I was at a festival the other week (Tribojam, it was amazing) and of course I didn’t have my usual full store cupboards of food, which forced me to experiment more. I had lots of chia seeds with me and made a few different chia puddings. So this is a very flexible recipe, you can add what you have. Start with the following:

• 4 tablespoons chia seeds – (at Funky Raw they still on special offer until the end of August)
• Juice of half a lemon (or lime)
• Approx 300ml water

Mix together and leave to soak for 10 to 20 minutes. The chia seeds will soak up most of the liquid – you can add more water if you want it not as thick.

Then add a selection of fruit and flavourings as you desire. I like chopped pears, a couple of tablespoons of carob powder and a teaspoon of honey. Chopped or mashed banana also works well (this can be in addition to the pears or instead, up to you). I’m sure there are many other variations you can make, switch the carob for lucuma, algarroba or acai powder, add a teaspoon of bee pollen, or goji berries, etc.

Yes, nettles again! I love them! I made this tonight, it was delicious:

• 1 small red pepper
• couple of large handfuls of nettle tops (top 4 to 6 leaves from each plant)
• 4 sun dried tomato halves
• lemon juice
• olive oil
• small handful dried wakame seaweed, soaked for 5 mins
• oregano (maybe 1/8th teaspoon?)
• 2 egg yolks (optional)

Sorry, as usual I didn’t measure anything. Put everything except the egg yolks and wakame in the blender and blend, adding olive oil as needed. Then add the wakme and blend a bit more – I left it so the wakame wasn’t blended in fully. The paté was finished at this stage, but I wanted to make it a bit more filling so I stirred in 2 egg yolks.

It’s walnut season! We’re still in Portugal and found a few walnut trees near where we are staying so we’ve been collecting. And there are lots of nettles coming up now, so I came up with the idea for nettle and walnut paté and it worked quite well:

• A couple of large handfuls of nettles
• 1 cup walnuts, soaked for 4 hours or more
• 3 sun dried tomato halves, soaked
• squeeze of lemon juice
• around a cup of olive oil
• dried oregano
• water if necessary to blend

Blend! I actually had problems blending as we don’t have the Vitamix with us while travelling and the blender we have is not very good, hence needing to add a fair bit of olive oil and water to make it blend.

Enjoy! Let me know in the comments if you like it, or make your own version of it.

I’m reading the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougal, which is about the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico who run hundreds of miles with seemingly little effort. I’m only part way through the book but it is excellent and very well written. It’s one of those books that’s hard to put down, it’s written like a novel although it is a non-fiction book.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about the book, it’s about a drink the Tarahumara make with chia seeds which is supposedly one of the reasons they can run such long distances without tiring. Chia seeds are amazing, there is a whole page in the book which reads like an advert for chia seeds: very high in omega 3 and 6, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fibre and antioxidants, etc, etc, actually I had a customer on the Funky Raw Shop say they bought the chia seeds after reading this book! So it’s always good to have another recipe of how to use them, and this is simple and delicious:

• 1 tablespoon chia seeds
• 1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 300ml water

Mix the lime or lemon juice with the water – the original recipe calls for lime but I used lemon as it was all I had. Dissolve the honey in this mixture. Add the chia seeds and stir well. Leave for about 20 minutes or so, stirring occasionally. Drink! It will keep for longer in the fridge if you want to make a larger batch.

If you have any chia seed recipe (or other comments), feel free to share below.

The other day we had a meal in a non-raw restaurant. Not something we do very often, but especially while travelling where there are no raw places to eat it can be fun. Interestingly, it was the decision to stop trying to be 100% strict about my diet which enabled me to stick to eating raw more than when I was trying to be strict. Counter-intuitive, but life is so much easier when there are no rules! Anyway, back to the restaurant. We shared a chocolate mousse for dessert and it was so good that when I got home I decided to look up how to make chocolate mousse to try and make a raw version.

