Simple Yet Delicious Recipes This Weekend: A Pineapple Dessert And Two Mexican Flavored Pâtés (raw & vegan of course!)

Vermont is so gorgeous and green this time of year, especially with all the rain we had last week! I took the above photo which shows Mad River Glen Ski Area in the background near Waitsfield, Vermont, a lovely ski town. With the weather becoming nicer, I’m hoping to find more simple raw vegan recipes that take less time in the kitchen so we can get out and play!

Pineapple Icebox Dessert! Recipe in Ani Phyo’s new book, Ani’s Raw Food Desserts.

This is a lovely raw vegan dessert book with some simple yet delicious looking recipes. Many recipes seem perfect for the summer and I hope to try out a bunch more and report back.

The Pineapple Icebox Dessert was wonderful!! It was a true winner with myself, Scott and our neighbors! Scott especially loved this one. We both had 2 small slices for breakfast on Sunday. We even considered having a third slice! This was a nice change from the very rich and complex cheesecakes I’ve made recently.

Joyce’s Notes: This lovely little cake filled a 7 inch springform pan perfectly. (The recipes says to use a loaf pan but I don’t own one) It was so nice to find a recipe that tasted great and took under 2 hours. I didn’t time myself since I’m always slow in the kitchen and have a lot of distractions, but I bet an experienced raw foodie could do this in under an hour or 45 minutes!

The crust and topping are made up of soaked cashews (I always use the raw, organic cashew pieces at City Market Co-op), seeds from a vanilla bean, and agave syrup. This gets processed with the S blade in the food Processor. Half goes on the bottom and the other half gets sprinkled on top of the filling. That’s it! Very easy!

The filling is made up of more soaked cashews, agave syrup, melted coconut oil, and water. This gets blended up in the Vitamix (or any high speed blender) until completely smooth. Since I’m such a sweet tooth, I added about 1/2 to 3/4 tablespoon of additional agave and an additional 1 teaspoon of unmelted coconut oil. This made it perfect for my taste buds. Then I mixed fresh, chopped up pineapple in a bowl with the filling. After I finished putting the topping on the filling, I stuck the springform pan in the freezer for about 5 hours. Then I took the sides of the pan off and put the cake in the fridge where it held it’s shape just fine.

This whole cake has shopping list of 5 ingredients that can be found at most health food stores and co-ops. I highly recommend trying this one out! It’s easy, delicious and perfect for the summer! And it’s also a great ‘first time’ raw vegan food dessert to make in your kitchen ;-)

 

Here’s a photo of a pretty little pond along my running loop (on Leary Road). With Scott working most of the weekend for a big client, we didn’t get out to hike and explore, but I was out running both days in the rain and sun!

Green Chile, Lime and Cilantro Sun Seed Pâté and Mango Sun Seed Pâté. Recipes in the book, I Am Grateful, from Cafe Gratitude in Northern California.

Joyce’s Notes: While these may not look impressive, the two Pâtés shown above were super tasty and very flavorful. Scott is not a fan of cilantro so he ate the Mango Sun Seed Pâté and liked it a lot. I also thought it was wonderful with the fresh mango!!! I was so happy to find another easy raw vegan recipe that Scott willingly ate and enjoyed :-) Most of the ingredients are show in the photo! Both pâtés are very simple and easy to prepare.

The Green Chile, Lime and Cilantro Sun Seed Pâté consisted of soaked sunflower seeds, a fresh jalapeno pepper, garlic, lime juice, a scallion (green/spring onion), fresh cilantro and sea salt. Everything got processed in the food processor with the S blade! Very easy! The Mango Sun Seed Pâté consisted of soaked sunflower seeds, some fresh jalapeno, red organic miso, lime juice, and sea salt. This also got processed with the S blade. Then it was mixed in a bowl with freshly chopped mango and a scallion. Again, super easy!

Here’s how we ate both Pâtés:

I spread the pates evenly on collard leaves (de-stemmed and cut in half). I added some salsa verde and cashew sour cream on top that I made after the Pâtés which were both easy and simple as well. This might look too healthy, but trust me, it’s totally delicious wrapped up in the collard leaf. Here’s what the plates looked like just before we ate the ‘collard wraps’:

Collards stuffed with pâtés and other delicious ingredients are certainly a very handy meal in a raw food house, especially when a simple dinner is needed. I too was skeptical the first time I saw a stuffed collard wrap like these. But it’s quite a taste explosion I promise. The pâtés both dominate while the collard leaf is subtle.

The salsa verde is very good and is found on page 50. I simply blended up the following ingredients in my Vitamix: avocados, fresh jalapeno, fresh cilantro, lime juice, scallions, garlic, sea salt, cumin, black pepper, oregano, and water. It comes out better with ripe avocados. The cashew sour cream was also made in the Vitamix with soaked cashews, lemon juice, water and sea salt. This recipe also in I Am Grateful (page 48) is OK and works fine with the pâtés and salsa verde. For a more sophisticated and authentic raw vegan sour cream recipe, see my post on April 6 2009 regarding raw vegan tacos!

 

What the Heck!………Would you believe we started up the woodstove last Wednesday and Thursday evening?! It was cold, rainy and damp with temps in the low 50Fs both days! Sometimes the weather can be tough here in Northern New England! But today it’s sunny and gorgeous! Time to get outside for a run before the clouds and rain arrive!

Quick update of last week’s Pecan Turtle Cheesecake: Both Scott and I brought slices of the leftover cake to work and shared it with co-workers. We also had our neighbors try a couple slices. Everyone loved it, especially our neighbors. It got rave reviews. One of Scott’s work buddies thought I should sell this……We were feeling a bit burnt out with cheesecakes so we needed fresh taste buds in order to get some true opinions. One word of warning though: don’t eat this dessert right before going to bed if you’re sensitive to caffeine and or cacao (raw chocolate). It may keep you up and busy for most of the night as reported! :-)

Thanks for stopping by and come back soon! xo