Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Oodles and Oodles of Zoodles!

*I received this free for testing purposes. All opinions are 100% my own*

I have been attempting to eat healthier lately, which can be difficult when you love to cook and bake. Mmmm cupcakes, they get me every time. One thing I keep seeing over and over on my personal Facebook feed and Pinterest are these noodles made out of veggies, like zucchini and carrots. While this was an intriguing notion the thought of cutting up veggies into noodles was way to much work and I promptly began ignoring the recipes. Fast forward to earlier this month and I was given the chance to test out and review one of those nifty gadgets that turns zucchini into noodles. I'm never one to turn down a nifty gadget so here we go.


First impression is that I'm an adult sized 10 year old who is easily amused by strings of zucchini and will promptly dance around the kitchen pretending to be Cthulhu. Second impression is that the Spiralizer Vegetable Slicer does what it says it does, it turns veggies into noodles. Now full disclosure I've only tried zucchini with it, I keep forgetting to pick up other veggies to try it out on. What can I say, I prefer zucchini (and my in-laws had a bumper crop this year so I haven't had to actually buy any). In a nut shell, you take your veg of choice and put it into the slot you want (thicker noodles vs smaller noodles), then start turning. The slots have little knives and act like a cheese grater basically, shredding the veg into lovely ribbons to be consumed at your leisure.

While making the zoodles (zucchini noodles) was really simple, making a tasty dish with them required more forethought and planning than I had originally thought. Zucchini noodles release stored up water once they are cut, so I recommend letting them sit on some paper towels for a bit unless you want your beautiful spicy Thai peanut sauce to end up a watery mess by lunch time. The clean up was a bit more work than I had anticipated, this particular model doesn't come with a little brush to get all the bits off so you either have to wash it right after use or stick a knife (or finger) down into it to fish all the dried zucchini bits out because you were a bonehead and forgot about it till the next day when you actually had time to do dishes. Luckily this is top drawer dishwasher safe, and I have a husband who isn't anemic and prone to bleeding for an hour if cut so he got stuck cleaning it.

I actually really like this device and have been enjoying using it for quick summer salads/pastas. I saw a suggestion online to use it to quickly shred veggies for your stir fry so I'll be testing that out once its below 100 degrees here and I can actually stand at my stove without melting. If you would like to purchase this device you can find it on Amazon for $12.99 with free Prime shipping. I'm going to explore Pinterest some more and see what else I can whip up using my spiralizer, the avocado cream zoodle pasta recipe I found the other day sounded heavenly. If you do zoodles, what do you like to mix with it?

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