Cooking with a New Toy

A while back I was looking at some recipes and learned of a gadget called a "spiralizer".  This caught my attention, it looked fun.  Basically, it was a way to prepare vegetables for salad or other dishes, including making "noodles" of them to replace regular pasta noodles.  Now that sounded interesting to me because there are some pasta dishes I really like but I don't like the calories that go along with regular pasta.  So I made a note and did some additional research.  I looked into recipes that use a spiralizer, to see how much variety was out there.  Also to see what a spiralizer costs and, of the several different designs out there, which one might work best.  Finally, after several months, I bought one.  And a few weeks later, I got it out to use.

We had made regular spaghetti and had lots of left-over sauce so I decided to spiralize a butternut squash to use for the noodles.  I really like butternut squash anyway so I figured it would be a good item to try for the first time.  At the store I found what looked like the perfect squash, long neck and very little bulb, since you really can't run the bulb through the spiralizer.

I also had a recipe for spiralizing a butternut squash into "noodles".  So I started by cutting off the bulb end and peeling the squash,  That turned out to be easier than I expected.

Then I cut what was left into manageable pieces and got ready to go at it.

It took a little playing around, I also ended up finding a YouTube video demonstrating the use of my particular brand of spiralizer to figure out how to put the pieces together and make it work.

Then I got to work.  It really didn't take that long, nor was it all that hard to turn the whole squash into a nice bowl of noodles, ready to go.

Almost looks like a mountain of grated cheese.  And, for that matter, you can grate cheese with my spiralizer.  Or carrots, or zucchini, or cucumbers, or all kinds of other stuff.  But that's a different recipe.

Then it was time to spread the noodles out on a baking sheet, drizzle a little melted butter over them and pop them in the oven for a few minutes to cook.

For each piece of squash I was left with a "coin" of squash that wouldn't go through the spiralizer so I just cooked them, along with the bulb end, and ate it regular.  Yum, yum!

After they came out of the oven the whole lot had cooked down a little bit but now it was ready to go on the table.

Top it off with the spaghetti sauce and it turned out pretty good!  A little different than regular spaghetti but a whole lot less calories.  And still quite yummy.  And filling, as well. We'll have to try this new toy with some other vegetable, too, to see what we can come up with.  I also bought some sweet potatoes at the same time I was buying the butternut squash so they will probably be part of the next experiment.  And you could also spiralize stuff to put on salad, too.  All kinds of possibilities.  I think I like my new toy!

A Close Call

Hope you can stand a little more "family history".  I was gathering up some stuff this afternoon to put away in a more permanent place when I came across this postcard I sent home from my mission.  The story behind this card is kind of funny the way it turned out but it came close to being sort of tragic.

As my mission drew to a close I was packing and getting all ready to leave my last city.  Although no one actually said it would happen, I had just kind of figured all along that the mission office, or maybe the church in Sale Lake City, would send my parents the information about when I was getting home and all that jazz.  It seemed so obvious to me that I hadn't said anything to them even though I had known for a couple of weeks by that time.  But then, as we were walking out the door so I could head to the train station, I thought maybe I ought to send my parents something with my arrival time, just in case.  I wasn't sure, however, that at this point, it would even get there in time.  Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a building on the main market square several blocks from the center of town.  On the ground floor was a stationary store.  One that sold office supplies and all kinds of that stuff.  As we got down the stairs and walked passed the office supply store I said to my companion I wanted to stop quick and buy a post card.  So we did and then headed for the train station.

On the front of the postcard was a picture of the train station we were headed to, a place I was already very familiar with after eight months in that city.  Once we got there I wrote a quick note on the back side with my arrival time.  At the station was a post office so we went in, bought the postage, and put it in the mail.  Then I got on the train and left my last city.

That was in the morning.  I traveled to the mission office and got there in the early afternoon.  Then I spent the day getting a final interview with my mission president, making sure all my papers and ticket were in order, having dinner, and waiting around while the three or four other missionaries that were traveling home with me also got their final interviews and checked out.  We spent the night in a motel there in town and early the next morning we all hopped on a plane headed for London, New York, and home.

When we landed in New York, back on American soil for the first time in nearly two years, we each bought a fudgesicle because it had been nearly two years since any of us had one - you couldn't get them in Germany, at least not in the British sector where I had spent my mission.  Then it was catch another plane and on Chicago and to home.

As the postcard said, my plane landed at about 8:35 pm on what felt to me like two days after I had sent it, though I'm sure that I crossed enough time zones coming home that it was actually longer. And there was my family, my immediate family plus several members of my extended family, all smiling and happy to see me after two years gone.  It was a very good reunion.  On the way home my Dad told me that earlier in the afternoon, as he had been coming home from work, he had stopped to get the mail at the post office and there was my postcard, the only notice they had received of when I was arriving home.  So he hustled home and grabbed everybody from there, got word to a few aunts, uncles, and cousins, and headed almost immediately for the airport to be able to be there in time to meet my flight.  I came that close to not having anyone there at the airport to greet me when I got home.  That would really have been something.  Maybe that little postcard had some help making the trip in record time.  Who knows!

Love Notes

So I'm going through another of the boxes of stuff my Mom and Dad left and I came across these little bits of paper.  So I open them up to see what they are.  My Mom had left notes here and there as she had gone through some of this stuff after my Dad had died.  She had tried to make sense of some of it but it was a pretty big job.  Anyway , I figured it was another of her little notes as she tried to get this organized.  But, not so!  It was four little bits of paper that were notes they had passed back and forth, probably during the time just before they were married.  Three of them were short little notes, mushy, sentimental stuff - I'll spare you.  But one of them made me smile, chuckle, actually.  It was funny and would have been fun to be "a fly on the wall", as they say, watching.

It reads:
Dad: This is another example of taking up time on a program and saying nothing.

Mom: I can't concentrate 'cause you're tickling me.

Dad: He's not very interesting anyway.

Really makes me wonder what they were sitting though.  A bit of a different picture from what I saw as I was growing up.