Advice on food processors, please [View All]

[Kolesar]

I received a "Little Cuisinart" food processor as a gift several years ago. It had a bowl about five inches across. My experience with it was that pieces of vegetables that I put into it hardly got diced. The blades just sort of hacked and beat them up around the edges. I would end up with about half of the veggies being a nicely-diced size and the other half being these large pieces that I had to take out of the bowl and chop up on the cutting board.

I read the directions and the directions said that one must pre-chop the vegetables on a cutting board before placing them in the food processor to get a consistent size. I tried that and got better results. However, for what I was cooking (huge batches of veggie burritos), I decided that I could get just the right chop size with a knife and a cutting board. I switched back to using a cutting board and sold the Little Cuisinart at a garage sale when I moved.

I found a recipe for jalapeno sauce and it calls for a food processor. I am sure the Little Cuisinart could have pureed the sauce satisfactorily, but it's gone. I need to puree soon, now that my jalapenos are ripening.

My questions would be:
(1) Can I use the margarita blender for the jalapeno sauce instead of a food processor?
(2) If I had had a bigger Cuisinart, would I have not had the problem of inconsistent chop-size that I had with the Little Cusinart?