So I bought myself a Blendtec blender for my birthday - it's in competition with Vitamix (which is the one we've been using in class). Blendtec tries to market itself more for the home consumer - they have a lot of preset recipes like soups, sauces, smoothies, ice creams, etc that you can choose from and it's one button processing (the blender alters speed and duration based on what you choose). There's also a pulse button and adjustable speeds so you can manually blend something. Lastly, the Blendtec comes with a recipe book.
I started out trying out one of their recipes - strawberry ice cream. The recipe seemed simple enough - frozen strawberries, condensed milk, half and half, and a bit of lemon juice (the only thing I had on hand was the lemon juice). I saw that fresh strawberries were on sale so I bought that, instead of half and half I bought heavy cream (thinking I would make mousse again later on). So I cut the strawberries and threw them in the freezer, but I don't think I let them freeze long enough - I also used heavy cream instead of half and half, so the consistency was off. Final result, not a success, but not a complete failure - taste wise it turned out good, but when I first blended it, it was more of a soup than an ice cream (I had to refreeze it again). Here's a pic - I plated it with some sliced strawberries and a brunoise of strawberries on top:
Next up - gazpacho. There was a recipe for this as well, but I again ad libbed a bit. I had tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bell pepper, garlic, and jalapenos. I cut everything into pieces and threw it in the blender - one big mistake is that I totally underestimated the jalapeno. I didn't take out the seeds prior to adding it to the blender, so it was really spicy. When I tasted it, the consistency and spice level reminded me so much of salsa verde that I decided to convert it to salsa - I added lemon juice, diced some onions, and added tomatoes. Pictured here is the gazpacho in soup form:
Now that I had this salsa, I decided to make some tacos. I bought some pork which I seared and took off the pot - I then made my sauce: onions, garlic, fire roasted tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, oregano, chipotle peppers, mushrooms, beef stock, and dark chocolate. After I simmered it for a bit, I threw everything in the blender and pureed it - I then added the pork I seared back in the pot along with some of this sauce - it turned out awesome. Here it is plated with black beans, red onion, olives, cilantro, and a slice of lime:
Lastly, I made a cream of cauliflower soup - it's very similar to what we did in class but I sorta winged it (I didn't look up our recipe). Mine was cauliflower, onions, water, heavy cream, and salt. I took the cauliflower and cut some of the florets - I put oil and salt on these and roasted them in the oven to use as a garnish. For the soup, I added onions and cauliflower to a pot, and then adding some water to boil it. Once it was cooked, I put it in the blender with the heavy cream and pureed it.
This turned out really delicious - the soup tasted like the essence of cauliflower and the oven roasted garnish added a nice salty crunch component - a bit on the dark side, but I like charred cauliflower:
So the blender trials started a bit rocky with the ice cream and gazpacho, but I am really happy with the tacos and soup (especially the soup, that was so good).
Oh and one last thing, here's a bonus pic of my cat looking totally surprised when I first used the blender (it's really loud):
