Rise and Glow

Whenever I go on vacation, which seems to be a lot lately (hooray for West Jet seat sales), I must be prepared to feed myself and make sure I do not wither away. I usually seem to over-compensate for this fear of having to hear my stomach say "hey, jerk face, I'm not just here to connect your upper body to your lower body" and spend the entire week uncooking before the trip.

I have taken to creating my own raw buckwheat cereal a few days before vacation so I have something to eat as soon as I get up in the foreign land.

At first I thought the buckwheat gave a funny gritty or almost chalky texture, but now I am used to it and I dig it.

Here is the most recent variation of travel cereal:

Apple Chai Cereal

Soak 2 cups buckwheat overnight in water. Drain and rinse.
(not kasha, for kasha is toasted)

Chai Spice:
1 tbsp anise seed
6 cardamon pods
6 cloves (see caution below)
1 cinnamon stick, broken up
2 inch nub fresh ginger, sliced thin and dehydrated
1/4 tsp black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
4 star anise

Blend all in dry vita mix container until it is a fine powder, you will have lots left over for other chai recipes. If you have a better chai recipe please share!
*CAUTION - grinding cloves in your vita mix will scratch the crap out of it, it will also scratch your coffee grinder, just buy pre-ground*

Apple Chai Cream
2 gala apples, cored and chopped, skin on
2/3 cup dried coconut flakes soaked in 2/3 cup water for half hour or more
1/2 cup cashew pieces soaked in less than half cup water for 1-2 hours
1-2 tsp chai spice from above

Put cashews and coconut and all but 1/3 cup of the water in the vita. Blend till smooth. Add chai spice and chopped apples.
Blend till smooth. (add more of the soaking water if you need to, I didn't really measure this out so well, bear with me)

Other Ingredients
Handful walnuts
Handful Hazelnuts
2 tbsp ground chia seeds
Vanilla bean insides, powder or extract to taste

Place all but approx 1/4 of the buckwheat in food processor with apple cream, vanilla and ground chia seeds. Process until fully flowing and as smooth as you can get it. Add handful of walnuts and handful of hazelnuts. Lightly pulse batter w/ nuts so they are still chunky. Alternatively, you can just chop the nuts with a knife and stir them into the batter by hand. Transfer batter to a bowl and mix in the rest of the whole buckwheat.

Spread out on teflex sheets and add thinly sliced apples to the top. It is kind of a pain to spread the batter because the nuts stick up and create slits in the batter, but that is ok, do your best to spread the batter evenly about 1/4 inch thick.

Dehydrate overnight until dry. Break apart. Enjoy with home made nut milk (or store bought stuff if you are on vacation - when will they come out with the travel vita mix?)


Nut Milk
1 cup almonds (preferably soaked), hazelnuts, brazil nuts or any nut, or combination of these nuts
4 cups water

Blend in vita mix or blender until smooth. Strain through nut milk bag.

Optional - Put milk back into blender and add any or all of the following:
1 tsp soy lecithin
1 tbsp coconut oil
pinch sea salt
vanilla of some sort
pinch stevia or 2 drops liquid stevia

Ok, now you can rise and... glow. Peace out!

Raw Anniversary

Can you believe it has been only one year (and 9 days) since I first discovered raw food? On June 11th, 2009 I went for dinner at Pure Food and Wine in NYC with my mom. I didn't know anything about the place let alone why anyone would bother to eat only raw food. Were they bad at paying the power bill? Were raw food consumers just lazy? Maybe it was a good movement for old people so they didn't have to remember to turn the stove off?

As soon as I sat down at the table in the small red room I knew this place was special. When I told the server my allergies and he came back from the kitchen with only 3 things crossed off the menu that I could not eat, I knew this place was extra special. I won't bore you with the details but pretty much everything from the first martini and mache salad with truffle oil (and perfect salt) to the organic wine selection and stunning dessert was mind-blowing.

This was my meal, the White Corn Tamales with raw cocoa mole, marinated portobellos and green tomato salsa, and my mom's Zucchini and Green Zebra Tomato Lasagna with basil-pistacio pesto, tomato sauce and pignoli ricotta. (bad old flash camera, but you get the point).


I couldn't believe I found out about this place on the LAST day of my NYC vacation.

My mom didn't hesitate to buy me the restaurant owner's book "Raw Food Real World" and I didn't hesitate to buy a dehydrator as soon as I got home.

The only problem now is that all the other raw places that I eat at do not compare (and they all use so much garlic!). I started with the cream of the crop... but maybe I would not have been so excited about raw food if it wasn't so overwhelmingly awesome.

Anyway, although this blog is for me to post my experiments in the kitchen, I thought I would pay respect to the place that gave me the spark just a short year ago.

I have made almost all of the recipes from Sarma's two books and they are always amazing. Here is a picture of the green coconut curry I made a while ago from her book Raw Food Real World.


...and the entire Christmas dinner I made this past Christmas from her book "Living Raw Food". I certainly did have seconds and thirds.


Ok bed time.

