with a stand but allow you to remove the stand.
- Crock Pot: Ideal for slow cooking soups and stews or any recipe that requires long slow cooking.
- Toaster: Used for toasting sliced bread or bagels and other breakfast foods. If you have children, purchase a model that has a cool touch exterior.
- Toaster Oven: This is a small oven that sits on top of your counter, although some models will mount underneath a cupboard. The toaster oven acts like a mini oven and can be used for baking, toasting bread, broiling and top browning. Ideal for small cooking jobs.
- CoffeeMaker: This appliance can be used for more than brewing coffee, it works great for loose leaf tea as well.
- Nut Grinder: A small hand held appliance just big enough to grind nuts.

Large Appliances
- Range: A freestanding unit that combines a cook top and oven. You can purchase models for gas or electric. Oven can have features such as self cleaning while some models even have a warming oven included. You can choose a cooktop that features grill and/or griddle as well.
- Wall Oven: These can either be single or double oven units and can offer self cleaning, coventional cooking and convection cooking. A convection oven use a fan to ciculate the hot air around the oven for more even cooking. Great for bakers.
- Cook Top: A cooking surface that is built into the counter top. They come in a variety of surface options including: gas, coil element, solid disk element, glass ceramic, and induction. Induction means that a magnetic field is created with the cookware so food gets hot but the surface stays cool. These models are very safe, but very expensice and only works with iron or steel cookware.
- Microwave Ovens: You can purchase models that sit on the counter top or ones that take the place of range hoods and in a variety of sizes ranging from small to large.
- Refrigerator: When purchasing a refigerator look for the yellow and black Energy- Guide label for comparison shopping. You can purchase either top mounted freezers, side-by-side, or botton mounted freezers. Bottom mounted freezers tend to be more energy efficient and side-by-side refigerators are the least cost effective to operate.
- Chest and Upright Freezers: Always compare the Energy Efficiency Guides among different models before making your final decision when buying. Chest freezers are more efficient that upright models.
- Automatic Dishwashers: If you are planning to purchase a new dishwasher look for one that meets your needs. New models have many different features such as no rinse required, delay start, adjustable racks, no heat drying, special cycles, and more.