Uh oh...

After reading my first blog entry last night, one of my best friends sent me a text eloquently stating "so this thing makes your juicer look like a piece of shit." I don't think I could have said it better myself! I really am falling in love with the +Vitamix!

Along with successes, there will also be FAILURES! Today I used the dry container for the 1st time. The dry container is used to mill grains into flour and to make dough.. maybe some other things, but I'm not there yet! Today I attempted to make dough for the first time. I haven't ground my own wheat yet because they are sold out of the wheat berries I want online. I may get some other ones just to try it out, but that will be a later post. Today I had to just use whole wheat flour. I used King Arthur's because if you have seen America's Test Kitchen, you know that it has won the taste test at least twice. There is a recipe in the Vitamix cookbook, and I just followed that.. kind of. I found that we had a loaf pan, but it was called a "medium loaf pan." That freaked me out because I just assumed it was small. I should have actually measured the pan.. oh well, cook and learn! So.. because I thought the pan was small, I halved the mix. Because I halved the mix, I probably shouldn't have mixed it for as long as I did. By the time I put the dough into the pan, it was more like a sticky batter than a dough. I let the dough rise, except, it didn't really rise. Fail. I baked it anyway. The bread had a pretty good flavor, but it was pretty dense since it didn't really rise. I'm going to look for a normal size loaf pan, and next time I will follow the recipe exactly! Here are pics of my tiny bread loaf!

We used normal butter tonight, but I'm looking forward to making butter in the Vitamix. Yes, you can make your own butter. So excited!

Okay... So the bread was not perfect this time, but I did learn to do something pretty cool with the Vitamix today. For dinner we had whole grain spaghetti with 97% fat free ground turkey and a heart smart pasta sauce. I'm going to make my own pasta sauce in the future, but we had some that we needed to use first. Tonight, I chopped my onions and garlic in the Vitamix! It is so easy and seriously takes 5 seconds. I quartered the onion, and put half of it into the Vitamix. You then put about 4 - 5 cups of water into the Vitamix with the onions. You pulse it about 2 times on high, and that's it! The onions are chopped pretty finely. You then strain it. Same thing with the garlic! I learned I need a better strainer because the onions particularly were a little wet. But, in my opinion, getting a better strainer is worth not chopping onions anymore! No more tears for me.. The top pic is the onion and the 2nd pic is the garlic.

Who knows what I will do tomorrow... I think we are having fish so maybe some kind of sauce for the fish.. or possibly pureed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes. Oh! And here is a pic of the tropical smoothie I made last night! It was delicious, but I did not add any greens since we had big salads for dinner. Can't wait until tomorrow!