Food4Thought is a commentary on the ethics of eating, food justice and contemporary ideas on food democracy as well as recipes. Did I just say the same thing three different ways?

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Pamela's Chocolate Cupcake



The best gluten free mixes I have found are Pamela's - friends don't even know the difference. My daughter's 14 year old friends snuck up in the middle of the night and ate them so I think they passed the litmus test.
Since my philosophy is ALmost all raw, I whipped up an orange cashew cream as frosting.
Orange Cashew Cream
1 1/2 cups cashews, soaked for a few hours or overnight
Add cashews to Vita-mix and add enough water to fill just shy of the cashews
3 Tbsp coconut palm sugar
1/4 tsp orange extract
little vanilla extract or powder
Puree till smooth.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011




So it’s official – my daughter is sensitive to gluten – my spelt berries are packed away for a while, hopeful that this will just be a short- lived allergy. Goodbye  chocolate spelt cake (for now) and hello all things gluten free. I saved my almond meal today from my almond milk and decided to try my hand at quinoa flour. Here goes:

Cardamom Quinoa Pumpkin  Muffins
1 cup quinoa flour or Bob’s Redmill Cake Flour
½ cup almond meal (from almond milk) or almond flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking flour
1 tsp cardamom
freshly ground nutmeg
2 eggs
1 can organic pumpkin
1/3 cup avocado oil (or any oil)
½ cup coconut palm sugar
¼ cup maple syrip
1 tsp vanilla extract

Mix wet ingredients and add dry.  Cover mixture for 5 min till a little fluffy. Pour into greased muffin tins (I used coconut oil) and bake for approx. 12 min at 350 degrees.
Top with orange cashew cream if you like!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Violet Soup


The purple carrots at the Green City Farmers market were irresistible and vibrant - this carrot/ potato soup turned out violet and yummy.
Recipe:
4 large carrots - 1 purple
3 yellow potatoes
8 cups water
2 vegetable bouillon cubes
1 onion
sage
sea salt

Preparation:
Saute onion in a little olive oil
Boil water and add veggie bouillon cubes
Add chopped carrots and potatoes
cook until soft
puree in Vita mix till smooth in batches
add sea salt and sage
            

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Natasha's Fruit Salad

While I was in Jerusalem, my old buddy Natasha (we have known each since we were 12 and attended the Vienna International School, where we sat next to each other for 3 years in middle school home-room - but that's another story) whipped up this amazing salad, the secret ingredient - tahini! I have been home 10 days now and have eaten it daily.
Fruit of choice - strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, banana, plum, peach - chopped into bite size pieces
favorite plain yogurt (I use goat yogurt)
a few spoonfuls of tahini (I but it raw, not toasted)
raw honey - mine came straight from the honeycomb)
nuts of choice
The combination of the yogurt with the tahini makes an amazingly delicious sauce!
A note on tahini - it's a powerhouse seed, packed with vitamin B, E and A - it's also 20% complete protein and thus a better source of protein than milk, soy and most nuts. It also has a high level of methionine, an essential amino acid as well as lecithin which helps to reduce fat levels in the blood. It is an excellent source of calcium - claimed by some to be the best source of calcium, even over milk - and, it's not mucus forming. Eat up!

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Citrus Goji Berry Smoothie

This is an all raw smoothie that is refreshing, tart and packed with vitamin C.
-1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice (per person)
-frozen mango to the top of the OJ
-1/4 cup soaked goji berries (10 min)
-optional - little bit o lime, freshly squeezed. Or leave goji berries out if you don't have them.
Thanks to Franco Lanzi for capturing the smoothie as it really is.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Raw Chocolate Hazelnut Pie

Ever since I was little girl living Vienna, Austria, I have loved the combination of chocolate and hazelnuts. I remember the Milka bars and the first bite into milk chocolate with whole hazelnuts is a sensory experience I have not forgotten and tried to recreate with this pie.
Crust
1 cup Macadamia nuts
1 cup dried coconut (shredded)
6-8 dates, depending on the size
Filling
2 cups soaked cashews
3/4 cup hazelnut milk (put 1/2 cup hazelnuts in 1 & 1/2 cups water and blend till smooth in Vita-mix - strain through nut milk bag)
1 teaspoon vanilla powder
1/2 cup coconut palm sugar
1/2 softened coconut butter (or oil, but I prefer the butter in this one - I soften it by letting the jar sit in hot water in a bowl for 10 min)
Blend in Vita-mix and pour into crust - chill in freezer for an hour and then move to fridge or fridge for a few hours if you have time.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Key Lime Mango Pie