The New Salt

Bonjour!
Can I tell you how wonderful the city of Montreal is? Oh gosh, where do I start?
The markets, oh the markets. I bought 4 different types of pepper from a spice/olive oil store. I bought a Cherimoya - only the best fruit on the planet, no big deal... It was so creamy and custardy with strawberry notes... I saved a bunch of the seeds and maybe one day when I don't live in the weather CRAPital of Canada I will be able to grow my own.
I was lucky enough to attend a soft opening for a restaurant called Tuck Shop (thanks Tyler and Meaghan). I am pretty sure the chefs sourced their produce from the back yard of the restaurant only minutes before they made my salad (and perhaps from the market) - so fresh. It reminded me a bit of the grand opening for the restaurant I work at (www.thebison.ca). A restaurant can really set itself apart by it's use of salt. The quality as well as the amount used is so important for any good dish. This is the first thing I noticed when I ate at Pure Food and Wine (www.purefoodandwine.com) in NYC last June and the first thing I noticed at Tuck Shop - how perfectly the salt was balanced with all of the other ingredients in my salad. I didn't take any pictures, opps, a little too much wine!
Anyway, pepper is the new salt today. Check it!

1.Voatsiperifery Wild Pepper from Madagascar - lovely fresh black pepper taste, much more complex than regular black pepper.

2. Tribal Early Harvest Green Pepper from India - spicy, fresh, so much flavour!

3. Wild Assam Pepper also from India - such a cool looking pepper, it is shaped like a little dried blackberry. Certainly does not smell or taste like a blackberry though. Smoky, woody, earthy. Pretty unique.

4. Green Sczechwan Pepper from China - Woah crazy! It makes your mouth numb. Has citrus notes and is very much like strong roasted coriander.


I can't wait to make some kick-ass recipes with these peppers, especially chocolate.

Eddie and Pierre are stoked too.




Oh yea, I also went to Crudessence (www.crudessence.com), Montreal's raw restaurant. It was very cute. I consumed a shake and an apple walnut crepe. I could not eat 99% of the savory stuff on the menu because it all contained un-extractable garlic. The shake was pretty good and the crepe wasn't bad, but creativity wasn't it's strong point. This crepe has inspired me to come up with the most fantastic raw crepe ever. Stay tuned . . .

Juice Bread

I have been juicing a lot. I don't have one of those fancy juicers that delivers your baby for you, just a $25 garage sale juicer that has served me well so far (not pregnant yet). Carrots, spinach, kale, pears, apples, celery, cilantro, parsley, beets, cucumber, ginger... every vegetable gets a ride down the super happy fun tube. After the fun tube we usually make our way to the whirly twirly vita mix where we take a spin with Mr. Hemp, Mrs. Strawberry and their associates.

You might be wondering why I don't just whole food juice all of the vegetables in the vita mix. Well friend, that is because I like to make vegetable bread out of the pulp left over from juicing. So many different flavours every day, always a new bread or new cracker to be made.

Do you remember those Mr. Christie Vegetable Thins when you were a kid? Didn't your mom put them in your lunch all the time? What about the onion crackers with poppy seeds that made your breath quite foul? My vegetable crackers and onion crackers don't taste like those, but I just realized that I might be trying to subconsciously recreate them in super health form.

So basically I make bread and crackers from the same batter, it all depends on how thick you spread it on the teflex sheet (dehydrator sheet). Every vegetable bread recipe is different because I juice different things every day. This is a recipe I wrote down the other day, it is the red-ish crackers on the left in the picture below.


Red Vegetable Crackers/Bread

Pulp from juicing:
1 beet
2 celery stalks
3 carrots
1 pear
inch nub ginger skin on
1/3 cucumber skin on

Drink juice.

Add pulp to food processor with:
1 small zucchini, skin on, cut into chunks
2 onions, cut into chunks
approx 1 or 2 teaspoons pink peppercorns
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup braggs liquid soy/liquid aminos (I do not use Nama Shoyu because it contains wheat)
1/4 cup chia seeds, ground up (makes about 1/2 cup ground) (I do not use flax because I am intolerant to it)
1/4 cup or less sunflower seeds

Process until smooth, spread on teflex sheets thin (about 1/2 cm) or thick (1-1.5cm). Crackers or bread. Dehydrate at 105 degrees until tops are dry. Flip onto mesh screens to dry undersides. Dehydrate crackers until somewhat crispy. Dry bread until no longer wet but not crispy. You can choose to score the batter to define your cracker shape (top picture, far right) or just break apart into random shapes when dry.



Other variations:
Sometimes I will add nut flour left over from making nut milk (top picture frame, 3rd picture in, the light brown stuff), walnuts, cilantro, dill, cumin or whatever else is in the fridge or in the spice cupboard.


In the last picture frame above, the middle and right pictures are of onion crackers and onion bread. The onion bread is the base for all of the vegetable breads. I use one or 1.5 fewer onions when making vegetable crackers/bread.



