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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Raw asparagus, and buying Tempeh in Copenhagen


I made a bloomin' brilliant - and easy! - raw asaparagus soup last night from this beatiful recipe - I added a half an avocado to the mix because we had a mis-communication the other day about who was buying avocados and we got ourselves pretty well over-stocked up on those things. Also, I toasted some almonds without skins in a sip of olive oil and some turmeric, which turned out to be just the thing to drizzle on top with finely diced red onion. Boyfriend looked queasy when he first tasted it, but claimed he liked it after a couple of spoonfuls. I adored it. The recipe is from Jasmine's Recipe Box - which doesn't get updated any more I think but the recipes there are very neatly labeled with a "yes" or "no" for lots of food intolerances. Bliss.

Another site with the same level of service towards special-diet recipe readers but without the raw food twist is this one, by Susan Jane Murray, where there is both a recipe index and a blog. There's two recent - okay, maybe not so recent, the posts are rare, but interesting! - posts on Susan's blog that I like: one about the massive amount of food additives that are in conventional food ("Food Piracy") and another about dealing with a food intolerance diagnosis by looking at what you CAN eat, rather than what you can't ("Site goes live!").

I often had soy youghurt when I had not yet a had a reaction to corn. What is corn doing in soy youghurt anyway I'm thinking - but I haven't found it with just the soy and lovely bacteria. Soy youghurt is easy to find in most bigger grocery shops like Irma or Brugsen here in Denmark and if you're not squeamish about the sugar content there's even different varieties like fruits and vanilla.
For a period I was also in the vegan/vegetarian-trap of replacing everything with tofu. It is very difficult to find gluten and corn free sausages and cold meats for sandwiches for example. But I'm trying to limit my soy-intake so I have moved on to tempeh. Good thing about tempeh is, it actually has a taste. Not like tofu which is more like an every-taste kind of thing, tempeh has a taste like a cross between soy bean, blue cheese and mushroom - which I guess is easy to explain when you see what it is made from. Tempeh is not raw since the soy beans are cooked, but I've seen that some consider it a "raw" food because it contains live bacteria cultures. Should anyone else be afflicted with the tempeh-looove and find themselves permanently or temporarily in Denmark, here are my tips. Tempeh can be found in some of the larger health food stores in central Copenhagen and even in Lyngby outside Copenhagen, but it is dishearteningly expensive and not always in stock. There's a Chinese store near Nørreport Station which carries not only tempeh but also things like nuts, seeds, fresh okra and sea vegetables. Again, tempeh is not always in stock but the price is - it seems from my quick calculation - less than half of that in a health food store. Also, I found a Danish online shop here which also has cheaper tempeh - haven't tried it though because tempeh is practically the only thing I would be ordering from there. Fingers crossed they expand their line of goods. If you live near Nørrebro it should be a great option because you can save on postage by picking up your order rather than having it sent.

Another gorgeous woman has a wauv-wauv blog with recipes where I found this recipe - not raw, but it took care of a big block of tempeh on its last legs that I got cheap at the Chinese. The article is also a brilliant introduction to Meghan Telpner's fun, healthy food blogging :-).

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