One of my favorite dessert books is Jennifer Cornbleet's Raw for Dessert. Anyone new to raw can take a stab successfully. Her Key Lime Pie is amazing and the base is avocado, shocking to most! I was ready to try a different base and experimented with mango and papaya. The mango was scrumptious (A big shout out to my fabulous photographer Franco Lanzi!) -
Crust
1 cup Macadamia nuts
1 cup coconut
6-9 dates depending on size
Blend in Vita-mix until a paste
Filling
2 cups cashews, soaked
3 cups fresh mango
1/4 cup lime juice
3/4 cup almond milk
1/3 cup maple syrup (I used coconut palm sugar in this recipe and it tasted great - I also felt it helped firm it up a bit)
2 teaspoons vanilla powder (www.LivingTreeCommunity.com)
pinch salt
pinch cardamom (or cinnamon)
1/2 coconut butter, softened in the jar but soaking it in hot water for 10 min
Pour into crust and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
Raspberry puree
Add 1 cup raspberries to food processor. Remove while still chunky.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Rawsta Pasta

Angel hair Zucchini Pasta with Live Marinara Sauce,
Topped with Green Olives and Macadamia Nut Cheese
Spiralize zucchini noodles
Put 2 cups cherry tomatoes, 1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes (in oil or rehydrated in water), 1/2 a red pepper, few leaves of fresh basil, 1/2 olive oil (www.LivingTreeCommunity.com), pinch salt and fresh black pepper in the Vita mix or food processor. Wait to mix it into the pasta when you are ready to eat as the zucchini mixed with the marinara will get watery, fast.
Top with green olives and macadamia nut cheese (1 and 1/2 cup soaked mac nuts, 1/2 cup water, 1 teaspoon brewers yeast flakes, lemon zest of half a lemon - puree in Vita mix)

Sustainable CAN feed the world!

http://www.grist.org/sustainable-farming/2011-05-11-factory-farms-only-way-to-feed-the-world-no-says-science-paper

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Last Stanza of Hunger by Adrienne Rich

The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I'm alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz's women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the "mothers" drained of milk, the "survivors" driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I'm alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The many names of corn

Alcohol(Liquor) and vinegar

Ascorbic acid (vitamin C)

Aspartame

Baking powder (starch component is corn starch)

Bleached flour (can contain cornstarch)

Caramel (often sweetener is corn syrup)

Citric acid (candies and drinks)

Confectioner’s sugar

Corn-anything (whole corn, corn flour, cornstarch, corn gluten, corn syrup, corn meal, corn oil, and popcorn)

Dextrin, Maltodextrin (sauces, dressings, ice cream)

Dextrose (glucose), fructose (cookies, ice cream, sports drinks, french fries, fish sticks, and potato puffs)

Excipients (substances used to bind the contents of a pill or tablet)

Golden Syrup (mixture of molasses and corn syrup, found in cookies and candies)

Glucona delta lactone (additive in cured meats)

Invert sugar or invert syrup

Lactic acid (cheese)

Lecithin (occurs naturally in eggs and corn)

Malt, malt syrup, malt extract (alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, chocolate, and breakfast cereals)

Mono- and di-glycerides (sauces, dressings, and ice cream)

Monosodium Glutamate or MSG (prepared meals and instant soups)

Sorbitol (sugar substitute, oral hygiene products such as toothpaste and mouthwash)

Starch, food starch, modified food starch

Sucrose

Table salt(iodized salt contains dextrose)

Treacle (mixture of molasses and corn syrup)

Vanilla extract( all major brands contain corn syrup)

Vegetable-anything (unless you know what the vegetable is: think vegetable oil, vegetable shortening, and vegetable broth)

Xanthan gum (salad dressings and mayonnaise)

Zein (yellow powder obtained from corn, used chiefly in the manufacture of textile fibers, plastics, and paper coatings" or "a man - made fiber produced from this protein". Zein is the usual encapsulant for time-release medications.)

