Hello Fellow Campers and Foodies!
Gourmet Girl Denise here! As Executive Chef of The Gourmet Girls Go Camping Cookbook, I really needed to find a way to save time while we were testing the many fabulous recipes for the book. On a few of our trips we were testing two or three recipes at once, and this was really interfering with my hammock time!
On one of our Gourmet Girls camping trips, GG Gail was a bit nonplussed to see that I had brought along my mandolin. No, not the musical kind used to serenade star-crossed lovers but the slicing kind, that if you’re not careful can slice your fingers off along with that lovely, thinly sliced potato. We were testing our Cast Iron Ratatouille, and I was not looking forward to slicing all of the veggies by hand. They need to be uniform in thickness for this dish to look good and cook uniformly. So I sat down at the picnic table, opened the compact 16″ long by 6″wide box, pulled out my mandolin, and began slicing.
GG Gail was amazed by the speed in which I transformed two Japanese eggplants, two yellow zucchini, and three Roma tomatoes into paper thin, perfectly round slices. Of course I had to slow down and use the hand protector that comes with the mandolin for the final slices of each veggie (watch out! The blades are sharp!), but even so, the task was done in half the time it would have taken if I had tried to slice everything by hand. And the mandolin has several interchangeable blades, as well as a control knob that sets the slicing blade to cut your veggies in four different thicknesses.
So don’t forget to bring your time-saving kitchen gadgets along on your next camping trip. The mandolin (mine is made by OXO) is small and doesn’t take up much space. And it will make your life so much easier and save you time for more important things, like hiding from that bear who’s been sniffing around.
Oh, and if you want the recipe for our Cast Iron Ratatouille, our cookbook is available as an eBook to download to your Kindle, Nook, or iPad, and also as a wire-o book, NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER through our website here.
Happy Camping!
Denise, Gail and Lindsey
The Gourmet Girls on Fire!