Spiral slicing: 101

Monday morning, I bought a spiral slicer at Bed, Bath and Beyond and after on what felt like a cruel prank by my GPS, I picked it up at the store.

Luckily on my way to the store I passed a Wegmans, so I bought an eggplant and three zucchinis along with some lunch at their delicious hot food bar, haha.

My plan was to make some delish "zoodles" when I got home, but that didn't happen for a few days, because well, life happens in between, and at least this time when I tried something in the kitchen I remembered to take pictures, lol.

So a couple days ago I decided to finally make the zoodles. I had seen many Pinterest pins for zoodles and recipes that use them instead of regular pasta and it always intrigued me and just made sense for low-carb living instead of depriving myself of pasta dishes altogether.

Basically, the slicer works similarly to a mandolin whereas the blade stays still and the vegetable moves across it to create uniform, thin slices. The spiral slicer has a crank arm with a spiked disc to grab onto the veggie in question and another "grip" on the blade side.

After washing your veggies cut a slice off of both ends to create a flat surface for the grippers to grip and then press one of the flat ends onto the side with the spiked disc and slide toward the blade.

Once the zucchini is up against the blade you can start cranking and in no time you'll have a plate full of long green ribbons!

The noodles are going to be very long spirals and I think next time I'm going to cut the zucchinis in half before I spiral them so they're shorter and more manageable noodles.

A quick side note, I tried to spiral slice the eggplant but it didn't work so well. I think it was just a bit too dense or big and just ended up bruising one side of the egg plant. I want to keep experimenting with the eggplant idea because who doesn't like eggplant parm?

Anyway, so after I had a plateful of noodles, I boiled them for a few minutes to make them tender, which I only slightly regret doing afterward because I ended up sautéing them anyway, so the boiling was unnecessary.

I cubed up the eggplant and sauteed it with some olive oil and garlic and some cherry tomatoes. In another pot I browned up some ground turkey and when everything was cooked I mixed it all together and added the remainder of a jar of pasta sauce to it.

Overall, it was a pretty tasty dish, and I'd totally eat it and make it again and obviously I have plans on using my slicer so much more.

Do you have a new gadget that you're in love with?



Spiral Slicing: 101 by Ana M. Ferrer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://analovesfood1.blogspot.com/2013/09/spiral-slicing-101.html.

Back to basics

WARNING: THIS POST MAY SOUND WHINEY. CUE YOUR VIOLINS.

O.K. so, going paleo didn't exactly pan out for me. Or rather, I didn't exactly pan out going paleo, if that makes sense. After a month I lost some weight as I shared in a previous post, but I couldn't stick to it.

I worked out with a trainer twice a week for three months and felt stronger, but didn't lose any weight because my diet was out of control. And when I say "out of control" I don't mean I was washing down 18 super-sized value meals with a carton of ice cream. Mainly, I go out to eat a lot with The Boyfriend which usually includes appetizers, wine (on my side of the table at least) and restaurant-sized portions.

I told myself that I'd get back on track during the summer - get really focused and concentrate on getting fit while looking for a job. But of course, that didn't happen.

I've been freelancing for my old newspaper writing about local restaurants where I interview owners and/or managers and generally I test out the food, so naturally, I choose places with delicious food which isn't always diet-friendly.

Nonetheless, I didn't stick to paleo because in the end I found it to be a bit too restrictive with the exclusion of grains and some dairy, I can't give up cheese, I just can't do it. haha.

I have no one to blame but myself for my short-comings while trying to lose weight and I make a lot of excuses:

Excuse: "My mom buys garbagey foods and I don't have any money to buy my own stuff all the time."

• Translation: I'm lazy and have no will power. 

 Excuse: "I worked out today, I can treat myself to some (a lot) of fro-yo."

• Translation: My fro-yo ends up as a huge serving, mostly with fruit but there's usually some kind of chocolatey bits on there. 

Anyway, I like the idea of the paleo diet, whole natural foods and basing your diet on unprocessed items, but like I said, the lack of grains is just a bit too restrictive for me and it made me feel like a scumbag with every .

I follow so many people on Pinterest who live healthy lifestyles that I envy and the term "eating clean" kept popping up so I decided to look in to it for myself and I'm pretty much sold.

The two pyramids have the same basic elements: fruit, vegetables and lean proteins. The twist is the clean eating pyramid shifts focus from proteins to plant matter and includes grains, legumes and dairy.

I think clean eating is going to be a better situation for me, it's essentially eating an overall healthy diet which just makes sense.

So let's see what happens. Maybe I'll be bold enough to post some before measurements and pictures. ..or maybe not. I'll wait until I see some results maybe.

Until next time!

Broccoli that I'll actually eat, and maybe you will too!

So I was watching the Rachael Ray show the other morning and Daphne Oz was a guest, along with Bob Harper from The Biggest Loser, and Shaun T from the Insanity workouts.

It was some fitness day episode, so healthy recipes were featured on the show including Daphne Oz's "pizza" broccoli, which I actually tried.

Her recipe is basically you steam some broccoli florets, then drizzle some olive oil, oregano, crushed red pepper and peccorino romano cheese over top before sticking them in the broiler to get super toasty and melty.

I used frozen florets and added more spices to mine before baking it with the stuffed fish I had for dinner.

Generally, I use the foil pouch method of cooking my frozen veggies when I'm baking them, since for the most part they just steam and suck up any flavoring I shove in the foil pouch.

So in this pizza broccoli pouch, I had about a handful of frozen broccoli florets and six or eight fresh cherry tomatoes.

I seasoned them with crushed red pepper and oregano like in Daphne's recipe but I added onion powder, garlic powder, salt and black pepper and I threw in like a tablespoon of peccorino romano and a pat of butter instead of the olive oil.

I baked it along with my fish according to the fish's directions which were 400 for 15-20 minutes and they came out fantastic.

The pizza broccoli wasn't exactly the best pairing to my crab-stuffed fish, but I really wanted to test out how delicious this broccoli was.

...and it was delicious.

It legitimately tasted like I was eating a slice of broccoli covered pizza, which I'm not opposed to. The addition of the fresh tomatoes was the clincher for me I think. They pretty much oozed out their tomatoey goodness and mixed with the butter and cheese and got everything pretty saucy, which again, I'm not opposed to.

All and all, I'll make it again, I may try it Daphne's way and put them in the broiler and maybe they'll be more of a kale chip texture.

I'll more than likely use the same combo of spices to make some pizza kale chips one of these days.