Is a Blendtec really worth the price?

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After the very first green smoothie, I'd have to say YES.

Our old blender, a fairly decent KitchenAid model that was only a year or two old, just couldn't manage to blend everything up really smooth.

The Blendtec effortlessly blended everything- no chunks or little bits of kale and spinach left behind. We had to do some chewing with the last few smoothies I made with the KitchenAid blender. The Blendtec is noisy, but I don't mind the trade-off. Having fully blended food is definitely worth a little extra noise.

I had heard great things about the Blendtec and its close rival the Vitamix on a lot of the food blogs I follow, but the cost really made me hesitate. I debated for *months* before finally deciding to bite the bullet and buy a Blendtec. I'm glad we finally did it!

We've used it for making green smoothies, mixing up our ice cream before putting it in the machine, mixing up salad dressing, pureeing steamed squash, and making Nomato sauce (more on that one later...). I'm sure we'll be using it even more as we do more experimenting in the kitchen in an effort to find more recipes we like and can use.

What we eat when we invite friends over

We invited the neighbors over for dinner the other day. They're a cute young couple with a one year old daughter that LMS really likes (and would really like to play with, though she's too young to understand that concept yet). These days it's definitely easier to host a meal than to worry about going somewhere else to eat.

So what was on the menu?
Aidells chicken and apple sausages

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Grilled chicken, marinated in Nomato Sauce (more on the Nomato Sauce later)
Grilled mixed veggies (onion, mushroom, zucchini, yellow squash, broccoli, carrot)
Faux-tatoes (pureed squash)
Real mashed potatoes just in case the squash wasn't well received (and because Mr M really wanted some)
Fruit salad (blueberries, strawberries, kiwi)
Green salad (LMS put this dressing on it)

and for dessert we had homemade peach ice cream, using this recipe.

We ended up with more food than we needed, but we tend to operate on the "rather have too much food, than too little" mind set, especially when we're having company over. We had a good time and all the food was enjoyed, even the squash :)

Birthday ice cream

I had stopped baking by the time my birthday rolled around at the end of June, but I did make some ice cream- coconut ice cream topped with blueberries. I used the recipe I found here but I left out the chocolate. Even without the chocolate, it was pretty yummy.

However, LMS is still upset by the fact that I didn't have cake for my birthday. She has brought it up multiple times, and is quite concerned that I didn't have a birthday cake. Too cute!

Paleo Strawberry Shortcake

I've recently found that recipes that follow the paleo diet are fairly close to what we need to eat. I do have to make some changes and substitutions, but they're fairly easy to do. I like the emphasis on fresh, unprocessed food, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to try some baking, which I haven't done in several months.

I made strawberry shortcake following this recipe. Other than subbing flax eggs for the real eggs, I followed the recipe as written. It is quite dense and not much like your traditional shortcake, but it was still pretty good.

Mr M put strawberries and bananas on his.

 I put strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries on mine.

 LMS just had coconut cream on hers.