Borrowed Books and Gooseberries

In an effort to not spend all my money on cook books I went and took out two raw cook books from the library. "The Complete Book of Raw Food", edited by Julie Rodwell, and "The Raw 50" by Carol Alt. I am not eating all raw, but I am always looking for new ideas on how to use raw vegetables and inspiration for dressings, snacks and desserts.

Drizzle and Crunch

There are all of four things in this post: something thought-up (was going to say invented, but that seems a bit rich), something tried, something copied and something failed. To get the "fail" off my chest first I tried winging a coconut ice cream that didn't go so well. I was inspired by an ice cream purchase for the bf, three flavours of ice cream made with organic cream: banana chocolate, ricca mocca, and the one that inspired failure, coconut cocoa.

Jam and Parmesan

While running today I did something as devoid of dignity as trip in my own shoelaces. Nothing happened though, except I donated some skin off my hands and elbow.

More Raw

I bought my second raw food cookbook. It's Raw Food Real World, and I'm loving it. I have it decked out with little post-its at all the recipes I want to make. First. Then later I have no doubt I'll make all.

After resting lazily on the laurels of my self-awarded food prize I bottomed out a bit today.

B & C

I have to bow down again to the altar of whatever person it was that first invented blueberries combined with cardamom.

Second Green Recipe!

Hm, okay, so I fell right off the grid there for a couple of days. There was something important I had to write and I kept dragging it out and postponing - refusing to blog before I had it finished or I would just have let blogging be my excuse.

Okay, what I tried to draw was a dried date filled with my new seed butter fave, black tahini, but I realised in the process that it's quite difficult to make it come out looking like food

Two more recipes tried and tested: I made another ice cream, and crackers.

Mighty Raw Cupcake!

Continued from this post: Ellen is in Raw Cupcake Heaven! Okay, in all fairness I only (un)baked one raw cupcake, but since I have the chance to draw as many as I like I doubled the amount - also, I don't have fancy polka-dotted cups for the cakes, I invented those too. I didn't use icing this time - was inspired by Hayden's cupcake and went for a Larabar base with raw cashew ice cream om top. For more pics of raw goodies check out Shannon Marie's birthday post.

Something in The Middle of Something

I was making a post about some raw chocolate chip cookies and chocolate ice cream (double chocolate, yeah!) when I realised I forgot to note where I got the recipe for the cookies and wasn't able to backtrack to the place again...I know where I got the ice cream recipe, but that's my first and only raw food recipe book, so I can't even post that - guess the purpose of that post kind of petered out. I'm all fired up about the ice cream though, so there's definitely a post-worthy topic for later...

stEVI(L)a, one splurge and two (three) granolas.

Of course I could have made the connection stevia/evil when I bought it...but a lot of bloggers out there use it as a sweetener and I am always up for trying new things. I bought some from Funkyraw, where I order all things that I can buy and have shipped over from the UK while still paying about half of what it costs here (sigh - why is that?). By the way, the huge benefit of Funkyraw as opposed to a lot of other UK webshops is that they actually charge a shipment fee according to the weight of what's in your parcel - a lot of places charge a flat rate of maybe 18£ for just sending anything at all. Eighteen! But regarding The Evils of Stevia...

Cupcake II

The above is of course a cupcake, produced by yours truly! - since I wasn't happy with the first one I consider this my very first raw cupcake, ahhh. I decided to cheat, though...got the idea from this post at Shannon Marie's blog - which is of course also where I got myself an e-book of raw cupcake recipes.

Bread & Crackers

After musing over the beauty of Danish, wholegrain rye bread and stating that these days, I would much rather be baking and enjoying some raw bread and crackers with the help of all the grrreat recipes out there, I think I ought to mention a couple of those recipes I am making most often right now.

Green MONSTER!

Please try and make the recipe from this post over at Vegan Strong if you need a little extra protein and are fairly open-minded about food textures and about mixing at-first-glance-weird-sounding ingredients or if you need a quick filling breakfast option or indeed all of the above. I realise that protein is probably not something that any of us actually lack and I have never obsessed about it, but I like to add it sometimes for a nice filling feeling. I am not a vegan, but the debate about protein-intake and a vegan diet seems to be ongoing as witnessed by this post, with lots of links to articles and resources, at Love Veggies and Yoga. I am easily convinced of the logic that we don't need animal protein to grow muscle. It's probably true that most monkeys = super strong = plant eaters?

