Our Favorite Microplane + Giveaway (CLOSED)!

NOTE: this giveaway is closed.

We're cooking with Beck today! 

You saw her Monday in the Chinese Beef and Zucchini Bowls, get after those if you haven't already.

Beck is at an age where she can actually DO a few things in the kitchen, and I love it so much. She has an understanding of how to hold handles of pots and not use her other hand to stabilize a hot pot (thank goodness), she can stir and add ingredients, and whooboy will she taste almost anything if she's made it herself.

Kids in the kitchen are slow. They are messy. They are not terribly talented at literally anything, until you teach them. I'm a huge advocate of cooking with kids at the expense of any personal comfort. There are definitely some times when it's frustrating and I'd rather just.do.it.already, but I do believe that the only way out is through, and it is so important to me that Beck now how to feed herself even if she never adores cooking.

So we cook with our kids! So that it's not a mystery, it's just a thing that we do. And, new this week, Beck can grate things! All over the counter! Barely into the sauce!

But by golly, she tried, and she had a GREAT time. I can assure you that these pictures aren't posed, because my daughter is not one to be posed. She either likes things or she doesn't, and she either runs away from the camera or she doesn't, and there's literally nothing I can do to change that.

Microplane sent us some new graters/zesters and safety gloves for me and Beck, and we've had the most fun using them! The Asian-style sauce in the Beef and Zucchini Bowls is a perfect dish to practice grating, but there are tons of other times that I use graters and zesters in meals.

Especially this time of year, I love adding fresh things on top of cooked dishes to brighten them up. We use our Microplane graters for TONS of things, including but definitely not limited to:

• Grating garlic and ginger into Asian-style sauces like these Korean Chicken Bowls.
• Zesting lemon or lime zest on top of salads right before serving like this Asparagus Salad.
• And lemon zest over top of Broiled Chicken, aka the fastest weeknight dinner.
• Parmesan over pasta because we aren't animals. This spinach cream version, this one-pan scampi, and this lemon pepper pasta all scream for freshly grated parmesan.

To say that we LOVE these fun gadgets is an understatement. The ease of grating for kids and adults with the safety gloves, the HUGE array of styles and colors (I honestly could spend $500 on zesters alone because I need one of each style and no I do not need them but yes I want them).

And also! This week I'm doing a giveaway of a set of safety gloves and a classic zester grater, a great size for so many things. It's over on Instagram; head over to enter! That ends Friday.

this post was sponsored by microplane, and the writing, recipe, and images are by me. we adore these products and can’t recommend them enough, truly. thank you for being here!