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Bar-B-Q Tempeh Spelt Pizza

Since wheat & I do not agree, I decided to make a spelt crust pizza. But wait a minute - spelt IS a wheat! True, but it has 1 less gluten (wheat has 2) and it has not been hybridized - it's still an ancient grain, though not for long - Monsanto, yes the lovely Monsanto, has an application into the USDA to deregulate it's new Roundup Ready spelt seeds, engineered to withstand copious lashings of Monsanto's proprietary herbicide, Roundup (and thank you Tom Philpott of Grist because I couldn't have said that better - copious lashings is brilliant!)
Spelt Crust compliments of the Moosewood Cookbook
1 cup luke warm water
1 & 1/2 teaspoons dry active yeast
1 tablespoon sugar or maple syrup
2 & 1/2 cups - 3 cups freshly ground spelt flour (I use a Komo Mill - you just press a button!)
Add yeast and sugar to water and let blend in - then whisk in the flour. Knead it for 5 min into a ball and then brush with olive oil - let stand covered, in a warm place so it will rise to double it's size (mine does not usually co-operate to this size)
I usually have to press it out on a pizza stone - it's a bit sticky so dip your fingers in olive oil.
Add favorite toppings and cook at 425 for 10 - 12 minutes.
This pizza has:
tempeh with bar-b-q sauce, goat gouda, green onion and bar-b-q sauce on the crust.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

A Bosnian Sister

This is my first non-food post but it has been food for thought for me and I wanted to share. For the last year, I have had a new sister, a sister from Bosnia named Vahida, through Women for Women International. Women for Women pairs you with a sister from a country recently at war - all the women are survivors of war. For one year I have supported Vahida financially while she learns a new trade. But recently when opening a letter form her, I realized that I have been the one touched by her. She started her recent letter with "Dear unknown sister from afar, I can tell you that I have already started to love while reading your letters, regardless of the fact that we don't know each other." And right then and there, I was struck by Vahida's openess and vulnerability and ability to communicate her feelings that way, with a stranger no less. Perhaps it's easier with a stranger, I muse to myself, looking for an excuse for my lack of demonstrativeness. And I try to convince myself - I do things for others, I cook for others, remember birthdays, and I regale my list. But I don't often use the words that Vahida used with me - I have already started to love you. As I sign off, I am reaching for my phone to call my sister, my blood sister, to tell her how much I appreciate her always remembering my husband's birthday and that he thinks of her as his little sister too - and yes, I love you Robin.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

118 Degrees in Costa Mesa


That's the restaurant, not the temperature! But boy was the food hot - as in great! Pictured here are dehydrated flax coconut crepes with fruit, drizzled with macadamia nut cheese and strawberry sauce - possibly the best raw dish I have ever had! The chai tea with house made almond milk was pretty fabulous as well. If you are in the area, check it out.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Ode Article

A new food manifesto

It’s time to take back control of what and how we eat. Here’s why.
Carolyn Steel | November/December 2010 issue

Food isn’t just something we need to shovel down our gullets each day to survive. It’s far more potent: the means, more than any other, by which we humans shape our planet and ourselves.
Photo by Marko Matasic

From 100-mile diets to vertical farming, from green markets to organics, from obesity to genetically modified organisms, food is always in the news. The issues are political, social, emotional, psychological, ecological and economic. Take the current popularity of urban farming, for example. A renewed interest in what and how we eat combined with the aftershocks of the Great Recession have inspired city dwellers to cultivate whatever little plots of land they might have. The last time people were this keen on growing their own vegetables was during World War II. So what’s going on?

The short answer is: another war. The new food movement is an act of popular resistance against a system hardly less harmful to life and limb than military conflict. Food isn’t just something we need to shovel down our gullets each day to survive. It’s far more potent: the means, more than any other, by which we humans shape our planet and ourselves. Recognition of food’s true power demands we treat it in a completely different way. Rather than think of it as cheap fuel, we need to embrace food as a cultural force. We need to understand food in the way our ancestors did, before fossil fuel blurred our sense of its importance.

