The Living Kitchen

These were, like so many of my desserts, a total experiment.  This one happened to turn out better than expected! The base is coconut and currents ( I don’t like raisins - except for the delicious,newly available Green Hunza raisins, wow, those are divine!). They were dehydrated for about 6 hours and were a real treat. The recipe will be in the eBook, coming soon. Email me if you’d like to be notified when it’s available!

Such a pleasure to treat ourselves and our friends to these sweet little bites every so often. I brought these over to some friends who gave them a thumbs up - a considerable compliment, coming from them. I was especially happy that these came out shaped like Madeleines, the traditional French cookie that was so transcendental for Proust. These are the perfect snack to eat with a good book, in fact. Just the thing for a rainy, lazy afternoon!

Earlier, I mentioned a big reveal for this odd looking, cylinder shaped fruit and the day has arrived. No one ventured a guess as to what it might be, and I admit, this one is a toughie to guess even for the locals here. This mysterious fruit is known as the Monstera Delisiosa, and hardly anyone has any idea how delicious these are WHEN RIPE. Because, when picked by an overly eager fruit bug such as myself, it is a tragic waste of one of nature’s most delicious secrets. Such is the adventure involved in new discoveries!

What you are supposed to do, is wait until the first few tiles turn yellow and fall off of their own accord. Only then do you harvest the fruit from the gorgeous tropical plant which looks like this.

These tiles did fall off on their own, but it had been picked much too soon, so the required ripeness was only just barely present and made for a dicey experience when swallowing due to the very slight presence of oxalic acid crystals. These crystals disappear completely when the fruit is ripe and you are left with a spectacular, creamy flavor somewhere between kiwi and pineapple.

Ah well, it takes up to a year for these to ripen on the plant so I’ll be watching them like a hawk for the next month or so. They are great just in a bowl, with vanilla seed spiked coconut cream. Mmm… I may try to make a sorbet out of them, actually. That would really be monsterously delicioso!

Here we have a humble quinoa salad. I find I much prefer food simply prepared for everyday eating, and this is one of those meals that is both quick to prepare, elegant looking and very satisfying to eat. Most of my meals take shape without much of a recipe, but I am learning to write these quick little meals down and share them because everyone always wants to know. Even though I LOVE the ease and availability of deli or restaurant food - and now we have that option more and more with live food, thank God! - I’ve always taken time to prepare my own food, usually more often than not. I mean, live food has only been available recently as a take out option! But even when I was cooked, I could easily find myself in the kitchen whipping up a batch of this or that rather than making a shopping trip, because there is just something about home-made meals, as we all know by now. With GMO’s and pesticides so prevelent, the safe feeling I get from knowing what each ingredient is and where it comes from - down to knowing who the grower is and how they farm - makes my meal that much more loving to my body. Now it just so happens that I know and trust the person who makes the raw food I most often get for take away, and I would eat his delicious meals everyday if I could, but even so, I do enjoy taking a spin in the kitchen myself and always have. It’s wonderfully creative process that engages nearly all of my senses.

This recipe, as I said, just came together without much thought, but I’ll outline it here for you in case you are new to sprouting grains. You need at least a one day headstart to sprout the quinoa. I sprout for two days, so this is a make ahead sort of recipe. If you make a big batch of the sprouts, you can also use them in a hearty breakfast by stirring in a 1/2 cup or so of nut cream or seed yogurt. I’ll blog a yogurt recipe soon.

QUINOA SALAD

1 cup quinoa, rinsed and sprouted for one or two days. I prefer two.

1 cup of grated carrot

1 cup of finely grated or sliced cabbage

large handful of sunflower sprouts, to stir in just before serving (they’ll wilt in the vinaigrette if you let them sit too long)

vinaigrette, your choice

spirulina flakes and nutritional yeast to sprinkle on top, optional

SPROUT THE QUINOA: Rinse about 1 cup of quinoa in a fine mesh strainer over a large bowl and swish it around to really wash them. Change the water once or twice. Quinoa has a biochemical protective coating, a type of saponin, that tastes very bitter and seems to make digestion difficult for some so rinse well! I leave it in the mesh strainer over a bowl, (either a very large bowl or a very small bowl so that there is air circulation for the sprouts), and put a plate over the top of the strainer to protect from bugs (fruit flys LOVE sprouts) and help retain moisture. If you have a sprouting jar, great. I like the air flow of the strainer, so I prefer that.

Rinse every morning and evening. If it is very hot in your kitchen, (a bit early in the season for that for most people, but here in the tropics it’s already warm weather), then rinse again throughout the day; sprouts will generate their own heat and can get quite hot, facilitating mold growth, so keep them fresh and rinsed.

