Another avocado dressing

Lots of catching up today after being away for six days. Unpacked a large box of superfoods for the shop, we’ve now got 1kg bags of Goji Berries and some delicious fresh dates from Iran. Also decided to give a free sample of coconut butter with every order for the month of February.

Made a very nice dressing for tonight’s salad:

1 avocado
2 large handfuls seaweed flakes (dulce, nori and sea lettuce)
a bit of spring onion
1 medium carrot
4 cherry tomatoes
1 soaked sun dried tomato and some of the soak water
1/4 tsp maca
a little water to blend

Put it all in the Vitamix and blend, adding more water if necessary.

Hope you like it!

Vipassana

Where have I been these last few days? Well, I started a 10 day Vipassana meditation course. If you don’t know, it is supposedly the path to “Enlightenment” as originally taught by Gotama Budah. 10 days of meditation, no talking, daily lectures (on video). It was definately interesting, some of the meditations went quite deep and I felt energy flowing through my body on a couple of occasions. I survived 4 days but just couldn’t do anymore.   Just not my style, I think having to get up at 4am really did it for me.  And I was missing Chocolate Pudding and all my other favourite raw foods!

(Anyone interested in more info on Vipassana can see www.dhamma.org)

Red pepper and avocado

I made a delicious sauce today for the salad:

1 red pepper
1 avocado
1 small carrot
3 cherry tomatoes
1 1/2 sundried tomato (soaked)
3 tablespoons seaweed flakes (we use a mixture of dulce, sea lettuce and nori)
1/4 tsp maca
1/8 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp coriander
1/2 tsp hemp leaf superfood
small piece of chili

I put all the ingredients into the power blender including some of the soak water from the sun dried tomatoes. I served it with a salad made with grated carrots, beetroot, sweet potato and chopped cucumber, broccoli and tomatoes with some wild pennywort and chickweed.

Things to be done…

Coconut ButterWhen I find a new ingredient, I tend to use it a lot to start with, so last night I made the parsnip thing again. This time I didn’t use sweetcorn and I used more spiring onion. I also added a bit of ginger an dried thyme – I liked it even more than the first version.

Today I’m putting more coconut butter into jars for the Funky Raw shop. I’m going to do a Vipassana meditation course on Wednesday which is 10 days long – I’ll be away for 12 days in total, so it seems like I have a lot to get finished. Anyway, the coconut butter is delicious, it’s hand made in Thailand, completely raw, organic, etc. I can’t stop eating it myself, there’ll be none left to sell! I like to open a date up, fill with cacao nibs then top with coconut butter, mmm, I might just go and make one now…

Market stall

Today we did a stall at the Staverton village market. Bertie made “Berties Yummiest Recipe” (Butterscoth Pudding), Lizzy made “Rolling Balls”, made from dried figs, dates, dried apricots and goats butter and Holly made Hazelnut Truffles which were delicious. I made dehydrated burgers with a chili sauce served on a lettuce leaf:

4 large Mushrooms
2 handfuls of walnuts (pref soaked first)
80g flax seeds (soaked for an hour or so)
1 tomato
50g sesame seeds
some spring onion
a teaspoon or 2 of ground coriander (fresh works better but we didn’t have any)
thyme, basil or other herbs

Put it all in a food processor and process then form into burger shapes and dehydrate. I did them for about 6 hours but you might want to do them for a bit longer.

The chili sauce is made from fresh tomato, sundried tomato and chili and a bit of water as necessary to blend. This time I also added a red pepper and a date. Blend up and there you have it.

Anyway, back to the market stall. We had a nice table laid out with all this delicious food and some superfoods – goji berries with some to taste, yacon root, cacao and coconut oil, also with some to taste, and the magazines and recipe booklets. But it was pretty quite and we didn’t really sell much. Oh well, maybe next time.

I don’t usually eat dehydrated food but I know non-raw people appreciate it, but as we had loads left I ate a few and it’s upset my digestion a little. I think I’ll stay off dehydrated food in the future.

Parsnips?

When I was a kid I used to hate parsnips. They were one of the only vegetables I found truly inedible.

Recently I’ve heard from a few people that parsnips were actually nice raw, so I finally plucked up the courage to buy one. This is what I did with it:

1 parsnip
1 avocado
1 carrot
Corn from 1/2 sweetcorn (maize for all you Americans)
1 sundried tomato, soaked
little bit of spring onion
little bit of chili
1/4 tsp maca
1/4 tsp hemp leaf superfood

I put all this in the Vitamix with some of the soak water from the tomato and some water and blended away. I must say it was very tasty. Holly liked it too.

Paignton

Today I walked to Paignton.  It’s about 16km (10miles) and it was a beautiful walk.  Along country lanes, across fields, through woods, by streams and rivers.  In the last section just coming up to Paignton there is some ancient woodland and I found loads of wild garlic.  When I got home Holly made this into soup, which was delicious.

Creamy Coconut Curry

As usual I went and picked wild greens, at the moment there is chickweed and pennywort, as spring comes there will be much more choice. Holly picked nettles and made nettle and celery juice.

We had a fairly standard salad – brocoli, tomato, cucumber, grated sweet potatoe and grated beetroot along with the wild greens and I made the following Coconut Curry sauce:

1 avocado
corn from one sweetcorn
fresh coconut meat (about 70 grams, as usual I didn’t weigh it)
small amount of spring onion
1 1/2 sundried tomatoes (soaked)
1/2 tsp corriander
1/4 tsp cumin
pinch of fenugreek
1/4 tsp maca (a superfood we use a lot)
1/2 tsp hemp leaf powder (another superfood, it does not contain THC or anything, it’s just dried, powdered leaves from industrial hemp. It’s got all sorts of good stuff in it and we’ll be selling it in the shop soon)
water to blend

Put all ingredients in your blender including a little of the tomato soak water and blend. Add as much water as necessary to get eveything to blend up well. We have a Vitamix blender which can cope with chunks of coconut and sundried tomatoes, if your blender can’t do this you may need to grate the coconut and chop up the tomato. We’ve got the Newgena blender in the shop which is a great high power blender. Edit: we no longer stock the Newgena but now sell the Vitamix.

It was delicious, yum, yum.

Photography

Hemp SeedsSo, I’ve always loved photography and often, while thinking of a job I’d really enjoy doing, I’d think “there must be a way to earn some money from my photography”. And you can’t say I haven’t tried, see www.madmouseart.com, for example. So today I was surprised to realise that I’d finally done it, well nearly anyway. Today I was taking photos of hemp seeds for the online shop I run. Not the kind of photography I imagined, but it’s a start.