Hoo-Hah: It slices, it dices
There’s a lot of stuff out there to help you cut up your veggies. TV infomercials are chock full of these hoo-hahs.
Case in point: The Chop N’ Slice. Chances are, the same 
manufacturer has several names for this chopper/slicer/dicer thingy. But for now we’ll call it by the name I know it.
Note the old, slimy onion nestled under the lid in the back of the device. The problem here, though, is that the wrong blade grid is inserted, and what these people don’t know is that the grid is used to dice, not chop. That’s bad Karma, as they soon discovered.
The Chop N’ Slice is a nice name, but this device is low on my totem pole of interest. It is supposed to make short work of chopping, slicing or dicing your veggies, but it’s a little bit like buying an electric duck — you’ll never get a quack out of it. With this device, you’ll never get a recognizable veggie out of it — sliced, diced or chopped.
Here, we bump into lesson No. 1:
1. Always use the chopping grid for chopping and the dicing grid for dicing.
Followed by lesson No. 2:
2. Don’t use a slimy onion. I mean, really, they’re cheap, and there’s no valid household reason to let your onions grow leaves in/near the pantry.
My mom, did, however, come up with why letting your onions go to seed is good idea: You can cut off the “leaves” and put them in what you’re cooking. “They’re just like the wild onions you find alongside the road,” she said. Well, that may be true, but what I’ve also heard is that, along the roadside, “Where Bambi goes, nothing grows.” And I, for one, don’t want extra seasoning in my salad.
But I digress.
What comes with the Chop N’ Slice:
1. Metal grids to chop and dice
2. A plastic insert with a thin, metal blade to slice stuff; like a cucumber, potato, your finger.
3. A base which has marks on the side to tell you how many cups of stuff you’ve managed to wrangle out of the chopping/slicing/dicing process.
4. A plastic veggie holder to allow you to hold the veggie as you slice your way to Vegetable Nirvana. Back and forth. Back and forth. Yawn.
Real-world analysis:
I could just say here, “get a knife,” but I decided, for the benefit of my blog’s audience, to go through the process of attempting to actually cut an onion. Once I got past the “you’ve got the wrong blade grid” step, I found that a slimy onion does not cut well under any circumstance, and I would wager that even a fresh onion wouldn’t fare any better. And, if you think you’re going to slice a WHOLE onion; think again. It would take the muscles of Hercules to push the lid down to effect the cutting of the onion. I found it better to cut up the onion into quarters (4 quarters equals $1, of course), and then “slice” each quarter-onion separately.
In fact, slicing anything in this device is difficult. I didn’t have any luck with a carrot (this wasn’t slimy, but would have been if I had tried this machine a couple of weeks into the future). All I managed to do is to make the carrot flatter.
Cleaning:
Once you’ve mangled your veggie to your satisfaction with this device, you clean the contraption with what I call a “pick comb” (you ladies know what I’m talking about). If you have an extra one or two hours on your hands, you can use this “comb” to pick your veggie remains from the chopping and dicing cutting blades and plastic parts of the device. I found the process to be onerous, and I would let Fido lick the veggies off, if it were not for the sharp blades (not that he couldn’t lick off just the plastic parts. OK, never mind).
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