Posts filed under ‘Raw’
Feelin’ the Love in L.A.
This week in L.A., we had the pleasure of meeting the owner of Euphoria Loves RAWvolution, Matt Amsden. Matt is also the author of RAWvolution. Be sure to check it out next time you’re in Santa Monica! His restaurant also does raw food delivery (“The Box”) and will deliver nationwide. You can see Matt speaking on YouTube here.
We also spent some time in Redondo Beach at Terra Bella, owned by the lovely Melissa Davidson. I’m still dreaming of their Coconut Curry soup. Wow. Check out the close up of Melissa’s tattoo here!
I’ll be writing a full blog on our raw restaurant visits soon (including Cilantro Live! in San Diego)…complete with food photos, of course! Stay tuned!
Rainbow In My Bowl
I love color. I have colorful clothes. A colorful home. Colorful things in my hair. A very colorful daughter. Color just makes me really happy. 🙂 It’s no wonder I LOVE eating raw foods so much…they just add to the happiness. If you’re wondering how to be really healthy and live for a long time…just try to eat every color of the rainbow, every day. In this particular salad, I had:
- mixed greens
- spinach
- red, yellow, and orange peppers
- grated beets (my new favorite…thanks Em!)
- heirloom grape tomatoes (red, yellow, and green)
- sprout mix (sunflower seed, pea, lentil, alfalfa)
- cucumbers
- red/purple cabbage (oh how I LOVE the crunchiness!)
Yum! Chopping up the ingredients for a huge salad is very meditative for me…and eating it brings great delight. I eat at least one large salad a day, and I look forward to it with anticipation without ever getting tired of it.
Here is some interesting info from Prevention Magazine describing the benefits of each color. This is what they have to say:
The more colorful your diet, the more antioxidants you get. These compounds reduce overall cellular damage and prevent the hardening of the arteries that can lead to heart disease, stroke, even memory loss. “Every hue — green, yellow, orange, red, purple, and even white — signifies a different class of nutrients, each of which offers a unique benefit…”
1. Yellow/Orange
Sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, mango, corn, and melon all contain a variety of carotenoids, which reduce the risk of developing cancer.2. Green
Vegetables such as spinach and broccoli are high in lutein, which keeps your vision sharp and clear.3. Blue/Purple
Blueberries and blackberries are chock-full of anthocyanins, which prevent tumors from forming and suppress their growth.4. Red
Tomatoes and watermelon are loaded with lycopene, which may protect against cancer and heart disease.5. White
Cauliflower offers the same cancer-fighting benefits as broccoli, its cruciferous cousin, and potatoes are a good source of vitamin C.
Even within this list, I believe that dark leafy GREENS (kale, spinach, collards, etc) are the most important thing to focus on. If you’re not taking in lots of greens each day…start working to make a change. Add one green salad to lunch or supper. Add a green smoothie…just get your greens wherever you can! Eating more greens will stop cravings dead in their tracks…and will actually cause you to want MORE greens. The more greens you eat, the more you want! Check out Green For Life for more information on why your body can’t go without the greens.
*For those of you who love a great bargain…I found my this amazing orange bamboo bowl at a Goodwill near San Diego for $9.00! The tags were still on it…and this exact bowl retails for $40+! Woo hoo! When Matt and I turned the corner into housewares that day, we GASPED out loud and grabbed it as fast as we could. Because…and you’ll never believe this…I’ve really been wanting a big salad bowl, and he was going to buy me the smaller one just like this at Whole Foods for $25 for Mother’s Day. What a sweet blessing. Yay!
Sweet Corn Chowder
This is a delicious raw soup from Ani Phyo’s cookbook, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen. I absolutely love sweet corn…being that I grew up in Iowa, that is practically a requirement 🙂 This recipe has the perfect blend of flavors…and you can go wild with toppings! I like to add tomatoes, seeds, nuts, etc. to make it chunkier.
I also like to cut back on the olive oil a bit…and add a little more water. You can also blend the avocado into the soup for a creamier base. Enjoy!
Sweet Corn Chowder
Makes 2 large bowls or 4 small bowls.
Chowder Base:
3 ears sweet corn, cut off the cob
3/4 cup walnuts
3/4 extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 t sea salt
2 cups water
Chowder Toppings:
1 cup corn kernels, set aside from above
1 avocado, diced
1/3 bunch cilantro leaves
1 t cracked black pepper
Blend base ingredients until smooth and top with toppings. Store separately in the fridge for best left overs. 🙂
Gotta Love Renee
One of my favorite documentaries is Go Further, featuring Woody Harreleson and his friends as they bike down the West coast spreading the word about “simple organic living”. Well, actually Woody and a few friends bike it, and the rest of them ride in a sweet bus and eat raw foods. In fact, I do believe that this movie was what got me interested in raw foods initially! If you haven’t seen it, add it to your Netflix TODAY! It’s such a wonderful, quirky look at all things environmental, as well as food related issues. I have the book too, which I love. 🙂 Check it out…
“GO FURTHER”, the new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Ron Mann, explores the idea that the single individual is the key to large-scale transformational change.
