I have never seen a soup-maker; they must be a Brit thing.

The hand-held stick blender is my go-to gadget for almost anything to be puréed. Like Steve Shaw, I'm a lazy beast; cleaning the food processor or the blender is a cumbersome task that I will do almost anything to avoid.

I have to admit, however, that both gadgets earn their stable space with certain dishes that are delicious but (in my opinion) hell to make the manual way. Top of the list is pesto; I have made it by hand, with a mortar and pestle, and all I can say is Never Again. Decent pesto can be made in a blender, I'm told, but when I tried it, we ended up with green goo on the kitchen ceiling. Enter the Kitchen Aid food processor: a hulking machine of great capabilities that -- thank God -- also makes terrific pesto. When the manual meat-grinder kept falling apart, it turned out to be good for forcemeat, too, if the ingredients are half-frozen and you go easy on the pulse button. I also confess to using it to blend pastry and the crumble topping for baked fruit dishes. (Baking is not my forte.)

As for the blender, the thing it does that keeps it in the house is the frozen daiquiri. The frozen strawberry daiquiri, to be precise, which is the thing I really, really want after completing three batches of strawberry jam in one hot Saturday in mid-July. Jam recipes always say to use so many quarts of fruit, but however precise I think I am at the market, I always end up with about three extra pints of strawberries; not enough for a batch of jam, but too many for two people to just sit down and eat. (Your mileage may vary.) The answer to this (First World) problem is the strawberry daiquiri: ya get drunk, and your anti-oxidants and vitamin C all in the same delicious package.