I need a sous chef!

With work & other obligations, it's taken me a lot longer to put together this list of culinary delights than I expected:

MONDAY:

• zest & juice 9# of Bearess limes - freeze most of the juice & dehydrate the zest

This took the better part of 90 minutes just to zest & juice the limes - a lot of them were tiny!  I ended up with 6 cups of juice and nearly 2 cups dried zest.  Plus an hour for clean up (lime pulp got everywhere!)

TUESDAY:

• kale & spigariello chips (dehydrator)
• shredded brussels sprouts salad - little enoki mushrooms, lemon, nama shoyu, olive oil, black pepper, garlic, marinated in dehydrator at 105 for a couple hours
• savoy cabbage slaw w/lime, ginger, olive oil, nama shoyu, red onion, cilantro, garlic, mango & topped with sprouted pumpkin & sunflower seeds
• grated turnip & carrot salad dressed with agave/nama shoyu/lemon/white wine vinegar, liberal amounts of finely minced parsley & cilantro, red onion & garlic
• fennel & grapefruit salad with jalapeno & cilantro
• sprouted sunflower seed, cilantro & chile pate
• sprouted pumpkin seed, sundried tomato & chipotle pepper pate
• soaked cashew red pepper pate
• buckwheat, sprouted almond & carrot pulp crackers
• romesco sauce w/sprouted hazelnuts, cherry tomatoes & red bell pepper

This all took the better part of 5 hours, plus an hour for clean-up and a half hour to put together two plates with collard leaves stuffed with pate & brussels sprouts salad, and pate, romesco, sunflower sprouts & cucumber, and a quarter cup of three of the salads.  I'm very happy to have this all wrapped up - I'm going out of town this weekend for a mushroom foray/taxonomy trip in Mendocino and will have all my own foods ready to pack up and bring along!

The spigariello greens turned out great as chips - and I'm really more and more happy with my new Cuisinart - it can be a bit tricky to get the nesting bowls to lock properly, and I have noticed some food bits do get up into the part of the locking lid where I can't easily clean (long bristles from a bottle cleaning brush and running water seemed to do the trick, except for one tiny carrot bit).  Also - don't expect that you'll be able to use the slicing or grating disc and can get away without washing all the bowls as bits travel down the stem and get into the other bowls.

WEDNESDAY:

• shelling Louisana pecans that I brought home in November to store in fridge
• key lime pie (lime, young coconut meat & water, avocado) with pecan/mac crust

This is my "to-do" - after doing 4 hours of work, a couple loads of laundry, vacuuming, sweeping & mopping the floor.  I'm trying to think about how to make small "to go" sizes of the key lime pie so I can bring some with me on my weekend trip.