After the quinoa has sprouted, rinse and drain 10 minutes or so to dry it out a bit and then toss it together with the other ingredients. It’s really too simple. If you’re not into oil, then use an avocado or a handful of hemp seeds to make a great creamy dressing in the blender with citrus, herbs and spices - I always get great results by just using whatever I have around and adding a pinch of sea salt and freshly crushed peppercorns. Lately I love adding one shallot to the mix, it really has a very different flavor than onion and is a French classic in vinaigrettes for a reason. Give it a try.

My personal favorite, and I think this makes the salad, is to add a generous sprinkle of both nutritional yeast and spirulina FLAKES - powder just doesn’t do it - right before serving.  It’s not as nice if you stir it into a big batch and then let it sit. It gets mushy and yucky. However, without the sprinkles, this salad keeps very well in the fridge in it’s marinade. I think it’s even better after sitting in the marinade a few hours or even overnight. All of the ingredients soak up the flavor of the vinaigrette and still retain their own identity so that it becomes more than the sum of it’s parts, making for quite a fulfilling meal. It’s nice to serve this in tender, young cabbage leaf cups or tat soi spoons. Enjoy!

My morning vegetable smoothie. Mostly kale, celery, cucumber, cilantro and parsley, but today I added a carrot and half a beet and got the scintillating, vibrating RED smoothie that comes with any addition of beet. Very beautiful. And, who knew? I just read, here, that Montel Williams juices and blends seventy-five percent of his food! Wow, this is great! Whether or not you watch his show, (I don’t even own a TV, but I have heard of him!) he reaches a huge audience of people who can all benefit from his positive example if they choose to. Very exciting.

On another note, because it’s too obvious to ignore, I’ve got to ask if anyone can name the odd green cylinder in the photo. I’ll do a post on how I used it soon, but for now, who can correctly guess what it is? I’d love to offer to mail one to you as a prize to whomever correctly names it but it won’t pass airport inspection. (I’ve tried!) I could send it to you in dehydrated form, but I don’t think it would taste the same. These are in season right now though, so I should definitely try that as there are an abundance of them! I usually just eat them fresh.

So how about it? Anyone know what this is?

I have no reservations about eating while I’m at my computer. In fact, it’s where I eat most of my meals, if I’m absolutely honest about it. At some point I’ll be happily sharing meals with an actual human, but until then, this little laptop is my most frequent dining companion.

If I’m working especially hard online that day, I’ll often find myself in need of a snack and some of those snacks do pass for a meal, occasionally. This is one of them. It’s a quick protein blast that satisfies and nourishes me without taking much time away from whatever project I’m working on.

I’ve always got a supply of dehydrated flatbreads in my “cookie” jar on hand for times like this. And as I’m continuously recipe testing, they are frequently experimental in nature, for better or worse. This one was not perfect, but it worked for a quick snack at home. It was a buckwheat-based flatbread, spread with a hummus I made from sprouted black sesame seeds. I topped that with hijiki and was good to go. The protein and minerals from the seaweed and sesame seeds really serves me well and I’m satisfied until dinner when I can put some greens in my body. (And, um, yeah, a couple of dehydrator cookies are part of the snack equation too : )

This would be great with sprouts too, but I didn’t have any and I was only looking for the quickest thing so I didn’t worry about it, though something green would add to the experience, for sure. Sometimes something, is better than nothing, and this was one of those times as it tasted just great the way it was. I recommend it!

Wish I could explain away my lengthy absence by saying that I flew away to South America to plant trees in an Amazon reforestation project for Earth Day and have only just returned today but, well, I didn’t. Along with the delay caused by a wonky WordPress glitch, (grrrUMBLE!…) (WordPress is the best! I’m all fixed now! It seems that clearing the Cookies from one’s system is the answer to most every problem, hmmm…how appropriate, yes? I LOVE this world! : )

So, I’ve merely been occupied by life, people, plain-n-simple. Hoo well… Amidst all this, I did manage to produce my first successful batch of homemade sauerkraut, and I must say I am rather excited about it. It’s tricky, here in the tropics where the median temperature is always just right for all the wrong bacteria. But I had Faith that Courage would see me through and low and behold:

Just look at this gorgeous bowl of hot pink and orange sauerkraut vibrating off the screen with pro-biotic action and vital life force! See those little black balls nestled in all cozy betwixt the tart and juicy strands of cabbage and carrot? Those, my friends, are Juniper Berries and they are DIVINE in the BRINE, I must say! What a surprise to me! My neighbor just happens to be German and so I asked her for some roots info on sauerkraut and she said: juniper berries. They were my favorite part! I am going to put in many more on the next batch. I should look them up to make sure I don’t unwittingly dose myself in some crazy way, but I’m pretty certain it’s fine. I’ll update on that too, when they finally let me put up my photos! ***Updated here.

