Today we finally got over to Bed Bath & beyond with our welcome-to-the-neighborhood "20% off your entire purchase" coupon. With this, we obtained curtains and rods for our room, a new 14-cup Cuisinart food processor to replace my old 5-cup unit (which has a cracked driveshaft, held together by a field-expedient repair using safety wire and a Dremel tool), and a 6-quart, 600-watt Kitchenaid bowl-lift stand mixer. On top of the 20% off the Kitchenaid, we also get a mail-in offer for either a juicer attachment or a meat-grinder attachment, which is another $65 worth. I'm guessing we'll go with the grinder.
Chopping onions with the new Cuisinart is a breeze. With my old Cuisinart, you had to trim and peel the onion, cut it in half each way, drop the chunks of one small or half a medium or large onion in at a time, pulse about 20 times until chopped, scoop out, put the other half in, repeat. With the chopper attachment on my Braun stick blender, you have to trim, peel and pretty much cube the onion into about 3/4" chunks, and you cannot put in more than about half an onion at a time. With the new 14-cup, trim a large onion, peel, quarter, drop in and pulse 16 times or so and it's done, and it's easily got room to do probably three onions at once. (Not that I have a recipe that calls for three large onions in the quantities we'd ever cook it in.)
We're not sure about the color of the curtains ... they end up covering almost the entire wall, and may be too dark. They're a deep midnight blue, but it ends up just looking black. We may exchange them for a lighter color.