Mr. Vince Spirooli

The most exciting thing happened to me today...my Spirooli arrived. "Spirooli?" I hear you say, as though I've gone a bit loopy. Yes ladies and gentlemen....SPIROOLI (or, as Dave has named it, Mr Vince Spirooli - our new best friend). It is a vegetable slicer that is nothing short of awesome.

When I was thinking about going raw I never wanted to buy tools to be raw. To me, that kind of defeats the purpose of eating whole foods in their natural state and keeping things nice and simple. BUT, on other raw websites I keep seeing recipes for zucchini pasta and I have been craving it. I love zucchini and my attempts at trying to simply slice the zucchini thinly to create "pasta" failed miserably - I just had long zucchini sticks that didn't remotely resemble spaghetti.

So, now that Dave has put me on this 3 week challenge, I decided it was time to look around for something that could do the job a bit better than I can and make my raw food exciting!!

You may not get as excited as me over spirals of zucchini pretending to be pasta topped with a cold sauce...but, to me, this is the best purchase I've made in a very long time. (Note to skeptics: don't burst my bubble - this looks EXACTLY like pasta and when you leave the sauce marinating in the 'pasta' for a while, it goes all soft... just like pasta!)

Here is the recipe for a lovely "pasta" I made:

Sauce (adapted from one I found at Raw Food Punk):

½ red capsicum

1 clove of garlic

½ cup packed fresh basil leaves

3 tomatoes

¼ cup olive oil

cayenne pepper

handful of black pitted olives

Directions: Make pasta using a spiral slicer. Put all ingredients of sauce into a food processor or blender. You can also add mushrooms for a chunkier sauce. Serve sauce on top of zucchini ‘pasta.’

Optional extras to serve on top include:

marinated artichoke hearts

more olives

halved cherry tomatoes

(I added all of the above!)

It was scrumptious and my main man Vince is definitely earning his keep!