Coriander and Lemongrass

Did something a little different today for the salad dressing (oh, ok, not that different).

  • 2 avocados
  • 1 soaked sun dried tomato
  • handful of fresh coriander
  • small piece of cucumber
  • some chili
  • a shaking of dried basil
  • a bit of lemongrass

I got a whole stalk of lemongrass, never actually bought it like that before. It was still dried, but seemed a lot fresher than when you buy it in a packet.

Anyway, back the recipe. As usual, shove all the ingredients into the blender with some of the soak water from the tomatoes and blend.

London – web design and raw food

I went to London last week for a few days, partly for work and partly for play.

Web Design

I arrived in East Grinstead on Thursday evening and was met at the station by Steve Charter, an old friend from the days of Ecoforest. It was good to catch up with Steve and see the community he now lives in – Hoathly Hill. On Friday I helped Steve set up two websites www.sc2.org.uk for his Sustainability Consultancy business and www.cultureofchange.com which is an interesting idea based around using popular culture (film, novels, music, etc) as a vehicle of change to bring about a sustainable, healthy and inspiring world. I created both sites using WordPress (the same as this site) so it is easy for Steve to update them himself.

London

Later Friday afternoon I travelled up to London and met up with another old friend for dinner then headed over to Camden where I stayed with Janet for the next three days for lots of raw food excitement.

Saturday evening it was the Raw Food buffet at “The Spirited Palace” in Crystal Palace which Janet had helped to organise. We started off with a Sound Healing workshop which was lots of fun and included speaking gibberish! Then an amazing raw food buffet. Afterwards some great music, I had a bit of a dance but I was the only one! After this was poetry and me and Debbie got told off for talking in the corner 😉

Sunday morning I did a bit of work on the Festival of Life website with Janet, set up a mailing list system using phpList, not very exciting so I won’t say anymore.

The Raw Meeting

Sunday afternoon was the “Raw Food Organisers Conference” (bit of a mouthful and we changed the name to something shorter and snappier, but I can’t remember what it was!). About 20 (?) people turned up for this and we discussed various things including the Food of Life festival in Brighton on June 4th, the Rawberry Gathering from 10th – 14th August and the Funky Raw Festival from 8 to 13 August, which you will be hearing a lot more about very soon as Holly and myself are organising it.

We also discussed the setting up of a Yahoo group where people can post raw food events which can hopefully help us avoid clashes like Rawberry and Funky Raw both being at the same time. (Although Rawberry is near Harrogate in the North of England and Funky Raw is down in Cornwall, so shouldn’t cause too many problems).

We also talked about other stuff including lots of completely inconsequential stuff, I can’t actually think of anything else to report, but if when I get the minutes I find something, I will report back…

A few of us stayed over at Janet’s and we stayed up quite late talking pretty random stuff and having a laugh, the kind of thing years ago I would have done when having a few beers but this is all fuelled by raw food!!!

Curry

Funky Raw issue 6 is finished now and is at the printers, should be with us early next week. Some good stuff – Aranya’s experience with his Ejuva cleanse, running vehicles on used vegetable oil, reports of experiences of taking ayahuasca and of course a good selection of recipes.

Which leads on to the curry I made for dinner:

  • 2 sundried tomatoes (soaked)
  • 4 tomatoes
  • 1 carrot
  • handful fresh coriander
  • 1 wild garlic leaf (you can of course use shop bought garlic if you prefer!)
  • 1/2 tsp dried coriander
  • 1/2 tsp cumin
  • 1/4 tsp fenugreek
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1/2 tsp garam masala

Put all ingredients into your blender and turn it on.

We had this over a salad of cucumber, tomato, grated carrot, grated sweet potato and broccoli with wild pennywort, wild garlic and watercress.

Avocado and Carrot

No posts for a while as I’ve been very busy producing the next issue of the Funky Raw magazine. I really need to get it finished by tonight so I’ll be quick. We had a raw food gathering here last night and here are a couple of recipes I made:

Avocado and Carrot Sauce

  • 1 avocado
  • 1 carrot
  • 2 sun dried tomatoes, soaked
  • 3 tablespoons of seaweed flakes
  • fresh chili to taste
  • 1 tablespoon flax oil
  • water (as much as you need to get it to blend properly)

Put everything in the blender, including some (or all) of the soak water from the tomatoes and blend.

I’ve started to use flax oil as I read a bit about Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids and their importance to our health. We need a balance of the two, but most nuts and seeds have way more omega 6 so we need some flax oil which has more omega 3. Hemp seeds have a good balance of both.

Carrot and Beetroot salad

  • 2 carrots
  • 1/2 beetroot
  • juice of 1 orange

Grate the carrots and beetroot into a bowl and pour over the orange juice. Leave to marinate for a while, stirring occasionally.

Everyone who came brough delicious food, my favourite being Charlie’s Carob Pie (and of course Holly’s Golden Cream Pie).

