Lots of Snow, Skiing and Good Eats!

From Sunday morning to the present moment, we’ve gotten close to two feet of snow! It’s currently Monday night as I’m typing this and it’s STILL snowing!  Not having a significant snowfall in a few weeks, this is a wonderful treat! Sunday, we were out cross country skiing at Sleepy Hollow, a beautiful local xc area with incredible trails and scenery. Today Scott took the day off and we went downhill skiing at Smugglers Notch for some fresh powder! Wow! What an amazing day of fresh tracks and tons of new snow. It was windy and snowing pretty hard, but that made it even more adventurous! I only wish we both could take the day off tomorrow!! 

The photo above is of Smugglers Notch but I didn’t take this one. It’s taken from a collection of downloadable photos people can use from the Smuggs website. It’s a breathtaking mountain!

Time for the Weekend Raw Food Update :-)

I love starting with desserts first as they are always my favorite part of the weekend!! This is a Chocolate Orange Cake which is quite famous among raw food enthusiasts, especially on the website, Raw Freedom Community. The recipe is by Heathy Pace and you can find her brilliant recipe in her e-book, Just Desserts. This weekend, there was a ‘Raw Project’ on the Raw Freedom Community website and several of us made Heathy’s amazingly decadent Chocolate Orange Cake.

Joyce’s Notes: This was my first time making an actual raw layer cake like this. I used an 8 inch spring form pan which worked like a charm. This cake is not very complicated but it does take a bit of time and patience as you must chill layers before adding other layers.  This is a perfect recipe to make if you have a bunch of leftover almond pulp from making almond mylk! The cake portion uses almond pulp along with walnuts, vanilla, dates and dried apricots. The combination of these ingredients taste like traditional cake batter! Even my husband thought it tasted like real cake! Simply genius!

The chocolate and white chocolate orange layers were made with a cashew base. Both layers tasted like rich yummy frosting! Cacao butter was also used in both which made them taste wonderful. I love using cacao butter. It’s one of those special raw food ingredients that you order online to get the truly raw stuff. I got mine from Matt Monarch’s site: The Raw Food World. (click for details of the cacao butter) The white stuff in the photo is a block of cacao butter. This is basically raw unsweetened ‘white chocolate’ (one of my favorites!)

Another reason that this recipe requires extra time is that once the cake layer, the chocolate creme layer and white chocolate orange layer are made, you need to chill them in the fridge for a few hours as instructed. Although I bet you might be able to get away with chilling for an hour to an hour and a half to save time.  Once the layers are chilled you start building the cake a couple layers at a time by freezing to set them and then adding another layer or two (depending on where you’re at). So the building/layering part requires patience and a bit of time as well. In spite of this being a bigger and time consuming project for me, I loved making it and found it was totally worth the wait. This is a delicious tasting treat!! If you love the combination of chocolate and orange, then you must try this one!! I highly recommend it for a special occasion or just a nice treat for yourself :-)

One tip for the cashews in the chocolate and white chocolate orange cremes: The recipe doesn’t call for soaking the cashews and normally I like to do this because my Vitamix can get pretty hot sometimes. So instead of soaking them,  I took the cashews and ground them up into a fine texture in my food processor and then added them to the Vitamix with the other ingredients. Heathy suggested on the Raw Freedom Community website that you could soak the cashews in orange juice for the white chocolate orange creme. I might do that the next time!

Last tip for garnish: as you can see I sliced a few oranges to make the photos pretty. I also added cacao nibs (crushed up cacao beans) on the plates as well. The cacao nibs tasted great with the cake!!! They added a bit of crunch and a bit of extra chocolate to each bite. For every piece I ate this weekend,  I kept sprinkling the nibs on top! Delish!

What do you Do with left over beets from Valentine’s Day?

For dinner I made another red beet ravioli recipe to use up some beets from last weekend. I found this video on You Tube of famous raw chef, Renee Loux making Red Beet Ravioli on the Hippie Gourmet. (click on green to see the video). I’m not sure about copyright laws and the legalities of posting a video like this on my blog. I don’t want to break any laws or step on any toes. So I’ll keep it off for now. Definitely check it out. Renee is charming and her video is very informative. Here are my photos:

 

Joyce’s Notes: I used a spiralizer to make the beet discs you see in the photos. This works very well to make thin ravioli layers. Renee used a ceramic slicer and blanched her beets. I didn’t blanch mine since I didn’t feel it was truly necessary. I prefer to avoid blanching and steaming in order to preserve as many enzymes as I can. But I did let my beets marinate for several hours. Here’s the marinade: Olive oil, a bit of flax oil, ume plum vinegar, truffle oil and a pinch of salt. I didn’t write the amounts down as I just watched Rene pour out these ingredients onto the beets. They are all small amounts with the olive oil being the biggest ingredient.

