Posts filed under 'Raw'
I also made a marinated mushroom dish. I got some reshi mushroom powder from Holly’s shop ages ago and didn’t really use it much, and then last week I had some and have probably eaten it every day since!
I mixed the above ingredients and then added sliced shiitake and chestnut mushrooms. I also soaked some dried porcini mushrooms and added them to the mix. Leave to marinate for a little while and then you have delicious mushrooms.
February 13th, 2008
I like making pesto with basil, but it’s not really in season at the moment, so I used some wild leaves I collected. I used mostly wild garlic (pictured), a few chives and a few sorrel leaves. I ground up a couple of handfuls of pine nuts, then added the leaves and some flax oil and blended. It had a strong flavour, delicious on a green salad of dandelion leaves and other wild greens.
February 13th, 2008
This was one of the headlines in today’s Guardian newspaper. I really don’t know where to start, but this has got to be one of the worst articles I’ve ever read. The lowest point was this statement, made by Tom Sanders, director of the Nutritional Sciences Division at King’s College London. He was talking about fruit smoothies:
“If you liquidise it into goo it’s just like drinking ordinary Coke. Or worse, actually,”
I don’t think so. Fruit has a vast array of different nutrients; minerals, some protein and lots of vitamins including Vitamin C, which may be more important than conventional nutritionists realise. Look at the nutrition of coke. It’s got zero vitamins, zero protein and lots of sugar and some nasty acid. Work out for yourself which is best!
The articles finishes with the following:
“The way you’ve got to look at fruit is that it’s better to eat fruit than biscuits, cakes and puddings, because there’s very little energy value in it and it’s not fattening,” he [Sanders] says. “A bit of sugar gives you a lift and takes the pangs of hunger away. But it’s not full of all sorts of other nutrients as well. That’s a myth”
The nutrition is fruit is a myth is it? Has he looked at nutritiondata.com recently? Maybe he should try it. You can enter any fruit and it will list all the vitamins and minerals they contain. For example, one large kiwi fruit gives you 68.2mg of vitamin C, that’s 114% of the RDA.
The bit of the article they do get right is about ready prepared fruit (like sliced apples, etc) is not as good for you as it starts to loose nutrition from the moment it’s been cut.
If you want to read the whole article, it’s here, but don’t worry, you are almost certainly not eating too much fruit!
January 23rd, 2008
Over on the Sunfood discussion forum, Kyle posted a photo of Tom Yum soup which made me want to eat it, so I decided to try and make a raw version.
First I made coconut milk by blending about a third of the flesh of a mature coconut with the coconut water and some more water and then squeezed it through a nut milk bag.
Then I got the following ingredients:
- 1 clove garlic
- 3 stalks of lemon grass
- 2 birds eye chillies (the small hot ones)
- small piece of fresh ginger
- 25g fresh coriander
- 1 red pepper
- 2 cherry tomatoes
- lime juice
- coconut milk (as made above)
I chopped the lemon grass quite finely, then chopped the rest of the ingredients and put everything except the coriander in the Vitamix along with the coconut milk and the juice of about a quarter of a lime and blended. I then added the coriander and blended again (so that there were still bits of coriander visible). I was very pleased with it for a first attempt!
December 21st, 2007
There has been a lot of speculation on this topic, I think it’s the first time I’ve heard David Wolfe say he eats ants. His viewpoint is pretty much the same as mine.
November 23rd, 2007
I can hardly contain my excitement - I’ve just taken delivery of 120 packets of freeze dried durian. It’s going to be a real test for me to not eat it all before I sell it! It’s delicious, and if you soak it for 20 to 30 mins, it becomes just like fresh durian again.
I’m sure I’ll be posting lots of durian recipes in the very near future…
November 17th, 2007
I made a simple paté for dinner tonight:
- 1 medium avocado
- about 5 cherry tomatoes
- 1 tablespoon kelp powder
- 1 tablespoon flax oil
- squeeze of lemon juice
Now I know most of my recipes start “place in blender”, well this time it’s different, I just used a fork to mash all the ingredients together, after first chopping up the tomatoes. And that’s it, I had it with spinach, rocket and watercress, delicious and simple.
November 14th, 2007
This Radio New Zealand interview is a great introduction to Tony’s work and his theories. He talks about what he thinks the problem with the human brain is, what latent abilities we could all access if we could make full use of the right brain and what we can do to help the situation. It’s a great summary of the Left in the Dark book.
(Update: I’ve fixed the links again - they now link directly to mp3 files.)
Listen to Part 1
Listen to Part 2
October 30th, 2007
If you’ve been eating rose hips you will know about the seeds, they can be a faf to remove and some of them are so hard that even the VitaMix won’t break them down. So today I discovered a very simple way of using them - I put them in the blender with my hemp seeds when I am making the hemp milk, so the flesh gets broken down and goes into the milk and the seeds get left behind when I strain the milk. The milk tastes prety good like this too.
October 24th, 2007
The latest addition to my breakfast of chocolate pudding is wild rose hips. They are in season now, you will find them growing all over the place, a local, highly nutritious superfood.
First, gently squeeze the rose hip to check if it is ripe. If it is firm then it’s not ripe, you want to feel for the softness and only very gentle force to pull it from the plant.
Rose hips are full of seeds which can be hairy and irritating when ingested, although I find that when they are properly ripe they don’t cause problems. There is a technique to getting the seeds out - hold the hip in between thumb and finger with one hand, and with the other, gently break the skin around the closed end of the fruit then pull while squeezing with the other hand - if successful all the seeds will come out in a clump. The seeds are edible, they are high in vitamin E, just some of them are very hard.
Rose hips are amazingly high in Vitamin C, according to Wikipedia, rose hips have 2000 mg per 100g compared to oranges with 50 mg and dried goji berries with 73 mg. I just recently found out that most animals can make their own vitamin C within their bodies, humans along with the other primates are some of the only creatures who don’t have this ability and have to rely on food for their vitamin C supply.
It starts to get interesting when we look at how much vitamin C other animals make. According to this article by Bill Sardi “A 160-pound goat produces about 13,000 milligrams per day” and “A dog or cat will produce about 40 milligrams of vitamin C per kilogram of body weight per day, or the equivalent of 2800 mg per day if these animals were about the same size as humans.” Compare this with the RDA of 90 mg and you begin to think that something might be wrong. The Vitamin C Foundation suggest that humans might need 5000 mg per day. In the Sardi article, it is suggested that this kind of dose of vitamin C can increase our lifespan and health.
So it all starts to fit together, by eating a raw food diet you would generally be getting a lot more vitamin C than the RDA, but maybe we need even more than that. I did a rough estimate of one day’s vitamin C intake for myself and it came out at around 500 mg, nowhere near the suggested 5000 mg. But adding 100g of rose hips per day could take that up to 2500 mg, so that’s what I aim to do while they are free and in season.
October 18th, 2007
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