Canasian Soup

Our Farmer's Market in Banff has begun and it is a really exciting time of year for me - not because I am selling food (I'm not, btw), but because I receive farm shares from local organic farms via Farm Box. Let me tell you - these are the best vegetables and fruits around. I instantly become inspired the second I fill my bags. I rush home to chop, blend, mince, massage, season and assemble them. With raw food, the quality of the ingredients is key, it makes all the difference in the world. It's easy to forget how amazing a carrot can taste when all you know is California carrots from a bag 9 months of the year.

Here is a really simple soup I whipped up, with some extra ingredients from T&T Asian market in Calgary.

Fresh Asian Broth Soup, errr Canasian soup?

Broth:
approx. ¼ cup braggs
1L filtered water
juice of one or 2 lemons
inch of thin fresh turmeric
½ inch of fresh ginger, thick
3 fresh kefir lime leaves
½ fresh garlic scape (farm box!)
splash rice vinegar
½ serrano chili
one small piece of star anise

Blend all in a vita mix on 10 first speed, bring to high speed for a few seconds, but not long. (if you have a normal blender, just blend for about 20-30 seconds)
Strain in fine mesh strainer over a big bowl. Discard the fibers in the strainer.

Add to bowl of broth:

about 1 cup thinly sliced red cabbage (farm box!)
long slices of fresh oyster mushrooms (really nice meaty texture)
¼ red pepper, thinly sliced (farm box!)
a few stalks w/ leaves of cilantro, roughly chopped (farm box!)
a few stalks w/ leaves of pea shoots (farm box!)
1 carrot, thinly sliced (farm box!)
a handful of broccoli florets, chopped small (farm box!)
a few small radishes, thinly sliced (farm box!)

Garnish with a few cashews

If you plan on having this over a few days it’s best to keep the veg and broth separate and add them together just before consuming.

Sorry I didn't take any mouth-watering photos, I actually only took this one crappy photo with my phone. These are the harsh realities when you make something an hour before you have to be at work. Still, there aren't even cashews in this photo, how embarrassing.

Here are some photos of other things I've made recently, to make up for only having one soup photo.

This is a fresh organic corn polenta topped with BC cherry salsa

A marinated mushroom tart with dill kale pesto and fresh market tomatoes. Almond pastry.

Even cross-eyed Eddie is enjoying the fine summer greenery. That guy sure knows his way around a patch of grass.

Cheers to Asian Soup and Asian Cats, in Canada.

Truffles, Macaroons, NZ, Oh My!

In May I found myself across the pond in a land of sheep and greener pastures (for real, these pastures were fantastically green, lovely rolling hills too, just a stunning place). I didn't have my usual pantry items to turn to when snacking struck, but I managed to find some terribly expensive coconut oil, cocoa powder and lovely Manuka honey that came with me everywhere in my travels. It's no secret that I'm addicted to Chocolate. Or if it was a secret, it was a really boring secret. Anyway, one day while working (yes, working on vacation) I was struck by a snacking desire and rummaged through the food bag to see what I could concoct. This is what I had:

Quite solid coconut oil (no central heating in NZ)
Raw cocoa powder
Manuka honey
'Port of Russel' NZ dessert wine / "port"
Cinnamon
Himalayan sea salt with kelp

So I mixed these things together in a bowl and they made a tasty frosting-consistency bowl snack.



The following week I made this again, but added only a dash of dessert wine, this time an NZ Gewurztraminer Riesling and some thin, long dried coconut shreds. They made perfect instant macaroons. The trick is to only add a teaspoon or less of the dessert wine and mix well and if you need more, add a touch, but too much will make them too soft and gooey.






The following week I tried making them without the coconut shreds and the result was beautiful truffles.

Here is the general break down of the stuff:

NZ Chocolate Honey Truffles

All ingredients are approximate.