I sliced red and green cabbage super fine with my knife ( I have a mandoline but as I only made a small trial batch - a precaution I chose to take after wasting tons of cabbage in the past when I couldn’t get it right - and I want to practice my knife skills, I hand sliced it all paper thin, including a few huge, sweet carrots. I massaged it with a very tiny bit of Celtic salt and a bit of lemon juice, (which I’ll leave out next time - it’s unnecessary) and let it sit for a while to get juicy, giving it another few squeezes every so often over the course of about an hour to really generate as much liquid as possible. Then I sprinkled it with a large pinch of probiotic powder, tossed in the juniper berries, and gave it a good stir. It went into a quart sized mason jar, topped with a clean, inner leaf of cabbage. I was afraid that, even washed, an outer leaf might pollute the batch with mold spores. Then I pushed down hard to try to get the juices to come to the top and weighed it down with a crazy contraption that kept the juices raised. (I used a tiny juice glass pressed ontop of the cabbage leaf which just fit inside the rim.) It was covered with a clean dish towel, sealed with a rubber band and left on the counter top for about 4 days.

About 1/2 an inch on the top turned greeny/grey from oxidation, with very little mold and that only on the upper most layer. I’ve heard that is normal and fine, because you scrape it off. So I scraped that off with a bit of the healthy part as well, (in case there was any mycelial mold action), when I could wait no longer and gave it a taste test. It was delicious, if just a tiny bit overly tart from the lemon juice, which was definitely superfluous. I mean, it’s sauerkraut right? No extra sourness needed.

This sauerkraut was just what my body needed and I can’t wait to try some other combinations, including Kimchi style. Another fun note was that my hale was being re-roofed while this was going on and the roofer guy was, by pure chance, newly raw! He’d just completed an Arise and Shine cleanse with juicing and looked spectacularly terrible from the detox, haha! He had lost a lot of weight (which is all the toxic stuff his body dumped and he’ll regain fresh, wholesome weight soon) from the last time I’d seen him, but was doing just great and commited to 80/10/10. How wonderful. Of course, I just had to offer him a bowl of sauerkraut to share and that was the well-spent end of that first batch. A great success all around, I’m happy to say.

Radishes have been calling me this Spring, and so I’ve been eating them quite a lot. I found some today at the local health food store that were so ravishingly fresh that I had to get them immediately. I came home and made this easy salad which I dressed simply with shoyu, meyer lemon and a bit of cold-pressed sesame oil. It was a perfectly refreshing pick-me-up for a 2pm snack.

I found my trusty old coconut wood chopsticks that used to go everywhere I went and it was such a pleasure to eat with them again. I don’t eat out much anymore - if I do I tend to pack things like wraps - and I had somehow returned to the habit of using a fork. Funny, but there was a time when I did not like metal to touch any of my food. So I used chopsticks exclusively for years, which were both super fun to use and highly portable!

The simple vinaigrette really complemented the radishes and made a sort of quick pickle. In fact, at the end of the salad, I sliced up another radish or two and tossed them in the remains of the dressing and let them sit for a minute to soak up all the flavor before quickly downing the crisp little slices.

I think making up a jar of these for the fridge is happening soon, they’re that appealing. There is barely a recipe but as I make all sorts of quick pickles, (my recipe book - which is supposed to be finished by now, and will be sooooon…..um - has my favorite recipe for seaweed pickles that are so delicious), I’ll jot down some proportions for you here, but it’s really, really easy to figure out, especially after you’ve made them once or twice:

Quick Radish (or carrot or or watermelon or apple) Pickles

1/2 lemon, juice of

1/8 cup of nama tamari

1/8 cold-pressed sesame oil

1 cup of thinly sliced fresh radishes

Toss it all together and let it sit out for 5 mins or so before eating, or store in the fridge for up to a week. I actually recommend making more but these amounts are just guidelines so go crazy with it. I could have eaten an entire bowlful, but only had the 3 radishes left so…

I almost never have breakfast, but sometimes I do and so I have a bag of granola I made kept in the fridge for those days. I also really love almond milk and so always have soaked almonds available for milk making. However, I did run out of almonds the other day and really wanted a bowl of granola, so I was left scrounging around for what to do about milk. I was totally out of all nuts, and nearly resigned to using just water, when I realized that I had a banana. I would make Banana Milk!

