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…
I thought that government was supposed to be a representative of us, to do what us, the people, want. So the facts from an article from the Daily Telegraph (as posted on by Holly on Raw Cuisine) makes me say to everyone out there “Wake up! Look what is happening!”. According to the article, 95% of people are against GM crops. So what is the government doing? They are pressing ahead with commercial growing, with the first crops likely to be planted in 2009. Can anyone else see what is wrong here?
I made a simple paté for dinner tonight:
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.
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 Tony’s book.
Part 1 (17 min 26 sec)
Part 2 (18 min 39 sec)
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 pretty good like this too.
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.
In a first for this blog, I’m going to talk about TV. Tomorrow (3rd Oct) at 5.15pm Thursday 4th October at 2.30pm on BBC2 (in the UK) there is a TV show called Identity and I understand that the contestant has to guess the identity of various people. Not that exciting you may think, well the interesting bit is that tomorrow Jess Michael will be on that show and her “identity” is a Raw Fooder – raw food is getting out to a wider audience. Fortunately, I don’t own a TV (don’t get me started on the evils of TV), so you’re going to have to tell me what it was like, and hopefully someone will YouTube it…
I’m going to try and post a bit more regularly again… so lets start with what I ate today:
Late Morning: Chocolate Pudding (you all know the recipe by now, but today I added a honey mango, was delicious)
Early afternoon: A small piece of raw cake left over from what Jolita and me made yesterday with coconut, banana, almonds, dates pine nuts, lucuma and a topping (or preferably base) made from cacao nibs, almonds, dates, carob powder and a little agave nectar.
Late afternoon: Some strawberries and a little later a couple of honey mangos (my current favourite in-season fruit!)
Dinner: I started out with a couple of sheets of nori in which I rolled some avocado, yellow pepper, tomato, sun dried tomato and a bit of basil. Then I made the following sauce by put all this in my Vita-Mix:
I blended it up and served it with watercress, spinach and rocket (arugula for you Americans), unfortunately from the shop as it was raining and I was too busy to go and pick anything, and a small piece of this delicious cheese with wild garlic.
As I’m currently addicted to pine nuts, I finished off by blending a handful of pine nuts with a couple of fresh dates, made a nice little desert.
As it’s only 10:30 now, there is a small chance that I’ll eat something else before I go to bed, but I feel quite full so that’s unlikely.
It’s been a while since I last posted, I’ve been at the Funky Raw festival and then Festival of Life. Back to my reasonably normal life now so maybe a few more posts! One of the things I love about my job is that I only sell products that I really value myself and want other people to share, so I am really excited that I am now selling Tony Wright’s book Left in the Dark and the Anastasia series by Vladimir Megre. Both are massively important in different ways (follow the links to read more about both). Tony’s book explains from a scientific view what is happening with our brains and Anastasia gives us inspiration for living in harmony with nature.
Here are a few photos from the festival, I’ll put a full album on the Funky Raw site soon, if you have any photos you want me to include, please send them over.
Beautiful face painting by Mary
Chan Yu’s Oriental Food Prep demo (assisted by Carme)
Music from Harmony by the fire
I’ve just added a few more answers on the FAQ page, including some info on the books I own on wild foods.
I recently got back from a holiday in Lithuania, I’ll be posting some photos soon. I found lots of wild food in the forests including wild strawberries, raspberries and bilberries.
Today I picked the first blackberries of the year, not many are ripe yet, but there are a few and they are delicious, larger and juicer than last year.