We need a new food manifesto—one that enables us to start thinking not just about food but through it. We need to understand how profoundly food affects every aspect of our lives, depending on the way it’s produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten and wasted. Food is much too important to be left in the hands of megacorporations. We must take back control of food, and start wielding that ­control ­positively and ­collectively as a tool to shape a better world.

For millennia, food has borne multiple meanings. Food is love, health and a gift from the gods. Food is friendship, identity, belonging and community. Food is desire, sharing and pleasure. Food is sex and sacrifice, reward and punishment. Food is the body of Christ. Food is fattening. The things food has been, or has represented, are as broad as life itself. Why, then, has food for so many become just a meaningless, tasteless commodity?

Before industrialization, food was the dominant priority of cities. No settlement was built without considering its sources of sustenance. Perishable food, such as fruit and vegetables, were grown as locally as possible, often on the fringes of the city itself. Meat and fish were consumed seasonally, with the excess preserved through salting, drying or pickling. Nothing was wasted. Leftover scraps were fed to pigs and chickens; human and animal waste was collected and spread as fertilizer.

With the arrival of the railway, all that changed. Once it became possible to transport fresh food quickly across large distances, cities were emancipated from geography, able to grow to any size and shape in any place. Cities began to sprawl, and as they did so, food systems became industrialized to supply them.

Our very concept of a city—inherited from a distant, predominantly rural past—assumes that the means of supporting urban populations can be endlessly extracted from the natural world. But can it? With at least 3 billion people living in cities, and a further 3 billion expected to join them by 2050, the assumption looks shaky.

Industrialization created the illusion that cities are independent, immaculate and unstoppable. Now, the illusion is wearing off. We urgently need a new dwelling model, one that recognizes the dominant role cities play in the global ecology.

Food is vital as we rethink our way of life. Many of the dilemmas we face—how to reconcile city and country, man and nature, prosperity and sustainability—can be addressed through food. Food is the common denominator: the one thing without which we can’t survive. What better basis, then, around which to order our lives? Together, we can harness food as a social and physical tool, both to interpret the world and to shape it.

My word for this approach is “sitopia,” from the Greek terms sitos (“food”) and topos (“place”). We already live in a sitopia of sorts, since the cities, landscapes and ecosystems we inhabit have been profoundly shaped by food. The problem is, our blindness to food’s influence has created a bad sitopia; one so bad, in fact, that it threatens to destroy itself—and us—if we don’t change it. So we must create a good sitopia, one that restores balance to our lives, to society and to our relationship with the natural world.

How might that work? First, we need to understand that sitopia is not utopia. We’re not trying to create an ideal world, but a way of thinking that allows us to create many different places, connections and relationships, using food as our tool.

Much of the mess we’re in is due to lack of respect for food. To create a good sitopia, then, we must restore to food its true value. This isn’t just a question of how much we pay for food, although that matters, but of what we understand it to represent. Ask a starving man what food means to him, and he’ll give you a frank answer. Food remains the most important shared element in all our lives.

The moment we restore food’s proper value, we begin to see where it belongs—not at the periphery of society, but at its heart. For example, “cheap food”—the apparent triumph of modern agribusiness—is an oxymoron, an illusion created by externalizing food’s true costs. Once you factor in all the fossil fuel consumption, rainforest destruction, soil erosion, pollution, water depletion, carbon emissions, loss of biodiversity, rural depopulation, animal suffering and obesity that result from cheap food, it doesn’t look quite so cheap. In fact, we pay a very high price.

When such externalities are taken into account, the debate about how to feed the world shifts. The pursuit of ever more “efficient” food systems is revealed as profoundly uneconomic. The false choices of industrial versus organic, high tech versus traditional, also disappear, replaced by an open debate about the farming practices and food systems that best match our aspirations for the future of the planet. Such thinking represents a reversal of the current trend, which treats food as a necessary yet somehow separate problem. In the ongoing food debate, the most vital question of all—What is a good life?—is rarely asked.

Of course, that question has no single answer; instead, it generates a spectrum of further questions. Being open to asking these questions, and realizing that there will be many different answers, is key to creating sitopia. Even if we can’t say for sure what a good life might be, we can describe some of its attributes. Most of us, for instance, would agree a good life is one in which people are generally happy, healthy, industrious, generous and loving; societies are tolerant, peaceable and sustainable; physical surroundings are diverse, bountiful and beautiful.

