Spicy Tomato Sauce

Tonights salad sauce, similar but different:

  • 2 tomatoes
  • 4 sundried tomatoe halves, soaked
  • a small amount of sea spaghetti, soaked, with soak water (I didn’t weigh it, but maybe only 5 grams)
  • 1 date, soaked
  • 1/2 yellow pepper
  • 1/2 carrot
  • 1 avocado
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds
  • a few pieces of fresh chili
  • a sprinkling of herbs de Provence
  • a small piece of fresh ginger

I blended it all together and it was delicious, I put a good amount of chili in it. I had it with a bowl full of baby spinach and some wild hedge garlic.

Peanut Curry

I made a delicious sauce to go on my greens today, but I didn’t weigh or measure everything, I was just adding stuff and playing around, but I think I can remember everything that went in:

  • 35g peanuts
  • 20g coconut
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds

I ground these up in my seed grinder first and then put in the blender with the following

  • 5 cherry tomatoes
  • 1 avocado
  • a couple of handfuls of wild garlic leaves
  • some wild chives
  • date soak water
  • lemon juice (a bit less than half a lemon)
  • fresh chili
  • turmeric
  • garam masala
  • cumin powder
  • water

Blend until smooth and creamy, adding water as necessary.

Raw curry

I attempted to make a sweet chili sauce and what I ended up with was the best raw curry I’ve ever made!

This is what I put in the blender:

  • 3 dates, soaked for about 4 hours, plus the soak water
  • 3 sundried tomato halves, soaked for about 4 hours
  • 1/2 red pepper
  • 1/2 carrot
  • 2 tomatoes
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds
  • 1/4 tsp ground cumin
  • about 1/2 tsp of chili powder (I’m a bit unsure of the exact amount as I added it in a bit at a time)
  • 1 avocado
  • 1/4 tsp agave nectar
  • a couple of handfuls of wild greens including some chives, wild garlic, sorrel and dandelion
  • 3 tablespoons of soak water from sea spaghetti (just the soak water, I ate the sea spaghetti yesterday) – I guess if you don’t have this then some seaweed flakes or a small amount of salt would create a similar flavour

I think that was everything! I blended it all up and poured it over a large dish of wild greens, and it reminded me so much of eating [cooked] curry!

Raw food out there

I was in Bumblebee (my favourite health food shop) yesterday and I overhead a bloke explaining to the cashier how raw goats milk was better than pasteurised cow’s milk. Then 5 minutes later in a different part of the shop I saw some raw food snacks for sale – Goji Bursts and Energy Bombs by Pulsin. I picked one up to have a look and the assistant mentioned to me that she had heard that they were very sweet and pointed out more raw food bars (from the USA), but I preferred the look of the handmade local ones:

pulsin-energy-bomb.jpg energy-bomb-label.gif

So I bought the Energy Bombs which contain guarana and ginseng. I had one straight away and it was delicious and I definitely got an energy surge from it, but I had the other today and while it still tasted great I didn’t notice any extra energy. I’ll have to try the goji ones next. I guess we’re beginning to see what it is like in the USA where, I understand, you can get ready made raw food items in most health food shops.

Quick and easy pudding #247

It’s the old favourite in one of it’s infinite variations – banana and sesame:

Banana and Sesame Pudding

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.

Golden Cream Pie

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!)

Pastry:
100g or ½ cup almonds, soaked
100g or ½ cup hazelnuts/ filberts, soaked and dehydrated if possible
5 dates, fresh if possible
5 prunes
1 banana
30g pitted dried cherries (if available)
handful cacao nibs

Filling:
hemp milk made with 200ml or 2/3 cup hemp seeds and juice of 2 oranges and water as necessary (click for hemp milk recipe)
a few pieces orange peel/zest
2 dried figs
½ banana
50g or ¼ cup macadamia nuts
30g or a handful goji berries

Decoration:
handful fresh cherries
sprinkling chocolate powder

Process all the pastry ingredients except the cacao nibs together until smooth, mix in the nibs and form the pastry base on a plate.

Blend the topping ingredients until smooth and fill the pie.  It will set in a few minutes
Sprinkle raw chocolate powder on the top and decorate with halved cherries.

Dehydrator Radiator

I made myself a dehydrator:

dehydrator-radiator.jpg

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:

Raw Chocolate Chip Cookie 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.

Mulberry Chocolate

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 chewy, 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.

Cravings

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 vegetarian (so I recommend you ignore the the non veg bits), but most categories have vegetarian 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.

Flavoured Oil

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…