Archive for January, 2007
It’s the old favourite in one of it’s infinate variations - banana and sesame:
I ground up maybe 80g of sesame seeds with 1 tablespoon of cacao nibs and a bit of vanilla pod. I mashed this up with a banana and and a teaspoon of mesquite and a teaspoon of hemp leaf green superfood.
The basics of the recipe are the ground sesame seeds (or tahini) and the banana. Any number of other things can be added, I often use spirulina but I fancied a changed today. If I want something really sweet I’ll mix in a bit of agave or carob powder.
January 24th, 2007
Just found a great new website www.walkit.com. There are loads of route planning websites out there but they are all for driving, this is the first one that is specifically for walking routes. On the surface there might not seem like much is different, but try using a normal route planning site and end up taking a 3 mile detour when you could have just walked ‘the wrong way’ down a one way street! They also plan to add lots of off road walking routes which would be wonderful.
January 24th, 2007
I just made Golden Cream Pie, one of Holly’s recipes. It was great, although not quite as good as when Holly makes it!
(Also, I didn’t have dried cherries, so I used fresh ones, which made the base not very base like!)
January 23rd, 2007
I made myself a dehydrator:
Ok, not quite. I worked out how to dry stuff using my radiator! I’ve been using this method to melt my cacao butter for a while now, then started drying some orange peel for making the orange oil which then led me to try and dehydrate a cookie…
So I was experimenting with a recipe for a cake base and I thought “mmm, this would make a good choc chip cookie, so I added some currants and, there it is:
Ingredients:
I put everything except the currants into the food processor and processed until the texture was ‘cake like’ (took quite a while, kept having to stop and stir it up a bit). I then added the currants and processed briefly. I ate most of it as it was and dried one cookie for an hour or two, but I think if you have a dehydrator it might make good cookies. You might want to add more cacao powder, 1tsp doesn’t make them very chocolaty.
January 23rd, 2007
I love mulberries! When I was living in Spain, I lived about 5 minutes walk to a mulberry tree so when it was the season, I would go every day and pick and eat!
Taking a cue from the Vanoffe bar, which is a raw white chocolate bar, I decided to try my hand at dark chocolate with mulberries.
First, I ground up some very dry mulberries (if your mulberries are still a bit chewey, they may need dehydrating before you do this) with some vanilla pod. Then I melted about 40g of cacao butter and added:
I left it in the fridge for a while until hard and it was very good. I think this recipe might work well with my mint oil when it is ready.
January 20th, 2007
It’s my belief that if we crave a certain food, it is most likely to be for nutritional reasons rather than emotional reasons. I just came across this chart which suggests which foods to eat to satisfy particular bad food cravings. It’s not vegatarian (so I recommend you ignore the the non veg bits), but most categories have vegatarian food options that you could use:
www.naturopathyworks.com/pages/cravings.php
If anyone finds it useful, I’d be interested to know which ‘good’ foods you used to satisfy which cravings.
January 20th, 2007
Thanks to quotidianlight who commented on my last post about making flavoured oils, today I bought a bottle of sesame oil and I’m going to try some experiments. I’ve put about 100ml of oil in a jar with two tablespoons of dried mint. When I next use some oranges, I’ll dry the peel and make some orange oil too. I’ll report back in a couple of weeks on how it tastes.
Got to mention Holly’s most recent post over at rawcuisine.co.uk, it contains a “don’t try this at home” recipe using zeolite…
January 19th, 2007
If you know me at all, you probably know that I hate supermarkets, but sometimes, like totday, I end up in one. I hadn’t been to get my wild greens and it was getting dark. If I want to buy organic greens, I have a choice, a two hour round trip on the underground to an independant health shop or a five minute walk to the supermarket. A 2 hour trip seems too much for 100g of greens, so the supermarket it was.
I picked up a bag of watercress, spinach and rocket salad and then somehow got drawn to the chocolate isle. I must have spent at least 10 minutes (maybe more) looking at all the posh chocolates, but amazingly I managed to leave without buying any of them and inspired!
Back home, out comes the cacao butter and another raw chocolate experiment begins. I grate 50 grams and start to melt it, and then stir in a teaspoon of dried mint leaves (stuff I bought for making mint tea). I thought it might work the same way as making tea, leave to infuse for 10 to 20 minutes as the cacao butter slowly melts.
Once the butter had melted, I added 4 tablespoons of cacao powder, 4 tabelspoons of carob and 2 tabelspoons of lucuma (I think, I might have lost count on some of those measurements). I tasted it, good chocolate but not very minty so in goes another teaspoon of mint, still not minty enough so in goes another. In the fridge to set:
and then the real taste test: good chocolate, but the mint thing didn’t work. I now understand why people use mint extract or mint oil, I shied away from that because I’ve looked at other things like orange oil and they always seem to have other unwanted ingredients. I will have to search for some really natural flavourings.
Ps We’ve got the chocolate moulds in the shop now, only £1.50!
January 16th, 2007
I made a delicious tomato sauce which I had with a simple salad of wild greens, some chopped musrooms, avocado and some unpasteurised cheese with wild garlic.
Here’s the recipe for the sauce:
- 2 fresh tomatoes
- 4 sun dried tomato halves, soaked for 3 hours
- 1 date, soaked for 3 hours
- 1 smallish red pepper
- 6 wild garlic leaves
- a small piece of fresh chili
- about a teaspoon of corriander seeds
- about a teaspoon of ground cumin
Put it all in the blender and blend!
January 14th, 2007
Rose hips are the fruit of the rose plant. There are many different varieties but the one most often found in the wild is the Dog Rose (Rosa canina), pictured below. Rosa rugosa has larger, rounder hips. I was eating rose hips in the Autumn but I found them quite tart and the little hairs on the seeds could be a problem, but I’ve found that now is the best time to eat them. They are so much sweeter now and it seems the hairs are less of a problem. I pick the hip then kind of squeeze the seeds out without losing too much of the flesh.
Rose hips are extremly high in vitamin C in a form very useful to the body and have high levels of calcium, iron and vitamin A. They also contain selenium which can be hard to get on a raw diet.
January 11th, 2007
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