Blendtec Total Blender

My father and step-mother visited us last weekend.  Everyone had a nice time.

My birthday, my wife's birthday, and our anniversary are all close together.  And our blender recently wore out.

Tangent: Our old Oster Designer Cycle Blend blender finally wore out.  It was a present from another math graduate student at UCSB in 1994.  She used blenders to make nut butter, and habitually gave them to friends when the motor had worn down too much for her needs but not enough to be normally noticeable.  It served us well for many years!

We had nothing else important on our wish lists besides a new blender.  And Costco was having a sale on the Blendtec Total Blender.  So that is what we were given as a three-event present.

It's really nifty.

I expect the biggest change will be in making soups. Recall that Smiley naturally likes "fast soup".  Today is a hot day, so right now my wife is experimenting with a cold Mexican-style soup.

The Total Blender should also be a much faster grain mill than the attachment for our mixer.  Hooray!  (That mill works fine, but slowly.  And it heats up the mixer a lot, so we need to pause every twenty minutes or so to let it cool off.)

Putting more carrots in our diet will be healthy but neither exciting nor much extra convenience.  Using all the swiss chard our garden produces just got a lot easier.  I am especially looking forward to no longer peeling broccoli stems--we can use the florets in our typical cooking and simply blend the stems!

The Blendtec website has a few recipes.  The sales rep also recommended Robyn's Blog.  I am sure we will make up plenty of our own recipes.  (I anticipate creating a latke-like celerac pancake in early Winter.)

I also expect many of our favorite recipes will soon include optional ingredients for folks with super-blenders: extra root vegetables or greens for nutrition, along with whatever additional liquids or stuff is required to maintain the right texture and cooking properties.

Lastly, tossing stuff in is fun.  Yesterday I noticed we had half a can of pumpkin in the fridge that Smiley had started last week but lost interest in.  So I combined that with some frozen spinach that needed using up, half a cored apple that was on the counter after Smiley's lunch, two big carrots, enough milk to let it blend well, and as spices a dollop of heavy cream, five whole cloves, ground nutmeg, and ground cinnamon.  The result was a yummy pumpkin pie flavored smoothie.