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.