New Year New Stuff!

Well, I had no New Year's Resolutions to work on. Not that I'd make them if I did, but you know.

But it IS a new year here so we got some NEW stuff!

It all started with a new BLENDER!
Our previous blender, a Black & Decker with a beautiful glass jar, met an untimely end at the hands of a "helping" 1 year old. Or maybe he was playing. All I know is when I tried to remove octopus-boy from the dishwasher, the glass jar came with him. It was like slow motion. I SAW it fall from about 5 feet up. (I had picked him up to get him away from it.) So now we have a new Waring Stainless Steel Blender that we got from www.hecticgourmet.com. (An Acumen Brands store!) It's awesome! I've made my 2 point smoothies in it several times now. It also has less parts to clean than our old one. You just put soapy water in it and turn it on! (with the lid on, of course....)

Next, I ordered a Cuisinart Mini Prep Plus 4-cup Food Processor! I've been seeing recipes in several places *cough Pinterest cough* that called for slicing and dicing things in a food processor. I asked for one for Christmas but Santa must have been busy with other things and forgot to make it for me....Of course, after Christmas I looked at prices. Holy moly! $200???? So I searched some more and found this one for $39.99 on Amazon.com with free shipping! I made Chocolate Covered Katie's Cookie Dough Dip last week. It is fantastic! Everything was chopped just perfectly. I can't wait to try it for more things. (and I would have posted a picture of the dip, but, um, we ate it. All of it. Every last bit!)

Moving out of the kitchen and into the home office..... Our old Lexmark printer had quit working wirelessly about a year ago. So Jim just plugged it into his computer and added it to our network. (the cabled kind) A few weeks ago, as I was trying to print out a recipe for Quinoa and Black Beans, it quit. I mean, quit. Just kaput. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The computer would say "Printing page 1" but the printer just sat there like my 8 year old daughter being told to go to bed. (yes, it was IGNORING us!) So I got to go printer shopping! I started with my favorite ratings place  ConsumerReports.org. I read review after review after review. I finally settled on an HP Photosmart 6510 eAll-in-One. I actually bought it from the HP store for $119 instead of the list price of $149 AND I got free shipping. Yay! And here's the weird but best part...I ordered it on Friday morning about 10:00 am. It arrived on Saturday morning around 11:00 am! That's 24 hours! Talk about customer service. Maybe I can score some cool ink deals on there, too. Yea right....    (One cool feature of this printer...it prints from our iphones and the ipad! How cool is that?)

I know you won't believe me, but I have even MORE new stuff to talk about. But this post is long enough and the other new things are bigger. So I'll discuss them when I can get better pictures and not bore you any longer.