Food processors are cool kitchen appliances that dice, chop, puree, shred, mash, knead, grind and pretty much do all the "hard labor" in the kitchen. Taken from the idea of a French industrial blender used by chefs from France, the food processor as we know it today burst into the kitchen scene in the seventies and now, it continues to be a handy appliance to have around.

If you don't have one yet, it's time you should consider getting this all-in-one kitchen tool. You don't have to get a professional grade processor-- one with a 10 cup capacity operating on 400 watts of power works well for most family recipes. If you're still not convinced, here are the advantages of having a food processor around:

1. It takes the toil out of cooking. Face it: All the shredding, dicing and mashing makes cooking the difficult thing that it is. Before you can get the soup done, you have to slave hours on the chopping board just to get the veggies sliced to the desired thinness. If you're not careful or are simply not used to using a knife, you could cut yourself sooner or later, making a bloody mess of your ingredients and banning yourself from cooking for life. With a food processor, you don't even have to learn the difference between chopping, dicing or slicing. Just put in the correct blade and voila! You're on your way to cooking like a pro.

2. Food processors make salsas, dips and spreads easy to prepare. Recipes for these favorites require a lot of fine chopping and grinding that take up a lot of your time and patience. If you've got unexpected guests over and only have chips and bread to serve them with, food processors allow you to jazz up your presentation quickly and deliciously with your own homemade spreads and dips.

3. Food processors allow you to make pizza dough and bread. Can't believe it? Well, the only way to prove this to yourself is to try it out. A dough blade that you can buy as an attachment to your processor mixes and kneads the dough for you so you don't have to tire your arms in the process. Not only is this a good opportunity for kids to help out in the kitchen, it's also the perfect way to ensure that your pizza dough is kept fresh and the bread you eat is made only of the most natural ingredients around, with no MSGs or preservatives.

4. Food processors make the cooking process easier and faster so you can do other important things. The length of food preparation time for family meals is what makes career moms or even those who run home based businesses resort to preparing canned, frozen or heavily processed food that's unhealthy. Bacon can simply be fried and there's no quicker way to eat a tuna than simply to eat it straight from the can. But the more processed their food gets, the more your loved ones expose themselves to all sorts of diseases. Since the food processor does all the "dirty work" in the kitchen, cooking from fresh ingredients becomes a breeze.

5. Food processors actually encourage healthy living. Because cooking becomes a cinch, it's easy to prepare healthy and delicious meals with the food processor. Soups with carrots, potatoes and other vegetables only take a matter of minutes to prepare. And making a fruit and cheese platter with all the right slices that appeal to both our appetites and that of our little ones is way easy.