We know such a place can’t exist; that would be utopia. But that’s where sitopia comes in. Sitopia is contingent, partial, practical. It can be big or small, shared or personal. It can take many shapes and forms. It can be created by anybody, right here, right now. It can exist anywhere. Indeed, it already does.

Photo by Marko Matasic

To see sitopia in action, go to a place where food is highly valued—such as India. Food is everywhere in India. The countryside is densely populated with more than half a million small farms. Close networks of villages trade with one another at busy food markets. In the cities, people cook and eat on the sidewalks; vendors sell snacks from carts and stands; and traders carry baskets of vegetables on their heads. Cows, goats and chickens wander freely, and even the temples are brimming with sweets, left as gifts for the gods.

Perhaps most impressive of all is the tiffin box culture of Mumbai. Thousands of Mumbai housewives cook hot lunches for their husbands. The lunches are packed into stacked metal containers (tiffin boxes) and collected by some 5,000 couriers, or dabbawalas, who use bicycles and trains to deliver up to 200,000 meals a day all over the city. The service is one of the most reliable in the world; a recent survey found that just one in every 6 million deliveries goes astray.

In India, food is powerfully embedded in the broader culture. But some aspects of Indian food are more difficult to swallow. Poor infrastructure means that food worth an estimated $10 billion is lost each year, while nearly half of young children are underweight.

Yet how much better are things in the U.S.? More Americans live on food stamps than do people anywhere else in the world, while 50 percent of all food—worth $136 billion—is thrown away each year. In India, meals remain at the heart of family life; 19 percent of American meals are eaten in cars. Agriculture employs half of the Indian population; in America, that figure is less than 1 percent. In India, one in 20 is obese; in America, one in three.

Such comparisons merely demonstrate the effects of two contrasting food cultures in two very different nations, one developed, the other developing. But that’s precisely the point. When you consider the social benefits and drawbacks of food systems worldwide, you’re forced to conclude that the former belong mostly to traditional food cultures and the latter chiefly to industrial ones. A country like India could certainly benefit from some modern technological and infrastructural improvements, but not at the expense of its traditional food culture. Food in India is still about sociability, connectivity, identity, seasonality, family, craftsmanship, love. The developed world could do with a dash of those ingredients, too.

High-tech industrial farming isn’t the only way to feed the world. Comparative studies of alternative approaches, such as organic or permaculture, tend to focus on short-term metrics, like crop yields. But the number of tons of grain produced per acre per year is much easier to measure than happiness, the feeling of the wind on your skin or the satisfaction of following in your grandfather’s and father’s footsteps. The tacit assumption that nobody in his or her right mind could possibly choose farming over a desk job is clearly false, too, as hundreds of highly educated farmers in America and Europe can testify.

The fact that 1.3 million rural migrants worldwide abandon their farms every week to seek new lives in the city is often seen as a sign of progress. What few admit is that it’s the transformation of the countryside to feed cities that’s making traditional ways of rural life untenable in the first place. A life of crushing poverty as a peasant isn’t a good life. But neither is a life of crushing poverty spent in a factory. Rather than thinking in such dead-end polarities, we need to make rural life more tenable.

Mobile phones, for instance, are transforming life for Masai cattle ranchers in Kenya, who use them to get the latest information on market prices.
In our rush to produce ever more “efficient” food systems in the West, we’ve neglected the advantages of slower, smaller-scale systems. On the voyage of life, food is our rudder, the one invariable—and pleasurable—necessity that binds us all. If we want to lead a good life, food must be at its heart.

So the essential task of sitopia is to put food first. This isn’t a clarion call to gourmandism. On the contrary, it’s a call to recognize the many ways in which food expresses our commonality. Examples of how to reconcile food and place abound. All we need to do is join in.

The quickest and easiest way to become a sitopian is to change the way you eat. Perhaps you’re already a self-sufficient vegan who cooks everything from scratch and composts all your leftovers. In spite of your good intentions, such an approach would not necessarily create a society in which most of us would want to live. Growing your own food might bring a sense of personal achievement, but if we all did it, we’d have to abandon cities altogether, so we’d lose all our sociability. Coming together to exchange food and other goods was, after all, what created cities in the first place.

