These are a few of my favorite things ...

Happy Friday to you!  We've made it through another week, one that was incredibly busy for me, workwise & a little more relaxing on the homefront.  Work obviously takes up most of my day and I get home pretty wiped out.  I get up early to hit the gym before work -- thank goodness, because if I left it for after work I would never make it there.  By the time I make dinner, clean up the kitchen and get my things ready for the next day, it's all I can do to roll into bed.  Because I get up early, I do tend to go to bed early so there's not too many hours for me to do all of my evening things before bed & sleep so I can get up the next day and do it all over again.  Boy, I can't wait for retirement... oh, wait.  That's a few years off!

Somebody asked me the other day what the most valuable piece of equipment in my kitchen is.  At first I was puzzled, and then she followed up with "what would you recommend as a necessity to eat the way you do?" Ahhh, I get it.  I would have to say that besides a good set of knives (we have a gorgeous Cutco set) I don't think I could get by without my VitaMix.

 

I make salad dressings, frozen desserts, smoothies, soups and all kinds of other things in there.  Some days I don't use it at all, but then other days I feel like I could use about five more canisters so I don't have to wash in between uses!  Cleanup is easy as the blades are contained within the canister, so you just add a little soap to a few cups of water and turn it on high speed.  Voila! it's clean. 

There are two other honorable mention appliances that I would be silly to forget.  The pressure cooker was the second major appliance I bought and it is very helpful with cooking dry beans in a jiffy.  No soaking needed.  Sometimes on a Saturday that puppy gets a workout as I make one batch of beans after the other so I can stock my freezer with a variety.  I should mention here, that the model cooker I have is about eight things in one.  It makes brown rice quicker than anything I've used (15 minutes).  It is also a slow cooker.  There's buttons on there that I've never even used before! 

The bummer thing with kitchen appliances is that they take up a lot of room.  Since most things in my kitchen don't get used every day (minus the VitaMix) I try to keep them tucked away in a cupboard.  I do have to say, it's fairly easy to stow away the pressure cooker on a shelf because there's not too many parts to it.  The food processor, on the other hand, stays on the counter.  I don't use it as often as the VitaMix, but there are a lot of pieces to it and it's just, well, not convenient a pain in the butt to haul all the stuff in & out of the cupboard when I want to use it.  So there it stays.  I probably don't use it as often as I could because I despise washing dishes and I figure why wash the blade, the bowl, the lid, when I can accomplish the same thing with ONE KNIFE?  Never mind the time it saves me!  Duh!  I could wash the thing three times with all the extra time I'd save at the cutting board.  Anyway, I love the thing.  It can shred a carrot in less than 5 seconds, chop up peppers quicker than a teppanyaki chef, and mix up quinoa brownie "dough" faster than you can make the frosting! 

Plus, this Cuisinart model has a 14-cup bowl so I can make huge microsalads to last me all week long.  Oh, that reminds me... "Honey, don't eat that icky salad in the back of the fridge.  I forgot it was there and it might not be so good anymore." <wink>

Here's a couple more of my favorite things!

All this talk about my kitchen helpers has made me realize I have some cookin' to do this weekend!  I can't wait to share with you my experiments that come from the Glaze Test Kitchen.  Check back here on Monday to see what I made.

Have a happy, healthy weekend!