Thank you, whoever you are.

We do not have a lot of appliances in our tiny kitchen, and in the absence of a stand-up mixer, our pastry cutter has become one of my favorite tools. It is great for mixing dough and is my favorite utensil for mashing homemade refried beans.

Pastry cutters are available in most stores that sell kitchen wares, and on Amazon they should run you around $10. Or you can do what we did and snag a good-as-new, heavy-duty pastry cutter at Goodwill that was discarded by either the family of someone who died or a person who just bought a stand-up mixer.