½ - ¾ cup coconut oil (cold, but any hard nubs broken with a spoon or fork. you don't want it to melt at all, just make it more combine-able with the other ingredients, like you would soften/whip butter with a fork)
½ cup cocoa powder
2-4 tbsp raw honey
couple generous pinches of sea salt
dash of cinnamon
dessert wine (start with 1 tsp and add more if needed after stirring thoroughly)

Mix all ingredients together into fairly stiff batter. Form into balls and coat in cinnamon, cocoa, coconut flakes, chili, or whatever you want. If the balls are too soft to roll, place the batter in the fridge for a bit to stiffen, then take out and roll (about 1 tbsp per ball)

Cinnamon & Chipotle Chili Powder for Rolling








Place in fridge to harden. If you use too much coconut oil they will be really stiff after refrigeration, but it's all a matter of trial and error, my recipes aren't exactly accurate - I just dump the ingredients from the bags into the bowl and mix. Sorry about that.

Yum Yum!

Beegan Latte

I've been reading a lot about Bee Pollen lately and was stoked to have some on hand after reading a lengthy PDF - this stuff is pretty much the perfect food. It is supposed to make your skin radiant and younger, help your digestive tract run smoother, alleviate allergies and asthma, be an effective anti-radiation food, prevent disease, stimulate and boost the glandular system and immune system and ward off alien invasions, among other things. Extraterrestrial life has been trying to contact my orange cat Pierre so I've been feeding him bee pollen in his wet food. Hopefully it will also help his asthma.

Every once in a while when I remember I have the granular goodness in my freezer, I choke it down because I know it's so good for me. One should never have to 'choke' anything down though. Yesterday I was determined to create a drink that makes bee pollen palatable. Turns out it was so simple!

Beeeeegan Latte

2 cups homemade almond milk (½ cup almonds w. 2 cups water, blended and strained through fine strainer to allow foam to transfer)

pour milk back in blender with:
2 tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp fresh bee pollen
1-3 tsp raw honey
½-1 tsp lecithin granules (optional)
a large pinch or 2 of vanilla bean

Blend everything together in a high speed blender for about 30 seconds.
It is nice to put a few frozen cherries in the bottom of a glass if you want your drink chilled but don't want to water it down.

I made another one today without nut milk and coconut oil because sometimes my guts don't want to hang out with the rich. This one was surprisingly delightful, and you can barely taste the bee pollen!

NUT FREE Beegan Drink

2+ tbsp bee pollen
1 tbsp raw honey
1-2 tbsp raw carob powder
2-3 tsp lucuma powder
1-2 tsp ground cinnamon
1+ tbsp tocotrienols (some raw white powder made from rice that makes drinks creamy)
large pinch of vanilla bean
2 cups filtered water

blend in vita mix for 30 seconds.

So the second nut free option is only for those who's cupboards are full of strange raw vegan powder accessories, otherwise this drink might end up costing more than you think, and you might not even care for it. It will make you feel good though, and fill your belly for hours.

Guess what?! I made cheese!
For Christmas dinner we made cheese boards with crackers and all the usual suspects (fruit spreads, olives w/ truffle oil, homemade mustards, etc). Real dairy cheese attended for those brave enough to eat it, but I made four different kinds of nut cheese and raw almond thin crackers. Two of the cheeses were raw cashew based, one was orange zest + dried cranberry and the other was lemon + fresh thyme. The other two cheeses were made from macadamia nuts. One was plain with a rind (dehydrated for a day) and the other was fresh rosemary + black pepper, also with a rind. They were incredible. I got the recipes from Russell James' cheese book. It was so nice to take the 'simple' route and not stress about Christmas dinner - these cheeses were minimal effort and were ready in just a few days.

- Insert CHEESY joke about BEEEEEING finished this post.

Tanning Tomatoes

Oh boy, look at me - too busy to write to you. You must have been starving since October 20th. Poor thing. It was a good pie though, wasn't it?

So this next food experience actually happened a long time ago... but I was pretty excited about it and I got rave reviews so I would like to share it with you.

My friend Kristen Stuart of Sacred Roots Yoga in Canmore held a fundraiser yoga class for the children at an orphanage in Peru that she was going to visit the following week. She asked Glowfood to help cater it, and I was stoked to help out!