The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fuelled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. Their goal? To show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives to our habitual, environmentally-destructive behaviors.
The travelers include a yoga-teacher, a raw food chef, a hemp-activist, a junk-food addict, and a college student who suspends her life to impulsively hop aboard. We see the hostility these pilgrims encounter, and watch as their ideas are challenged from within and without.
We meet an entrepreneur who runs a paper company that does not harm trees; an organic farmer who believes Nature is his partner; a man who teaches environmental activists to use humor as a strategic weapon. And throughout, we see Harrelson test his belief that the transformation of our planet begins with the small personal transformations that are within the grasp of each and every one of us, after which… we’ll go further.
Go Further introduced me to Renee Loux Underkoffler for the first time. She goes along for the journey…riding on the bus, and is their personal raw food chef. Yay! She is so enthusiastic and amazing…she is someone you just know you’d love being around!
She has a GREAT cookbook, Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods…it holds the recipe for the Balsamic Vinagriette that everyone loves! The Amazon reviews speak for themselves…it’s just really, really good food. The entire first half of the cookbook is informational…about living foods and also food/nutritional info. There is a little sampling of her recipes on the follow up website to Go Further (Voice Yourself)…it has several of the recipes featured in the film, such as Painted Fruit and Chocolate Mousse of the Gods. Yum!
Here is her website, Euphoric Organics, which has a lot of really useful info. And here is a little video of her making Raspberry Lavender Lemonade. She has two other books, The Balanced Plate and Easy Green Living. You just gotta love Renee!
Juicing on the Road
We have juice! When we stopped in Tampa, Hallie and Chris had a Champion Juicer that they were looking to trade…so we acquired this beautiful beast of a juicer and have been enjoying it. I made a large batch of green lemonade recently, and it just made me soooooo happy. I love the “buzz” I get from green juice (it’s way better than a coffee buzz!). Paired with a big green salad, it’s a very filling meal.
In such a small space, it’s rather messy to clean up the juicer afterward…so we don’t use it every day. But I love having the option. And now I can make Magic Carrot Juice whenever my little heart desires…happiness in a cup!
Fruity
When you’re eating raw foods, it’s crucial to keep lots and lots of fresh fruit available so that you always have a quick snack available. This is a peek at our fruit baskets…just waiting to be devoured! We found these oranges while we were on Tybee Island…they were 10 for $1.00!! We bought 30. Yum. We don’t normally eat a lot of oranges, but that was too good to pass up! We’ve been juicing them a lot for green smoothies…it adds a great little kick.
Our banana stash was rather low in this photo…we usually have about 6 bunches on hand at a time (and more in the freezer for smoothies), all in different stages of ripeness. The challenge in the RV is where to put all of the fruit! I would have more if I had somewhere to put them. We’re working on making a fruit hammock to hang from under one of our counters…yay!
Oh, and no…the wheat grass is not real 🙂 It fools everyone who walks into the RV, but it’s just a great replica. Although, I am wanting to start growing herbs in the front window as we drive…it’s so nice and bright up there!
Raw Pad Thai and Spiralo Love
This is quickly becoming my new favorite…it’s incredibly flavorful and is so easy to make. There are LOTS of recipes for raw Pad Thai out there, I’ve kind of tweaked them all to make this one. The nice thing about this recipe is that you can make it as simple or as fancy as you want. You could just do a basic sauce over the zucchini…but I prefer to add as much of the “extras” as I have on hand. The fresh basil, mint, and cilantro really pump up the flavor. Plus, you can make it look really fancy, which is fun if you are serving it to someone else.
I also just received my Spiralo, and I am in love! I have owned a Saladacco Spiralizer as well, but didn’t like it nearly as much. The Spiralo makes these loooooong beautiful spaghetti noodles out of zucchini, squash, carrots…or any other hard vegetable. Bella loves noodles…so this little gadget allows her to enjoy so many more raw dishes. She loves to help too…although there are very sharp blades, so be careful when letting kids help. She loves this Pad Thai, but we’ve also made the noodles with a yummy marinara sauce and that was a hit as well.
