One of my favorite shortcut tools

One of the things I like to make up for us on summer nights is a nice salad. One easy way to make the salad look super nice is to include some really nice and thin julienned carrots. Now, I HAVE been working on my knife skills, but I am nowhere near being able to julienne that much carrot in that short a time. For this, I go to one of my little shortcut tools - the julienne peeler. This little guy just takes a pull down a carrot and BOOM! You have a nice line of nice thin julienne cut carrots. 

The trick is the little barbs

The trick is the little barbs. As the peeler cuts the slice of the carrot the barbs take the slice and cut it further into strips. These you can leave long, or cut them further and get them into nice bite sized pieces that are great for salad. This cutter is also great if you want to include carrots or some other hard vegetable, like turnip or parsnip, for a stir fry or other cooked application. They would look really nice in a soup, or as a topping/garnish for a steak or pork chop. You could even cut some potatoes and fry them up for some tiny french fries.

Salad with julienne carrot

There really is no limit to how you could use this except your imagination. How do you think you could incorporate some nice julienned vegetables into your nightly meals? Let me know on Facebook or in the comments below!