Then there’s the question of diet. Although veganism is often portrayed as the least ecologically demanding alternative, it precludes the vital role played by animals in the human food chain. Pigs and chickens are our timeless companions for a reason. Omnivores like us, they can share our living quarters, consume our leftovers and be eaten in their turn, completing the most resource-efficient food cycle known to man. Recent studies have also shown that large herds of roaming herbivores, such as American bison, contribute critically to soil fertility, thus improving water retention, biodiversity and carbon sequestration.

As with all things sitopian, the key word is balance. The daily plate of food recommended by nutritionists—roughly one-third fruit and vegetables, one-third carbohydrates and one-third protein, dairy and fat—neatly corresponds, when traditionally produced, to the sorts of vibrant, varied rural landscapes to which most of us are naturally disposed. We know we are what we eat. It follows that the world we inhabit is also shaped by what we eat—and we, in turn, are shaped by that world.
Campaigns such as “Eat the View,” set up by the British Countryside Agency in 2002, tell us that we can create the landscapes we desire through our food choices. Small- and medium-scale farming created much of the distinctive countryside we love; if we want to preserve both, we must eat accordingly.

America and Britain may just be the world’s worst food dystopias; however, they’re also beacons of the sitopian renaissance. Food apostles such as poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry and author and journalist Michael Pollan in the U.S., as well as food policy expert Tim Lang, inventor of food miles, and TV chef Jamie Oliver in Britain, testify to the power of the emerging food movement. Add to this the nascent discipline of food planning—which puts food back at the core of regional and urban design—and you have a powerful mix of people and organizations ready to think and act through food.

But the nation most actively taking up the sitopian challenge is the Netherlands, where much of my current work is based. The first nation on Earth to urbanize, and one of the most land-starved, the Netherlands knows a thing or two about intensive farming. In the 1800s, the Dutch pioneered many of the techniques that made the English agricultural revolution (thus modern farming) possible. The Netherlands is second only to the U.S. in agricultural exports by value. Yet, the drive for efficiency has taken a toll on the Dutch landscape. People are keen to find a Plan B.

I’m currently working with the city of Groningen to create a “regional food vision,” a sitopian strategy that people in northern Holland can use to rethink themselves through food. The work involves creating new networks, partnerships and synergies among individuals and organizations, adding new dimensions to existing plans and policies. Together with colleagues from Wageningen University’s Rural Sociology Unit and Business School, I’m also developing a “sitopia matrix,” a tool to help planners and policymakers address complex issues through food.

Understanding food’s influence, and using it positively and collectively to guide our actions, is the key to sitopia. This can take many forms, including cooking more for our kids, eating less industrially produced meat, buying from local markets, joining Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects, composting our food waste, refusing to buy unsustainably sourced fish or joining movements such as Slow Food and Transition Towns.

Whatever form you choose, remember that what you’re doing isn’t just about food. It’s about deciding, together, what sort of world we want to live in—and using food to get us closer to it.

Carolyn Steel is an architect and the author of Hungry City: How Food

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Raw Strawberry Shortcake

Yep, It's raw and from I am Grateful - the recipe is too long to post! If you're up for a challenge, this is the recipe!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Taco Rawco Salad

Taco Rawco Salad (I double it)

We recently made this version of a popular Mexican salad in a class I taught. It's light but filling - but then most live food is!

1 ½ cups raw walnuts

1 teaspoon taco seasoning

½ teaspoon coriander

1-2 tablespoons soy sauce (Namu Shoyu or Braggs)

blend in the food processor

A head of lettuce, dried and torn into small pieces

Avocado or guacamole (I bought it Whole Foods) – smooth onto the lettuce

Pumpkin seed oil sprinkled on lettuce and guac

1 ½ cupos chopped tomatoes (I used cherry)