Orange chocolate mint

Just got back this evening, we did a raw food preparation workshop in Manchester which went really well and then popped over to York to see my parents.

I was missing my chocolate puddings so made a nice desert based on the chocolate pudding recipe:

Hemp milk

The pudding

Make hemp milk by blending the hemp seeds up with the oranges and soak water. Strain through a muslin bag then put the hemp milk back into the blender with the other ingredients and blend.

Banana and sesame desert

First, make hemp milk:

  • 200g hemp seeds, soaked for 4 hours or more
  • 1 orange
  • soak water from dried figs and apricots (see next part)

Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until all the hemp seeds have been broken down. Strain through a muslin bag (or tea towel or old t-shirt).

Next:

Place these ingredients in the blender along with the hemp milk and blend. Mmmm delicious.

Durian and Mangosteen, London and Brighton

No posts for a while as I’ve been away, although unfortunately not to Thailand – I’ve only been as far as London and Brighton. In London I headed straight for China Town where I know of a few shops which sell tropical fruit. I tried mangosteen for the first time and they are amazing, quite unlike any other fruit I’ve had before. I also had some longan which were also delicious, they were very similar to lychees but with a different outer shell. Got a couple of durians, they are not quite ripe yet, looking forward to having them very soon.

Had a great time in Brighton, a continuation of our “Staying Awake Club”. It’s based on research by Tony Wright on how the brain works and how we might be able to enable much more brain function. On the Saturday night we had a bit of party, Kate invited a few other friends and we had lots of raw cake with superfoods and then later we took some ayahuasca. We made it with a different ingredient and I found it very difficult to drink, so I ended up not drinking too much and not having a very big experience, but it was still good.

You can read a bit more about the weekend on Jess’ blog.

A quick recipe for you. While in China Town I found some very cheap sheets of kelp so I made the following:

  • 2 avocaods
  • about 4 sheets of kelp, soaked for 30 mins
  • bit of chili

Everything went in the Vitamix, including the soak water and it was delicious (but then I do love seaweed).
Got a lot of work to catch up with now so I’m going to stop writing. I really must get on with the next issue of Funky Raw if it is going to come out anytime near the due date and at the weekend me and Holly are doing a raw food prep workshop in Manchester.

Chocolate

Had to post a chocolate recipe today!

Put everything in a food processor and process until a nice consistency. Roll into balls or whatever shape you want.

Avocado and Orange

So, 90% of my recipes contain avocado, I hope you like them as much as me!

Ingredients

  • 1 orange
  • 3 tablespoons seaweed flakes
  • 1 1/2 sun dried tomatoes, soaked
  • 2 avocados
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1/4 tsp maca
  • 1/4 tsp hemp leaf powder

Squeeze the orange and soak the seaweed in the juice for about 1/2 an hour. Put everything, including the orange juice with the seaweed and some of the tomato soak water, into the Vitamix and blend.

The Ayahuasca Experience

Wow, what a weekend. We had 4 people come to the experience, plus Tish came up from Cornwall (and Gavin helped out a bit in the evening).

We started the day by putting the Ayahuasca on to brew and then eating Chocolate Pudding.  We did various things throughout the day including a walk to pick wild greens, meditation and lots of talking about consciousness and the workings of the brain, including lots about new ideas about why our brain is as it is right now, but I’m not really going to talk about all that right now, I’m going to get right on to the evening.

Ok, I’ll mention one more thing  before getting on to the Ayahuasca – Holly made the most delicious pie, Golden Cherry Cream Pie.  At about 11pm the brew was ready to drink.  I drank about half of what we gave to the guests, so in theory I would be there if anyone needed help.

After drinking, we did eye connection meditation.  We rotated so everyone got 2 minutes of deeply looking into each persons eyes.  This seemed to bring on the experience very quickly.  I could feel myself slowly beginning to loose control of my body, I managed to move to go to the loo at the start as I knew that very soon I would no longer be capable!

I started off in the ‘quiet’ room but then I heard the most beautiful music coming from the other room. I didn’t think I still had the capability to move rooms, but I found that I actually did, so I found a nice space to sit and listed to the music. Playing was a CD by Nigel Shaw, which was beautiful natural music, rivers, birds, flutes. It instantly took me on a journey. The music became the music of a film playing in my head which was perfectly choreographed – the visual images in my head were completely following the music.

I also had an intense feeling of love for everyone in the room, I can’t remember if this was before, after or during the ‘film’ experience described above. It’s interesting to note that two other people who were in the same room at the time also reported the same feeling of love. The whole experience was one of complete bliss.
I think I was sat down (and fairly unable to move) for about an hour, after this I got up and was able to move about and interact with other people again, although I was still feeling the effects of the Ayahuasca.

It seems everyone who came really enjoyed it so I think there is a good chance we will do another one at some point.