Raw food is all about texture and preparation…it’s amazing how much more I love eating this dish with the spaghetti type noodles as opposed to just using my veggie peeler to make flat noodles. They are just like the noodles I had at The Sprout. If you’ve been wanting to add more variety to your raw diet, I would encourage you to get the Spiralo, or something similar. There are so many uses beyond the “noddle” function…making salads look pretty is so much fun too!
Pad Thai
Makes 2 – 3 servings.
3/4 cup raw almond butter
1/2 cup orange juice (freshly juiced!)
1 T minced fresh ginger
1 T nama shoyu (soy sauce)
1 T miso (optional)
1 t minced garlic
2 T honey/agave nectar
1/8 t cayenne pepper
Blend all ingredients in a food processor or blender until smooth. For a thicker sauce, add more almond butter…to thin it out, add more juice. Add more nama shoyu or sea salt to taste.
Prepare the “noodles” and then pour the sauce over them to marinate (let them sit for about 10 minutes) and then top them with a mixture of the following:
- Sprouts! Mung bean sprouts are the best…so crunchy and perfect for this dish, but alfalfa sprouts are great too.
- Julienned red and yellow peppers
- Shredded carrots
- Grape tomatoes
- Scallions
- Fresh Cilantro
- Fresh Basil
- Fresh Mint
Serve in a bowl and/or on top of a large bed of mixed greens. Yum!!
Raw Chocolate Macaroons
When we received our big box ‘o goodies from Sarma, the first thing I tried were the chocolate macaroons. It was love at first bite. I knew I had to try to make them on my own!
Now for all you raw foodies out there who don’t have a dehydrator, this one is for YOU! The original recipe by Sarma calls for them to be dehydrated, but I don’t have a dehydrator either, so I put them on a cutting board, lightly covered it all with foil, and FROZE them. Oh. My. Goodness. It’s like frozen macaroon ice cream yumminess. They are so EASY…and they are a hit with everyone who tried them.
Here ya go:
3 cups dried, unsweetened coconut flakes
1 1/2 cups cocoa powder (I prefer carob’s milder taste)
1 cup maple syrup
1/3 cup coconut butter or oil
1 T vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients and stir well to combine. You can also use a standing mixer with the paddle attachment.
Using a small ice cream scoop, your hands, or a big tablespoon, spoon rounds of the dough onto dehydrator screens (or a plate/cutting board to freeze). Dehydrate for 12-24 hours at 115 degrees F…until crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside.
For Blonde Macaroons: Replace the cocoa powder in the recipe with an equal amount of fine almond flour (soak almonds for 6 hours, drain/rinse and dehydrate for 12 hours…pulse almonds in food processor for a fine consistency).
Sun-Dried Tomato Hummus (no beans!)
Sun Dried Tomato Hummus
Ani‘s Raw Food Kitchen
2 c zucchini or summer squash, chopped
2 cloves garlic
Juice of 1 lemon (2 T)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup tahini (I only used 1 T)
1 t sea salt
2 T parsley, chopped
1/3 c sun dried tomatoes, chopped
Pinch of paprika
Process zucchini, garlic, lemon juice, 1/4 c olive oil, tahini, and salt until smooth. Pour mixture into a bowl, and stir in parsley and sun dried tomatoes. Set aside and allow tomatoes to soak up moisture for 10 minutes or more. Stir well. (note: I did not let them soak, but instead just blended everything together all at once and it works fine that way as well). Sprinkle a pinch of paprika and drizzle w/a teaspoon of olive oil on top just before serving. Keeps for 2-3 days in the fridge.
Chocolate Bliss
What I am about to tell you will revolutionize your entire life. 🙂 Ok…well, maybe not. But pretty close. This is especially for those of you who are rockin’ the green smoothies…and need something to shake it up a bit. But it’s also for anyone who loves chocolate and wants a healthy alternative to their addiction. These make great popsicles for the kiddos too.
Chocolate Shake
Raw Food Real World
by Sarma Melngailis and Matthew Kenney
3 cups frozen bananas
2 cups almond milk (it’s amazing with FRESH almond milk, but any milk will work)
2T raw carob powder or cocoa powder (adjust to taste…cocoa tends to have a stronger flavor than carob)
1 t vanilla (non-alcohol)
1/4 cup agave nectar or 2 packets stevia
Pinch of sea salt
(For an extra kick, you can add a bit of cinnamon)
Put all ingredients into your blender.
Blend.
Drink.
Sit there for a moment while your world turns upside down.
Smile deliriously until someone walks by and asks what is wrong with you.
Share your chocolate bliss and make them happy too.
🙂
Happy Foody 