What does one make for such an event? What would the kids in Peru demand? Something savory, obviously.
Remember all those nut butter stuffed fruit roll-ups that I made this summer for the market? I was thinking about those and it hit me like a ton of tomatoes - savory roll-ups - that's what I'll make!

So off to the over-priced specialty organics store I went to get really nice tomatoes and these other ingredients to make:

Tomato Herb Leather
6-7 large organic field tomatoes, seeded chopped. Place seeds in a fine sieve and drain juice into bowl. Add juice back into mixture, discard seeds.
1 small onion
a few sprigs of parsley, chopped
about 10 small basil leaves
a few sprigs of cilantro, chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
1 cup water
1 cup finely ground chia seeds
½ tsp sea salt
20 turns of a pepper mill

Put onion and tomato in food processor and puree.
Add the rest of the ingredients. process until well combined.
Taste for salt.
Spread on 3 dehydrator sheets and dry at 115 until dry to touch but not too dry that the leather is brittle.

Take the leather off the dehydrator sheets and cut into equal squares or rectangles. Fairly small, maybe business card size? I can't remember to be honest. My pictures aren't telling the truth.

Then I filled them with the most wonderful tarragon + green onion cashew cream, the recipe taken from Matthew Kenney & Sarma's book Raw Food Real World (best raw book ever, get it!). Lots of cashews and nutritional yeast pureed in a food processor with lemon zest, lemon juice and sea salt into a fluffy and soft paste. Yum! Fold in fresh tarragon and green onion and any other herbs that tickle your tomato leather fancy.

Roll the leather around the cream and tie with a chive or piece of cilantro... or parsley...

Feed to people at a fundraiser.

Tart Tart

I wanted to make a pie that I could eat for Thanksgiving. I'm learning more about proper food combining because my little guts still work over-time every day and I want to help them out as much as I can... we all know working over-time sucks. I also have to avoid as much sweet stuff as possible, so no dates, agave, or anything of the sweetener sort.

So fruit with fruit, and only fruit. Hmm, why then do nuts and fruit so often mingle? Why is trail mix so awesome and addictive? Um, Nature, WTF?

So I set out to make a nut-free pie crust. Is coconut a fruit? It is today.

Red Heart Plum Pie w. Coconut Lime Crust

Coconut Lime Crust:
2 cups of raw, shredded, dried coconut
3/4 cup melted coconut 'manna' or 'butter', you know, the product in the jar that is dried coconut made into a paste. I have tried to make this twice in my stone grinder, and both times it has turned out beautiful and silky, except for it is gray from some black oily sludge in the wheel well. Awesome. Artisana makes a nice coconut butter. Don't confuse this product with coconut oil. I probably would have tried to use some melted coconut oil in this recipe but both my gallons of coconut oil are 'off' so I was making do with what I had on hand.
2 teaspoons of fresh lime juice
3/4 teaspoon finely grated lime zest
a large pinch of Himalayan sea salt
1 tablespoon of lucuma powder
1/4 teaspoon of fresh ground vanilla beans

process all in a food processor with an 's' blade until it forms a wall. you may need to push the batter down and form a few walls to make sure all of the ingredients are stiff enough to go into the pie shell.

transfer most of the contents into a 9 inch pie shell with a removable bottom, or if you have a bigger pie shell you can use all of the crust mix. I just ate the extra in a bowl with a spoon (about 1/2 cup I left out so the crust wasn't crazy thick)

press the coconut mixture into the pie shell with the back of a spoon and make sure it is evenly distributed.
place in fridge or freezer to set.

Red Heart Plum Filling:
STEP 1:
2.5 oz irish moss (thoroughly rinse and then soak irish moss in clean water overnight in your fridge in an airtight container, then thoroughly shake excess water off before weighing)
put the irish moss in the high speed blender and break it up into small pieces. i did this so that when i blended everything together it wouldn't take extra long to break down the moss and the mixture wouldn't heat up.
take the irish moss bits out of the blender and put to the side in a bowl.

