*Knock knock* Anybody out there? Greetings humans and googlebot! I know I said my blog-hibernation would last until September, but I have a very good reason for this post!
I am holding a contest for a FREE Healthy Chef from Lexen Products. The Lexen Healthy Chef is an amazing 4-in-1 kitchen appliance that acts as a food dehydrator, rice cooker, steamer, and yogurt maker all in one! Lexen Products will be supplying the Healthy Chef at no cost to the lucky winner. For more detailed information about the Healthy Chef, or to purchase one click here.
Free Healthy Chef Giveaway!
Behold the mighty Healthy Chef!
Here are the guidelines for the contest:
There can only be one winner, though you are all winners in my heart [/end cheese]
The winner must be located in the US (sorry, my awesome non US readers!) If you're not in the US, you can still nominate your favorite US blogger and give them a chance to win.
The contest will end on July 8th at midnight. Wing-it Vegan will be 1 year old on July 9th when I will announce the lucky winner!
I will use a random number generator to pick a winner. If you win, I will ask you to email me your name and address so I can forward it to the Lexen Products representative and they will ship the Healthy Chef immediately.
To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post telling me what you are most excited to make/dehydrate when you win the Healthy Chef. Lurkers, come on out and de-lurk yourselves! :-)
To get an extra entry, link to this giveaway on your blog or website. Just leave me a separate comment on this post to give me a heads up!
Healthy Chef Review
I get to try the Healthy Chef too, thank you very much. We are home for a week long (or short) vacation, which means there isn't a lot of time to get properly acquainted with Mr. Healthy Chef. Do you see the irony here? We come home for a vacation, most people leave home instead. We're backwards!
Anyway, the Healthy Chef is an impressive little dude. Its rice-cooking magic keeps me from overcooking rice, which is a chronic problem that I suffer from. Just set the timer for the amount of rice that you want to cook and when it's done Mr. H.C will beep and let you know that it's done. Effortless! LOVE!
You can steam veggies without turning them into mush, which is also another one of my chronic problems. One of my favorite things about this product is that you can also steam veggies while the rice is cooking for a quick and non-mushy meal. AWESOME! I'm really looking forward to using the steamer for homemade vegan sausages too, though I might have to wait until our next vacation for that.
I am not yogurt's biggest fan, but I wanted to try the yogurt making feature anyway just to say that I've made yogurt. It was way better than the store bought stuff, because those are always too sweet for my taste. The little jars that come with the Healthy Chef are great. Instead of one big jar you get six individual servings.
My favorite part about the dehydrator feature is the awesome smell that takes over the house while it's working its magic! I dehydrated some strawberries, oranges, lemons, raspberries and dates at the same time, and the house smelled like a delicious fruity sorbet! The five trays are very convenient to dehydrate different things at the same time. This was my first time using a dehydrator and it has been so much fun. The Healthy Chef would be ideal for someone that wants to start eating more raw foods, but still enjoy the goodness of steamed veggies and perfectly cooked hot rice.
Another big plus is that it's a piece of cake to use, and cleaning it couldn't be any easier because you can just stick everything in the dishwasher (except for the base - duh!) It's bigger than I expected too, it's not some tiny little toy appliance that makes five apple chips at a time. Our kitchen is rather small, so I keep him in the laundry room. He seems to like it there. Oh yeah, whoever wins this puppy is in for a treat!
Here's what I have cooked up with Mr. Healthy Chef so far:
We had some veggie wraps for dinner. While I made the tortillas, the rice and veggies cooked together in happy unison. Can you see the rice below the tray?
Steamed veggie goodness
Perfectly cooked brown rice
This was my first time ever making yogurt! I was a bit skeptical of my yogurt-making abilities but it turned out excellent. The Healthy Chef comes with six cute jars (and lids) like the one pictured below.
Vegan yogurt with berry goodies and date "sugar"
I saw somewhere (can't remember where) that you can make "date sugar" out of dehydrated dates and use it as a sweetener in cereal and smoothies, so here's my attempt. Because of my impatience and instant-gratification issues, the dates weren't entirely done when I removed them from the dehydrator. The result was similar to brown sugar because there was still some moisture in there. Patience, Daniel-san. Wax on, wax off.
Date sugar
I don't have a powerful blender like a Vitamix or Blendtec, so my green smoothies are either lumpy with green goopy stuff floating around, or it's too much work to drain them to make sure they're smooth and not like some icky Fear Factor challenge.
*light bulb over head*
Dehydrated greens ground to a powder + smoothie = lump-free green smoothie!
Green powder ready to work its magic...
...voila!
There are things that I don't like doing when I'm cooking. Zesting stuff is one of them. I have a big beef (or is that a seitan cutlet?) with zesters/graters, but I love what lemon and orange zest can do to spice up recipes.
*light bulb over head*
Dehydrated lemon/orange peel + Magic Bullet = dry zest on call!
I ground the dehydrated peel until it was almost a powder, and I used the orange zest to perk up some orange-cranberry cupcakes. The aromatherapy that was going on while the stuff was in the dehydrator was insane! Now I have orange and lemon zest in a spice jar ready to go whenever I need it.
Orange zest
The lemon zest came in handy when I ran out of fresh lemons for my tea.
Lemon zest
I only had a few days to play with it for now, so I didn't just want to make apple and banana chips or dehydrated tomatoes. Everybody knows that dehydrators can do that, I wanted to see what else was possible, and found that the possibilities are endless!
See you guys on July 9th for the big winner announcement! Good luck to everyone! I miss you all, though I have been inconspicuously lurking around your blogs during my blog break. Mwahahaha! :-)
*light bulb over head burns out*
Well, there you have it. This was so much fun! See you guys a little earlier than expected, I have a lot of road-pictures to share. I'll leave you with one of my favorite ones. 
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