Surprisingly, most recipes didn’t need much tweaking to make them 100% raw – they already contain raw eggs, just substitute raw chocolate for the cooked chocolate (and use raw butter and/or raw cream in the recipes that call for these ingredients.) This is the page I found on the Guardian website with a good selection of chocolate mousse recipes and useful comments.

So yesterday I tried the first recipe from that site, the classic French recipe from the book French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David and it worked really well.

First I made raw chocolate using the following, quantities approximate:

• 25g cacao paste
• 22g cacao butter
• 10g dairy butter
• 3 tablespoons lucuma
• 1 tablespoon carob powder
• 1 tablespoon algarroba powder
• 1 teaspoon orange blossom honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla powder
• 1/2 teaspoon reishi mushroom powder

I grated the cacao butter and paste, added the butter and melted over a bowl of hot water (bain marie style). When fully melted I slowly stirred in all the other ingredients. This made too much chocolate, so I took 90g of the still melted chocolate for the mousse, and put the rest in moulds.

I then followed the recipe from the Guardian website above, using 30g of chocolate and 1 egg per portion. So I mixed 3 egg yolks into the melted chocolate (although of course I didn’t have the water simmering, I just kept it warm to keep the chocolate melted). Then I beat the 3 egg whites until they were relatively stiff (they use the term “soft peaks”) and gently folded this in to the chocolate and egg yolk mixture. Put in the fridge to set and you have a delicious raw chocolate mousse!

I’m sure it would work with other raw chocolate recipes, or even a purchased raw chocolate bar that you melt back down. Let me know in the comments below if you try this or any of the other recipes on that web page…

This recipe is so simple but I love it. There are only 3 ingredients, butternut squash (also works with other types of squash or pumpkin), salt and water. I’ve tried adding various flavourings and seasonings but I always go back to this simple recipe as it tastes the best.

I’ve talked about fermented foods before on this blog, they are wonderful for digestion, assimilation and detoxing and I eat several different fermented foods every day.

Start by cutting your squash into pieces suitable for grating, and then grate using a file grater:

Pack the grated squash into a jar, a kilner jar works well. Don’t fill the jar right to the top, make sure you leave some space as it can bubble up during the fermentation.

Next, add salt water so that all the squash is covered by water. The ratio of salt is approx 1 teaspoon of salt per litre of grated squash – so for example the jar I used was 1.7 litres, so I used just over 1 and a half teaspoons of salt. The amount of water you will need will depend on how much water is naturally in the squash. So mix the salt into a small amount of water and pour in, then add more water if necessary.

Finally, place something on top of the squash to keep it all under the water. I use a stone, cleaned thoroughly first of course. Check every day to make sure that the squash is still under the water.

Store at room temperature during the fermentation process. It usually takes 3 to 4 days to ferment, although it will take longer in colder climates. You can taste after 3 days and see what is happening. Once it is fermented to your liking, you can store in the fridge to stop it fermenting more.

What is your favourite fermented food? Please leave your comments below.

I wanted to make something with both kelp and chlorella, it was a bit of a random experiment but it turned out really nice.

• 250g pumpkin
• small piece of ginger
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon chlorella powder
• 1 tablespoon kelp powder
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

This was my first attempted at fermenting vegetables and it worked really well, although I think I put too much salt in. I followed the technique on pages 50-52 in the book Wild Fermentation “Sour Pickles”.

I sliced the carrots and cut the broccoli up, you can see the approximate sizes in the photo. I then sliced some leek,  I think I used about 1/4 of a leek. I used a couple of handfuls of coriander seeds and cumin seeds to flavour it, some whole and some crushed.

I put everything in a kilner jar and added water with salt dissolved in it, I think for this 1 litre jar I used 500 ml water with 1 and a half tablespoons of salt, but if I did it again I would use less. I then put a clean (well scrubbed) stone on top of the veg to hold it under the saltwater solution. After about 2 weeks fermenting they had an amazing flavour, but you can try them during the whole process to see how they develop.

You need to check them daily and if any mould forms on the surface it needs to be removed.