I bought a spiralizer! It's a little gadget with a turning arm and a sharp blade for cutting vegetables. I ordered a Japanese one called the Benriner Cook's Help Vegetable Slicer
and it arrived last week.
I used my new spiralizer to make vegetable noodles out of this green marrow. It's a gourd, and it's much like zucchini, except with slightly thicker skin. Compared to zucchini, which is imported to Singapore, it's so much easier to find this gourd. The texture inside is firm; the flesh is drier than a cucumber but a little more moist than a zucchini. Overall, it makes great noodles, much like zucchini.
The instructions for the spiralizer included some great translations! The Cook's Help tagline (in the orange banner) says, "Helps you in cooking fast, joyful, beautiful sharp edged!"
I enjoyed learning that you can use it underwater, for example, "when horse radish is not juicy enough to cut it well and smooth." Also you can use your carrot strings "for Hamburg steak and frizzled rice"!
While I was researching my spiralizer purchase, I learned that a lot of bloggers have a Paderno Vegetable Spiralizer
; which has a sliding, horizontal arm. I like my Benriner better because it uses gravity to help the cutting process. You just rest your hand on the handle and turn away. Very little force is required. (And the Benriner is not nearly as hard to fit in the cupboard as the bulky Paderno.) If you don't have a spiralizer, you can make vegetable noodles with a julienne peeler.
My first use of the spiralizer today was to make this extremely simple dish of noodles with butter and Parmesan. It's adapted from a Donna Hay recipe: linguini with butter and parmesan, from Modern Classics 1. With vegetable noodles this recipe is lightening-quick.
Heat a large pan and melt some butter. Then toss in the veggie strings and stir for a few minutes, just long enough to soften them and heat them through. Pour into a bowl and top with grated Parmesan cheese.
This dish is part of our Wednesdays with Donna Hay blogging group. If you want to join us, next week we are making carrot and parsnip fritters with marinated feta. Visit the others in my blogging group to see if they liked the recipe: Margaret from Tea and Scones, Gaye from Laws of the Kitchen, and Chaya from Bizzy Bakes.
Do you have a kitchen gadget to recommend?
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