I love making salad dressings from scratch, and also love eating hummus but I make very small amounts of these things. I also plan to move soon and will be donating most of my kitchen stuff when I do, so I’d like something that could be well loved by a new owner. Is there anything out there that fits the bill? Or even better something I might already have that fits the bill? I don’t have a blender, either. Already donated that one.
I got an immersion blender recently that I’ve been loving. Small and easy to clean. Not sure about salad dressing but it definitely could do hummus.
An immersion blender could absolutely do salad dressing. It would even be overkill, I typically just do dressings in a small mason jar and shake them.
Some immersion blenders come with replaceable toolheads too, including a more traditional food processor style. I got a replaceable toolhead model, but no other attachments. Haven’t needed it. I got it for soups in my slow cooker, works well.
Edit: I think I might have seen that some blenders come with food processor attachments too? Don’t have one of those.
Consider a Magic Bullet! Or something similar - there are a bunch of small blenders out there designed for single-portion smoothies that fall in the $20-$40 range.
I forget what it’s called right now, but the 3.5 cup KitchenAid food processor gets a lot of use here. I generally don’t like to use food processors just because they’re so loud, but this one isn’t too bad. It’s quick! But it is small, so it has limited uses.
I would get that plus a cheap immersion blender. That’ll cover basically all of your needs for what you’re talking about.