"Jonathan Kamens" <jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us> wrote in message
news:g77kpf$2bm$1@jik3.kamens.brookline.ma.us...

> Having once again smelled the smoke of hand-mixer doom, we are
> once again in the market for a new one, and so I thought I'd
> post and ask: is there a mixer on the market that won't give
> up the ghost after a few years (and if so where can we get
> it), or are we doomed to continue contributing to the
> ever-growing global waste disposal problem as long as we want
> to keep making chocolate chip cookies?
>

Well, I use either a pastry cutter
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Pastry_Cutter) or a potato masher,
which I think works better than a pastry cutter, to cream the butter and
eggs together, then a wooden spoon to stir in the chocolate chips and the
optional nuts. Neither of those things burn out.

I have mixed the cookies using an electric device like a mixer or food
processor from time to time, but it is neither faster nor "easier" than
using the hand tools, at least in my opinion. It is just more clean up.

You can even mix the chips in with your hands as the following recipe
recommends: http://theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/...p?RecipeID=111. I
have never done it that way, but I would highly recommend washing your hands
before doing the mixing, even though you washed your hands, or at least
should have, before you started cooking.

I don't know if you use the mixer for something else, but the bottom line is
that cooking had been done with hand tools for a lot more of human history
than power tools, and quite often, they are actually the better choice
(though one time I tried making mayonnaise with a whisk, and that is just
for the birds).

Brian Christiansen