Something else I have to mention about this recipe and I don't know which was there first - I'm guessing the term "green monster" is not exactly patentable - but this recipe should not be confused with the Green Monster Movement started by Angela from Oh She Glows to promote green smoothies. These are green monster breakfast cookies.

Oooh! Where can I get these?

I have just been reading this post over at Rawdorable and I went straight from being fine and happy with the health food choices around here to feeling downright deprived!

We haven't HALF the variety of Larabars where I live. I'm pining for info if anyone has it: do these interesting varieties (and the pack with the minis!!!) ship from anywhere in Europe, maybe some UK internet shop? Or is it US only? As if it didn't enduce enough shopping envy when Averie posts her "wall of..." pics, like the wall of nutbutters in this post. Sigh. I guess I'll manage ;-).

Coconut Cookies & Coconut Granola

IS there such a thing as too much vanilla? I've been (un)baking - well, it includes my old oven and it sure smells good so I guess it's okay to say I'm baking - some Lemon Coconut Cookies and Coconut Vanilla Granola today. I bought two mature coconuts and they've been sitting around just waiting for me to decide on a recipe. I ended up using only one for the two recipes, and I tossed in some of the water to replace some of the sweetener in the granola. Pure, tropical bliss in the kitchen. I did not have any vanilla essence, only a bag of vanilla powder, so I think may have overdosed more than a little. I'm wondering if vanilla has any nutritional significance, good or bad? I've read that nutmeg is unhealthy in large doses, and I'm a huge fan of turmeric not least because Meghan says it is super-healthy, but I have no clue about vanilla.

Here's how I tweaked the two recipes: for the vanilla crunch granola I did NOT use a whole cup of agave syrup, more like just a good long squirt. All the coconut makes it sweet enough for me. I kind of wish I tweaked it by halving the amounts, though, it turned out to be the absolutely hugest amount of homemade granola I've ever seen (how did I not foresee that?). Guess I'll be eating it for a while. And I accidently swapped the measurements for almonds and sunflower seeds, but the taste is still fine, only it's cheaper. For the cookies I halved the recipe - which got me around 15-18 cookies, I think, and I used half cashews/half some almond pulp left over from nut-milking. For both recipes I used fresh, not dried, coconut and I also used a bit of coconut water in both to cut down on the agave.

Nut milks and Raw Food book

Just to round off Meghan's prize draw, she was super-kind enough to reward everybody who participated (incl. moi!) with a download version of her most recent guide, the 5 days healing with everyday superfoods tutorial. It is not really a five-day challenge in the spirit of her low-glycemic or smoothie cleanse challenges, it is more like a guide to superfoods, and how to incorporate them into tasty meals on an everyday basis without breaking the bank.

So, I got all that new info to read, plus I picked up a present I got from a family member - actually what I got was a gift certificate when we celebrated my birthday and I made okay/not so great tasting but very festive looking cupcakes - a book in Danish on Raw Food, called..."Raw Food".

More balls for me, please.

Speaking of smart, strong women like Meghan and Averie: I have another of my favorite ball recipes from this Danish site belonging to Thorbjørg Haffsteinsdottir. If you read Danish, try the "sweet and sugarfree carob balls" - or donut holes, whatever you choose to call them - from the "snacks" section, or if you're not raw, try the glutenfree pizza crust, which is positively the best gluten free pizza solution I've encountered. Thorbjørg has a website too - where there's an "English" option but it doesn't have as much info as the Danish version - and a blog with health and nutrition news in Danish. I mean to try her recipe for "Delicious Liquorice-Chai Tea" next :-)

First strawberries - and the last.

I have been browsing through the pictures of every recipe at foodgawker tagged "raw". It took me a couple of days, seriously. Only a fraction are actually raw recipes, but oh, my, the eye candy. I felt goofy spending hours peeking at other people's food, but I realise, this website wasn't made for me. It was made for me AND all the other people out there who will sit around gawking at pictures of food if unsupervised, so I guess I'm not – at all – alone. However – and I'm sure there's a good explanation for this – an unreasonable number of the recipes use fresh strawberries. Massive craving ensued. I picked up the – for me – first batch of strawberries of the season. 500 g of fresh, imported, Spanish strawberries, not organic or eco friendly in the least. I ate every last one - big, red and really sweet. I snapped a picture of the last one which became the drawing above. Mmmm.