Raw Onion Crackers/Bread

3 medium onions
1/4 cup chia seeds, ground (makes 1/2 cup ground)
1 cup sunflower seeds, soaked for a few hours, drained (soaking optional)
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup braggs liquid soy/liquid aminos

I always add a handful of fresh parsley and one stem worth of fresh rosemary when making plain onion batter.

Place everything in a food processor and blend until fairly smooth. Spread on teflex sheets and dry at 105 degrees until tops are dry. Flip onto mesh screens to dry undersides. Dehydrate crackers until somewhat crispy. Dry bread until no longer wet but not crispy (maybe 10-15 hours?)

The brown lines on the onion bread pictured below are my version of grill marks. I achieve this by slightly scoring the bread with a knife and spooning balsamic vinegar into the slits. No, balsamic vinegar is not raw, neither is braggs. Meh...


You can also make fantastic veggie burgers out of vegetable juice left-overs.
Never waste the pulp!

Kale to the Cauliflower Queen

Good day to you. I have a simple recipe that doesn't involve a vita mix (but does require a food processor). I've been eating too much fruit and too many nuts and my eczema stuff is coming back. Time to feast on vegetables. I bought the most wonderful olives from Nu Roots - http://www.nu-roots.com/ - in Canmore the other day - Peruvian Raw Green Botija Olives by Essential Living Foods. Yum!

This is a recipe I have adapted from Sarma's book Living Raw Food for tabouleh salad.

Cauliflower Kale Salad

1 small/med head cauliflower broken apart and pulsed in a food processor until it looks like the picture below. Transfer it to a med/large bowl and add:

2/3 - 1 bunch of kale, not the curly kind, the darker green flatter kind, chopped into small pieces
a handful or two of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
a handful of cilantro, finely chopped
1 large cucumber, finely chopped
a handful of raw pumpkin seeds
a handful of olives (whatever kind you like, I used a mixed bunch. chop them if they are big)
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (please don't use the bottled stuff!)
1/2 - 1 tsp pink sea salt, or to taste
3 tbsp olive oil
a few turns of black pepper

Mix it all together and eat it. I like to let it sit for about an hour so the salt infuses the vegetables and their juices are excreted into a flavour puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Toss the flavour puddle back throughout the salad and eat.

I think next time I will add dill or oregano, how exciting.

Days Off

I've been creating for 2 straight days (days off).
I had an idea to make crispy strawberry/spinach/black
sesame/coconut chips and
blackberry/apple/coconut chips. They are in the
dehydrator now, can't wait until morning.

Blackberry Chips:

1/2-3/4 cup thawed frozen blackberries + juice from thawing
1 organic gala apple
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp lemon zest
- place all in vita mix or high speed blender and blend
until smooth. transfer to a bowl and add: -

1 cup raw shredded dried coconut flakes
4 tablespoons hemp protein powder
1/2 tsp lemon zest

Mix well. scoop out 1/2 tablespoon sized portions onto a teflex
dehydrator sheet and flatten with bottom of glass.

I did this with half of the mixture, then added a tablespoon of
raw coconut oil and a pinch of sea salt to the rest of the batter
in the bowl, then formed that into thicker bars.

- It is now morning, they turned out ok. Blackberry ones are crispy little chips that are not too sweet (but I'm ok with that) and the strawberry spinach ones might have too many sesame seeds, but also a nice light crispy snack (full of calcium!). I think adding a bit of yacon syrup would have been nice, or banana to sweeten because although I will eat these snacks I'm not sure others would love them.




Sour cream and onion almonds also made an appearance in the kitchen today



Cashew Sour Cream
1 cup cashews, soaked overnight, drained
a bit of water... maybe 1/4 cup, maybe less?
1/4 tsp pink sea salt (Himalayan)

Blend in vita mix until creamy and smooth, add more water
to get desired consistency. (you want it pretty thick)
Add 2 Bio-K dairy-free probiotic pills (break pills open and pour
contents into cashew cream. discard pill shell. The probiotics are added to
create the sour or yogurt-like taste).
Blend again until just mixed. Pour into container and leave on
counter to activate probiotics for about 4 hours.

Chop up a few green onions. Coat as many almonds as you like in
the cashew sour cream and toss with green onions and sprinkle with more pink salt.

Dehydrate at 105 until dry.


Put the rest of the sour cream in the fridge and eat on stuff.

I made other things too... but it is 4am so I'm not going to tell you about them. Except one of the things was lucuma ice cream. Yum!

Bowl of Sand

what would you eat if you chose not to eat the flesh of the dead, their fluids or their periods?

what would you eat if you were allergic to wheat, kamut, spelt, garlic, flax, most beans, oranges and grapefruits?

what about if you were told to stay away from all sugars and night shade vegetables?

maybe you could enjoy a bowl of sand.


i choose not to eat sand because ugh, how boring is that? not to mention, it gets all behind the wire on the back of my bottom teeth... gross.

this blog will take you inside my kitchen adventures that are the quest to continually impress my taste buds while sticking to this special needs (and raw food) diet. maybe you will find something you can eat too!