3 grated carrots

crinkle tortilla chips on top and grated raw goat cheddar

1 container mango salsa (or chop your own and add cilantro and red onion)

sprinkle taco rawco on top and toss

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Chocolate YoYo Muffin

What to do when you're snowed in? Come up with a cream filled cup cake alternative! It was my husband's idea to call it a YoYo - a joke after the Hostess Ding Dong! But this little muffin is packed with great stuff:
* 1/2 cup almond meal (I save mine from making almond milk - it's what's left over in the nut milk bag when you strain it)
* 2 organic eggs
* 1/3 cup coconut milk (or water)
* 1/2 avocado oil (or canola or walnut)
* 1/2 maple syrup
* 2 cups freshly ground flour (I use spelt)
* 1/2 cup raw cacao poder (or any)
* 1 teaspoon cassia cinnamon
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* organic cream cheese

After mixing, let rise for 5-7 min. Put one large spoonful in the bottom of each muffin tin and then add a teaspoon or more cream cheese (whipped works best) and then cover with another large spoonful batter. Bake at 375 for about 12 min or until tops crack.


Sunday, January 30, 2011

Juice pulp muffins with almond cream

A little live cream with your muffin?
Muffin:
1 cup juice pulp from juicing carrots, apples, lemon
1/2 cup oil (non-gmo canola, walnut)
2 eggs
1/2 maple syrup
little coconut milk (or soymilk)
2 cups spelt flour
2 teas cinnamon or cardamom
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 teas baking soda
after mixing, cover for 5 min - batter will rise a bit, sprinkle with poppy seeds
bake at 375 for 12 min
Almond Cream
1 cup almonds, soaked 12 hours
1 cup water
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons vanilla powder (I use livingtreecommunityfoods.com)
puree in Vita-mix and voila, pour over muffins!
bake

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Blood Orange Juice - Bloody good for you!

Interesting study on blood orange juice vs regular orange juice:

Antioxidant impact of juice not due to vitamin C

Experts believe that heart disease and cancer have their origins in long-term damage to the body’s cells caused by free radicals. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules created during normal metabolism or via exposure to pollutants in the environment e.g. cigarette smoke. Normally, the body is able to protect itself from free radical damage with antioxidant nutrients in the blood. However, the stress of daily life combined with poor diets often leaves individuals with a deficient antioxidant defence. This increases the importance of dietary sources of antioxidants.
One major source of antioxidants in the diet is fruit juice, particularly orange juice which is rich in vitamin C. Vitamin C is used widely in food manufacturing to prevent spoilage (oxidation). In the same way, vitamin C is believed to protect human cells from oxidation by free radicals. However, a number of clinical trials, involving vitamin C supplementation, produced disappointing results. This has left researchers wondering whether the antioxidant capacity of orange juice might be due to other nutrients, not vitamin C.
To test this, seven healthy subjects were asked to consume a different test drinks on three separate occasions. The three drinks were pure blood orange juice, a sweet drink with added vitamin C, and a sweet drink with no vitamin C. All drinks contained the same amount of sugars. Subjects were given the drinks in a random order, and two weeks elapsed between each type of drink to allow blood levels to return to normal.
On each occasion after consuming 300ml of the test drink, subjects were asked to give blood samples to estimate whether the vitamin C in the drinks was being absorbed. This was confirmed when blood levels of vitamin C were seen to rise after the orange juice and ‘vitamin C’ drink, but not after consumption of the ‘vitamin-free’ drink.
The researchers then tested the subjects’ blood to discover whether the drinks had affected resistance to free radical damage on blood DNA (genetic material from blood cells). The results showed that DNA damage was 18% lower when subjects had drunk the pure blood orange juice. The protective effect persisted for 24 hours. No such effect was seen with either the ‘vitamin C’ or ‘vitamin-free’ test drinks. This was despite the fact that the ‘vitamin C’ drink contained as much vitamin C as the pure orange juice (150mg/glass).
This study showed that drinking 300ml of pure blood orange juice was enough to protect the body’s cells from free radical damage for 24 hours. However, the protective effect was not due to the vitamin C, suggesting that other important nutrients are at work in orange juice. It also suggests that vitamin C pills would not influence our risk of chronic diseases.
For more information, see Guarnieri S et al (2007). Orange juice vs vitamin C: effect on hydrogen peroxide-induced DNA damage in mononuclear blood cells
British Journal of Nutrition, vol 97, pp 639-643.