New gadgets!

A few new kitchen gadgets arrived at our door recently and we are excited to put them to use.  We purchased a mandoline/food slicer for uniformly cutting fruits and veggies to dehydrate.  We also picked up a few more Paraflex non-stick sheets for the dehydrator  - the two that came with the dehydrator are always in use now that we know how easy it is to make fruit leather!  How exciting that we will soon be using all 5 dehydrator trays at once!! 

The third gizmo is a spiral slicer and we put that to work last night to make dinner.  The spiralizer (a dark green contraption that looks like the microscopes I used in High School Biology class) has 4 blades to create a variety of spiral thicknesses.  Last night we whittled two zucchini squashes down to a bowl of zucchini "pasta"! (top right in the photo)  To top our "pasta" was tomato basil sauce (Vitamix blended shallot, balsamic vinegar, sundried tomato, olive oil, and garlic) .  The sauce comes out quite thick, more of a paste, and is very tasty!  Our makeshift spaghetti with sauce was really good and packed with vitamins!  To the left of the sauce we have guacamole which we put on romaine lettuce leaves for a refreshing wrap.  Also on the plate of lettuce are tomato crackers we made on Sunday night with a few fresh tomatoes, sesame seeds, flax seeds, and seasonings.  The meal was eclectic and tasty and we followed it up with a fruit and spinach smoothie for dessert!  Yum!

Throughout all of our preparations Shep kept his distance from the ruckus of blending and slicing!

Weekly Update

While Jay looked forward to a weekend of resting after a hectic work-week, I headed up to Newberg Saturday morning to babysit Karsyn.  It is amazing how much she changes in between my visits!  I've made Karsyn a few hats along the way and have grand plans to make a Newsboy-style crocheted hat for her.  I brought my yarn along and got to work.  Turns out my yarn was too big and needle too small, so it made for an awkwardly huge hat for her little head!  I will be attempting this again with some different supplies and hopefully the outcome is much more appropriate! 

    On Sunday we checked out a new brew pub in town and watched the US vs Canada hockey game.  I'm not a huge hockey fan, and frankly I can hardly tell where the puck is most of the time, but the food was good and so was the company, so it was an enjoyable afternoon!  And if you're ever not sure, I can tell you that buffalo wing sauce on french fries is a wonderful combination! 

That night we "un-cooked" up some raw veggie patties and seed "bread".  Here is the before picture - red pepper, onion, flax, sunflower seeds, celery.  After hanging out in the dehydrator a few hours they were ready to eat, though there is no need to dry them if you like things really raw.  The end product looked pretty much the exact same, so you can pretend that it's the after photo, too!  Monday's lunch was a veggie patty, a little stoneground mustard, two pieces of seed "bread" and a leaf of romaine.  Not too shabby! 

Last night we made fruit leather out of frozen blueberries, pear, and apple.  Yum-o!