Eat All the Veggies!

Once again, I'm late to the party with something - this time, it's the Paderno spiralizer.  Now to be fair, I had it in my Amazon shopping cart for close to a year, but it was about $35, and I never could bring myself to click "buy" at that price - I don't cook a lot, and it felt silly to spend that much money on something that I might not use very often.  But I noticed that on Prime Day the price dropped to $20, and with that, I hit the buy button.  Apparently I have a price, and that price is $20.

I still wasn't sure about it, and unlike Debby, who also bought one using the Prime Day deal and tested it out immediately with a rutabaga she had lying around (side note:  I have never had a rutabaga lying around, LOL), I let my spiralizer sit on the kitchen counter for nearly a week.

Finally, after two trips to the grocery store (I forgot avocados and tomatoes the first go-round), I took the spiralizer out of the box, assembled the handle, and gave it a whirl with a zucchini.  YOU. GUYS.  This thing worked.  And it was fascinating!  Look at this:

One normal-sized zucchini - the base of my cold veggie dish.

I spiralized two zucchini in total, one for Jeff and one for me...it took great restraint to not spiralize all the things, because it was really fun to use.  Instead, I took out my egg slicer to use on mushrooms, because at this point I still wanted to play with my food:

I finally had to resort to using a lowly knife for the rest of the ingredients.  Behold, my beautiful veggie salad:

Zucchini noodles (zoodles), tiny colorful tomatoes, mushrooms, avocado, herbed feta cheese, and diced chicken breast.

I put a little bit of this salad dressing on it and tossed everything together:

For store-bought, this dressing is really good!

I added some salt and pepper, and ended up cutting the zoodles with my knife because they were as long as spaghetti.  The meal was tasty, healthy, and super filling...I had a hard time finishing it.  Until I bought the spiralizer and looked at some recipe ideas for it, I didn't know that you could eat the zucchini noodles raw - I thought they needed to be heated up.  Nope - it was delicious like this, and I love how many veggies we were able to eat in one meal.

While I'll use this to make noodles with spaghetti sauce, and also I'm interested in spiralizing a sweet potato, tossing it with coconut oil, and baking some nifty curly fries, that won't be happening until it cools down around here.  However, I did use the zoodles with some store-bought pesto and dang, that was really good.

For those of you who have a spiralizer, what else do you do with it?  Anything I'm missing out on making?  And if you don't own one, I'm telling you - don't be like me and wait forever to make that purchase.  It's easy to use, easy to clean, and I'm really amazed at how much I like the veggie creations that come from it!