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.