OXO Good Grip Food Mill

I purchased this mill to process tomatoes into sauce. I have struggled for months to find a technique to make it easy to process raw tomatoes for spaghetti sauce. I tried cutting slices, I tried cutting square pieces, but it was a major effort. The mill would just spin them around and not catch them between the blade and the crank mechanism. This device is more suited for pieces that are the size of a pea or smaller. Cutting the equivalent small pieces with a knife is a watery mess. I even tried to hold the pieces still with a rubber spatula to catch the blade. This worked, but is extremely tedious. I tried boiling to remove the peels. Too much work. I was ready to give up on this device when I tried a final technique that works to my satisfaction. I take the tomato and remove the stem. Then I grate each tomato on a course grater into a bowl. I then take the grated pieces from the bowl and dump them into the mill. Whala! This works and is the fastest way I have found to process raw tomatoes into sauce. (Please note that most store sauces are now full of chemicals. All products being sold with High Fructose Corn Syrup have trace amounts of mercury in them! It's in there from the hydrochloric acid being used to process the syrup. The main process for creating hydrochloric acid uses mercury and it picks up trace amounts. Do your homework and you will see this is true. The American food supply has been compromised. Google "Senomyx flavor enhancers" and you will find other surprises.) My time decreased from 3 hours to 15-20 mins in processing 15 or so tomatoes! You can grate a tomato on a grater in about 20 seconds or less. The smaller pieces work well going through the mill and do not pass the skins. Hope this review helps to save you the same frustration I encountered. I'm not sure if this machine can be improved to process larger pieces. I will tell you now, large pieces will just spin. I personally ordered a squeezo machine to process larger quantities of tomatoes more easily. For small batches of tomato sauce, the technique I describe is satisfactory and has helped to improve my opinion of this machine. Mashed potatoes work fine as long as you cook the potatoes to complete softness. Worked good and cleanup is easy. Overall, it's a relative inexpensive way to process tomato sauces and mashed potatoes. Just realize you need small pieces for this machine to work optimal. This goes for potatoes too unless they are very soft.