RSS Aggregation/reposting in WordPress

I’m sure this is a very simple question, but I’ve never had to do it before, and I’m a quasi noobie (not a tech–I got my degree in philosophy for god knows what reason–but not quite an idiot)

I know how to do a php include for rss feeds in the sidebar, but the feed would have to be sequential (ie 2 item feeds from X feed, 2 from Y feed etc…), but what I really want to do is to have a list of the 5 most current rss entries (including a limited amount of text content [~20 chars]) for the rss feeds that I personally specify.

How can I do that? I’ve searched many of the prominent plugins, and they lack one feature or another usually. Have I missed one?

Hope you guys can help! The key here is SIDEBAR and MULTIPLE sources– I could do this if I wanted them as syndicated posts or as separate feeds.

Thanks!

-Mike