What are your favorite kitchen tools?

Konnie wanted to know what your favorite kitchen gadgets are. Here are some of mine:

Vidalia Chop Wizard
https://www.chopwizard.com/

We love our chop wizard. We use it almost every day.It makes chopping and dicing so much faster. Fresh foods like salads, pico de gallo, hawaiian haystacks,and stirfry all become really fast and easy with this tool. I've always hated chopping onions, so much that I would use dried, minced onions in most recipes, but now we use fresh onions all the time. There's a video on the website that shows how easy it is to use. I highly recommend this tool to everyone.

Vitamix

We use our vitamix every day. It's great for non-dairy milks, green smoothies, or fruit smoothies, fruit leather, soups, baby food, salsa, dips, dressings, pancake or waffle batter, desserts, nut butters, and whole grain flour or nut flour. It's a very, very powerful blender, and it can handle jobs that would burn out most other blenders. I've heard the Blendtec blender is another good brand for a high speed blender.

A good set of knives

Every whole foods cook book I've read says one of the most important tools you can own for a whole foods lifestyle is a good knife. Our favorite brand so far has been JA Henckels. They slice through vegetables like a hot knife through butter. They make cooking with whole foods faster and easier.

Waterless cookware

We love our stainless steel "Waterless" cookware. They sell pots like this for thousands of dollars, but we got our set for a few hundred online. They are heavy duty pots, with a lid that develops a tight seal during cooking to create a high pressure environment. Foods cook faster with less water,which means you retain more of the nutrition. For example, brown rice usually takes 45-55 minutes to cook. After my water heats up, it takes 20 minutes in my pot. Also, some say teflon coating and aluminum in other pots release toxins into our food. The surgical stainless steel pots don't have that problem.

Pampered Chef garlic press

I love how with this garlic press, I can put a whole clove of garlic in, skin and all, and have fresh minced garlic in a couple seconds. Garlic adds a lot of great flavor to whole foods.

Citrus press and zester

Citrus is is another great food that adds lots of flavor, so I love my citrus press and my zester.

A few other tools that I love are:

food processor, mandolin, apple peeler/corer/slicer, apple slicer/corer, popsicle molds, and stainless steel cookie sheets.

What are your favorite kitchen gadgets?

A couple good recipes

I've been noticing that eating raw foods gives me a lot more energy than when I eat cooked food, so I was looking for some good raw recipes. Here are a couple good ones I found from a raw food recipe book. The "fries" look a lot like fries, but the taste and texture are completely different. They're sweet and spicy and crunchy and delicious.

Spicy "Fries" from Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen

Peel and slice jicama to look like french fries. Marinate in 1/4 cup honey, 1/4 cup olive oil, 1 lemon juiced, and 1/8 tsp chili powder and 1/8 tsp cayenne (or less of both--it gives it quite a kick). Let marinate for a few hours or overnight, drain and serve.

Cilantro Vinaigrette (also from Living on Live Food)

2 cups fresh cilantro
1 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup oil
1 clove garlic
1 1/2 Tbsp honey
1/2 tsp sea salt (table salt is actually so processed, it's toxic to our bodies. Real sea salt has has minerals and our bodies know how to process it)
1/2 tsp black pepper

Blend all ingredients in a blender. (I want to try this again with fresh lime juice for some of the vinegar.)

Homemade Crackers from Konnie

Here's one other fun and flexible recipe to try. It is for homemade crackers: http://www.recipetips.com/recipe-cards/t--1973/homemade-crackers.asp

These bake up kind of like wheat thins. It is a good base recipe for experimentation, and the food processor really does make this so fast to throw together.

Konnie

Konnie's Roasted Eggplant Dip

Roasted Eggplant Dip

1 large eggplant
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp. light tahini (sesame seed paste)--I didn't have any, but threw in a tablespoon of sesame seeds
1 tsp. ground cumin (I'd cut back to 1/2 tsp if you have eaters picky about things too spicy
1 tsp. ground cariander
2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt
freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees F. Prick the eggplant all over with a fork, then place in a roasting pan. Roast about 40 minutes until the inside of the eggplant is very soft.

2. Leave to cool slightly then halve the eggplant lengthwise and scoop out the flesh with a spoon into a food processor or blender. Add the garlic, tahini, spices, olive oil, and lemon juice. Process until smooth and creamy. Season to taste.

You can refrigerate this up to 5 days. Serve it with breadsticks, pita bread slices, vegetables, spicy sweet potatoes, or (as we did) corn chips.

Sandra's Avocado Soup/Dip/Dressing

Ladies,
Here's the most delicious vegan recipe I found while in Arizona to add to my 'collection'. We've eaten it as a cold soup, salad dressing, and (with half the water added, a dip for veggies and chips).
Sandra

Avocado Soup/Dip/Salad Dressing
In blender, puree until smooth:

1 avocado
1 c. sour cream (the soy-based tofutti 'sour cream' is just as good as the milk kind)
1 c. cold water (half that much if you want this to be thicker like a dip)
3/4 c. bottled salsa verde (I thought this amount was a bit speecy-spicy, so I dropped the amount to 1/3 to 1/2 cup and liked it even better without so much 'bite')
1/4 c. packed fresh cilantro leaves (I'm not real careful with this measurement because we like cilantro so don't mind if there is a bit more)
1/2 tsp. each salt and pepper (I also toss in some of the Ms. Dash non-salt Lemon Pepper flavoring because we like it)

If served as soup, sprinkle with some raw pumpkin seeds. Yumm!!