But, YES, a banana! It is a bit sweet, but it did indeed make a very nice pour for granola and I highly recommend it. Oh, and it’s green because I tend to add spirulina to everything : ) It’s nice to find a nut free milk that is also very easy to make. I think I also added a spoonful each of Tocotrinols and lecuma powder to soften the tartness of the banana as I am using the wild bananas that grow all around in these parts. I am really into bananas right now and though I feel David Jubb’s wisdom pressing on me, I am ending my relationship to them gently, as Dr. Jubb himself prescribes. Can’t help but think, though, that these bananas would surely posses a greater ability to eco-sterilize, as he puts it, just by virtue of their being stronger and wild! Woo hoo!

Is this confusing for anyone? It shouldn’t be, really. In refining my food choices to be in harmony with my intellectual understanding, there is often, there is usually, an overlap where I continue eating a particular food until my body and brain are synchronized and there is no longer any desire for it. In that way, I never experience feelings of denial, just a gentle understanding that - these last few tastes are a goodbye - and I progress at a perfectly healthy pace. Works for me. It’s interesting because certain things I can just let go and never look back. I feel no need to analyze this, I just trust it because it’s working for me!

This is one of the quickest and simplest shakes around, and something I’ve begun to crave for my morning take-along meal. It’s basically a combination of chia, soaked overnight in plenty of water and added separately to a banana and spirulina blended with a bit more water and then shaken together - and I think its simplicity is utterly delicious. While I make gourmet creations for my clients and am therefore constantly creating new dishes for others, it does seem that this only increases my love of extremely simple food for myself, as much as I love the taste of a winning gourmet extravaganza!

As an aside, I must tell you this story: a funny thing happened on the way to the market…heh, sounds like the beginning of a promising April Fool’s day joke but alas, I’m just going to let that opportunity go for the moment and talk instead of this amazingly random encounter I recently had. As I was saying, I was on my to the local organic bodega for my daily staple of kale and whatever else looked good, when I happened to meet a (VERY cute) man who turned out to be a former instincto eater - from Norway of all places. He was 100% instincto for 6 years (impressive, I thought) and we had a very long converstion about how he transitioned into it ( he didn’t: he jumped in cold turkey) and how he managed - in Norway (!?) - and with friends etc. A fascinating conversation and a compelling coincidence for me, with my proclivity for eating simply. Needless to say, I stopped believing in coincidences long ago, and am going to make an attempt to go this route during this summer and see where it leads me. I love these adventures!

I’d first heard about instincto eating while doing a work/trade exchange on an organic farm in Hawaii. (Something I highly recommend looking into, by the way, where ever you are even if you don’t come all the way out to Hawaii. Small-scale organic farmers are always in need of cheap or free labor and in return, you are given room and board along with some sort of wage and learn SO MUCH and meet fascinating people, (like yourselves!) - all there with various degrees of experience growing organic produce. Going the WWOOF route is one of the best ways to begin.

I am not much into limitations but I do enjoy working within a set parameter for the sake of evolutionary growth. I guess that’s what being a spiritual being in a human body is all about though, isn’t it? Am I being too random for you? Well, don’t mind me, these little asides are part of the charm of the blogosphere and I wouldn’t be living my dream if I couldn’t rely upon at least a few of you to listen and enjoy my bizarro treks into the unknown. Thank you, and deeply, by the way!

And so, my chia breakfast shake: those light streams radiating upwards from the individual seeds are so intriguingly gorgeous! This looked so much like a giant, liquid, green strawberry that I am inspired to add fresh strawberry puree the next time I make this, probably tomorrow. Strawberries are just beginning to show up in the markets of those of us fortunate to be in the more temporate climes and I am feeling their call intensely!

I do my best to eat seasonally and locally; it’s a great meditation to work with what the earth is providing us at any given moment within one’s particular agricultural food shed, but I don’t impose any severe restrictions upon myself about it just yet. Without a real garden, I tend to just make Gratitude for whatever nutrition does come my way, my main practice. While I am fortunate to live in a place where fresh produce is grown year round, and I realize well that I was fortunate enough to even have the options that allowed me to make that choice, I really wouldn’t have it any other way. At least not without an enormous and well-managed greenhouse on my property!

***for a fascinating introduction to instincto eating and a GREAT read, I recommend, Instinctive Eating: The Lost Knowledge of Optimum Nutrition by Zephyr. And just so you are forewarned, not all instincto’s are vegetarians and neither is the author. But he details his relationship and feelings about this aspect with such enormous personal insight and wisdom that it doesn’t stop me at all from considering this one of the most compelling perspectives I’ve read, even though my flesh-eating days are a past-life memory at this point. Even the thought makes me shudder, but the book is still a vital read because even if instincto has no appeal for you at all there are valuable points here that will benefit anyone’s eating experience. Not to mention that this is an incredible, true-life adventure story.