STEP 2:
8 red heart plums, halved and pitted
blend in a high speed blender to puree. the skins are a tad bitter, take them off and discard if you want before blending, but I didn't.

add: 1/4 cup of fresh lime juice
3/4 tsp or so of fresh lime zest
1/4 tsp vanilla bean
3-4 drops of liquid stevia
the broken down irish moss from step 1
blend on high in a high speed blender until totally smooth, but make sure it stays pretty cool.

STEP 3:
5-6 red heart plums, halved, pitted and quartered
place the plums in the bottom of the coconut pie crust and sprinkle with a few pinches of lime zest.
pour the plum puree evenly over top, cover and place in fridge to set for a few hours or overnight.

Did I like it?
I ate the whole pie. It wasn't in one sitting though, it was in 2 sittings. The first sitting I had 2 slices.

I would, however, recommend for anyone who doesn't have sugar issues to add some agave to the plum puree to make it a bit more palatable for the sweet-tooth.
It could also do with a touch more irish moss, my measurements were a guess based on a recipe in a Cafe Gratitude book of liquid vs. moss in lemon meringue pie. Also, I didn't want to risk the pie tasting like irish moss. It smells like mothballs sometimes but it magically never ends up altering the taste of any dish. yay!
If you want to combine fruit and nuts and don't care about happy guts then I bet an orange zest cashew cream would be pretty killer on top of this!

Twice the Fun w. Pumpkun

Hey Gang,
Feel like making pumpkin seed 'parmesan'?
You know... I don't think I made this recipe up, but I don't know where I got it, it was in my word doc recipes, which means I typed it out, which means that perhaps I made it up, I'm sure it was a take on someone's recipe for some sort of nut cheese.

Anyway, I just made tons of this stuff because I received 5lbs of really beautiful pumpkin seeds from the pumpkin seed pusher. The pictures don't do them justice, they are very dark green, and this is after being soaked!


So soak some pumpkin seeds for about 8 hours and rinse thoroughly. Now, I just stuck them all in the dehydrator at 105 for about 10 hours, but that is because I didn't want to use the food processor at 2am to make the parm - so you can take it from here or you can use dried seeds like me. The difference will be a coarser texture in the final product with the dry seeds. I like texture.

Pumpkin Seed Parmesan
1 cup pumpkin seeds - soaked
1/4 cup water (or more if the seeds are dry)
1/8 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
1/4 teaspoon sea salt or more to taste
1/2 serrano chili or jalapeno, chopped (optional but adds better flavour)

In a food processor, blend all the ingredients until fairly smooth. Thinly spread onto paraflex sheet and dehydrate at 105F for about 6-8 hours. Flip and remove the paraflex. Dehydrate until totally dry. Break into pieces and store air-tight.




So this is where things get crazy... My friends Sara and Reno from One Love Yoga in Vancouver http://oneloveyoga.ca/ were visiting a few weeks ago and asked me if I'd ever tried putting my cracker batters on nori sheets. "Well no, in fact I have not (I said), but that sounds awesome!".

So I had a little bit of this pumpkin seed parm left over in the food processor and I chopped up:
one large green zucchini, peel on
one small onion, peel off
a handful of baby dill including stalks/stems
1/2 of a jalapeno, seeded
and threw in some:
sea salt
pumpkin seeds
juice of 1 lemon
about 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast or more

and I blended it all in the food processor until it was combined but still chunky.
I chucked down some raw nori sheets on the paraflex dehydrator sheets and spread the mixture evenly onto 6 of the nori sheets (2 nori fit on one dehydrator sheet).




I let it dehydrate overnight at 105 and they were very crispy in the morning. Curled up a bit. I like this idea of using nori, not only because it tastes good and is healthy, but also because I didn't have to use a binder such as chia seeds, and that is a nice change because I always use chia seeds.



So anyway, they are kind of like dill pickle chips from the sea. SEA PICKLES. Pretty fun. Thanks SJ and Reno for the idea.