Pancake Powered Kitchen Appliances!

I have finally found the answer to every mother's question - why can't I somehow bottle up my child's endless supply of energy and use it for something useful? Oddly enough, I found it at a rummage sale:

Both my ten year old boy and my four year old boy are fascinated with my new toy. We shredded two zucchinis and a pound of cheddar with it this morning (and they were begging to do more!)

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I already have a gadget like this that hooks up to my kitchen aid stand mixer (the slicer/shredder attachment). But, honestly, it's kind of a pain to clean (by which I mean it takes up a lot of room in the dishwasher . . .) and store (yeah, it's my own fault for keeping it waaayyy back in the lower cabinets, so I have to dig it out whenever I want to use it . . .)

Ok, yeah, I saw a new toy and had to get it. It was only $2! And it's so earth-friendly it runs on completely renewable pancake power! You never know when there might be a power outage and you just NEED some shredded cheese!

~~~~~

This gadget actually caused an "Ah-ha!" moment for me. I had never seen a gadget like this before, and honestly, I never even thought to wonder if there could be a gadget like this. It just assumed that my big, bulky, plastic, electricity-driven shredder was all there was (other than that little flat cheese grater thingy I have in my utensil drawer. And maybe a salad shooter - which of course is simply a little, useless, plastic, electricity-driven shredder . . .)

But when I saw this, it dawned on me - most of those electric kitchen gadgets (the useful ones, anyway) probably started out as non-electric kitchen gadgets, since people have been preparing food for thousands of years, but electricity has only been widely available for less than a hundred.

Which (in my mind, anyway) went along with one of the ideas that drives this blog: processed foods, with all of their unpronounceable chemical ingredients, are simply poor imitations of real, homemade food. This was actually a revelation to me. I know - duh! I honestly used to think that you couldn't make things like ketchup or mayonnaise in your own kitchen, that you needed some kind of industrial machinery and unavailable-to-the-average-person chemicals.

But slowly, after I married and we started a family, I began to learn how to actually cook - not just warm up pre-packaged frozen pizzas and lasagnas (my poor husband put up with a lot of hamburger helper those first years!) Thanks to the internet, I found recipes for things like spaghetti sauce (millions of them!) and discovered what to do when you don't have a can of cream of mushroom soup.

So, part of the reason I started this blog was to help people like me - to give back, in a Titus 2 kind of way.

But also realize that I'm still learning - feel free to share your tips with me, too!