The cheese in these beets is outstanding. I watched the video several times to get a feel for the amount of ingredients used by Renee. However I ended up adding more to suit my taste buds. It’s a simple yet extremely flavorful mixture. Here are the ingredients:

• macadamia nuts (about 1 & 1/4 cups)
• pine nuts (about 1 & 1/2 cups)
• juice of half a lemon squeezed well
• olive oil
• truffle oil
• smoked Spanish sea salt
• fresh basil, a few leaves in the cheese and a few leaves as garnish
• scallions (green/spring onions), 2 in the cheese and one or two cut on the bias for garnish

Again I didn’t measure the ingredients out exactly. I started off with small amounts of oils and smoked salt like Renee used. Then I kept adding more truffle oil and smoked salt (I found this brand at Healthy Living Market in South Burlington: Matiz Mediterraneo. Oh my gosh it’s sooooo good. Not raw but that’s OK for me personally as it was used like a spice). Here’s what my cheese looked like after I scooped some out for the ravioli:

My texture and color was quite different than Renee’s as you can see from her video. I believe she may have soaked her nuts first. I just added a bit more olive oil to make mine creamy. I love truffle oil so I wasn’t shy when using this ingredient. (You can find good truffle oil in health food or gourmet specialty stores.  We still have some left from our trip to Italy last May.) I used several basil leaves in the cheese (chiffinade cut) as well as a couple scallions. I pulsed them up after I got the cheese tasting good with the smoked salt and truffle oil. I also used the basil and a scallion for garnish which tasted lovely over the beets.

Overall this was an incredibly tasty and flavorful dinner! My husband, Scott absolutely loved this one!!!  He even wanted the leftovers!! Today after skiing, I actually whipped up another small batch of this truffle oil, smoked salt cheese as I had all the ingredients. By just adding ingredients to taste, I was able to produce the same yummy and highly flavorful nut cheese again!!Thank you Renee for creating this amazing dish with truffle oil which is one of our favorite flavors .

Having one left over beet on Saturday afternoon, I decided to use my spiralizer again but this time I wanted to see if I could make beet noodles. The result is this! Fantastic veggie noodles! Nice and firm and strong!

I was going to make an Alfredo sauce but decided to use these beet noodles in a kale salad mixed with the truffle oil and smoked salt cheese. I love making big creative kale salads out of leftovers:

The kale and beet noodles were strong enough to mix in the cheese as a thick salad dressing. I also drizzled a bit of truffle oil, lemon juice and cut up one scallion. This was delicious! So flavorful, filling and incredibly nourishing with the kale. Ah kale! Another conversation for another time as I could write a book about why kale is so amazing and so good for you!!! ;-)

Almost time to sign off. A couple kitty photos, a roaring fire, and then a good bye for now.

It’s always nice to end a lovely weekend by sitting next to our soapstone wood stove with a good book and a warm kitty. Cheers for now!

A Valentine weekend

Happy Valentine’s Day!

My friend Sabrina brought over her professional camera with a food lens and took a photo of these spiralized beets. (Murphy was intrigued by the beets and loved being photographed by Sabrina)

She took a lot of lovely pictures which are posted below. I’m going to start with dessert first which was a White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake from the book Sweet Gratitude. Here are some shots by Sabrina and myself:

Joyce’s Notes: This White Choc raspberry swirl cheesecake was amazing!! I think it is my favorite raw dessert so far! We all loved it! I was lucky enough to find fresh organic raspberries shipped from California in City Market Co-op on Thursday. Sweet Gratitude has a whole section on cheesecakes but this one is unique in that it uses a fair amount of raw cacao butter in lieu of coconut oil which is the norm for raw cheesecake recipes. This gave it that rich white chocolate taste!  The crust was made with almonds, coconut flakes, cacao powder, dates, cacao nibs and vanilla. Delish!! I had a bit leftover due to the heart shaped pan. The cheesecake filling consisted of cashews, almond milk, agave syrup, lemon juice, vanilla, lecithin, cacao butter and of course fresh raspberries. I found the swirling part to be difficult. Much more so than Heathy’s Triple berry cake which I was able to swirl like a pro (see my photo on right side of my blog). The batters this weekend were thicker and didn’t mix together that easily. Luckily I saved some white filling to add on top of the pink filling. Then I was able to swirl it with a chopstick to get the pretty pattern you see on top of the cake. I liked putting fresh raspberries on top of the crust and then putting the white filling on top. The raspberries showing through were so pretty when cutting slices!

The raw chocolate sauce was also a recipe found in Sweet Gratitude on page 161. This was made of: almond milk, cacao powder, cacao nibs, agave, dates and vanilla. All I can say is that it tasted like traditional sauce you’d find at a good pastry shop. Chocolate lovers have to give this one a try! ;-)

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Scott got me flowers. Aren’t they pretty!

Dinner! Here’s what I made for an entree and appetizer/salad:

Red Beet Ravioli with an Herb Cheese filling – a variation of the recipe on the Raw Table website (there are some lovely recipes on this website. Do check them out!).

Papperdella with Sugar Snap Pea & Saffron Crème by Chef Dan. – I purchased this recipe from Chef Dan’s website.

 

Joyce’s Notes: This was a challenging dinner for me! I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to make for food. Originally I was going to make Raw Food Real World’s red beet ravioli with the tarragon cheese and yellow pepper sauce (book and my photo are on upper right of page). That recipe is my all time favorite but I wanted to make something new and experiment a little. So I did a variation of the red beets from The Raw Table. These turned out very well! I made the herb cheese mid morning so it would sit all day allowing the flavors to come alive. The beets were done on a spiralizer which worked great!

I also made fresh asparagus which I discovered tastes absolutely divine as a raw accompaniment.  I got the idea from Tofu666’s blog. (if you haven’t checked out this blog, make a note to do it, as it’s an amazing vegan and raw food vegan blog. The photos and recipes are gorgeous) I basically took a whole bunch of fresh organic asparagus and marinated it in olive oil, a capful of nama shoyu, a bit of lemon juice, and cracked black pepper. I let it marinate for most of the day. Then I dehydrated the asparagus for an hour at 105F. Everyone was so impressed with this asparagus!!

I also made a Red Pepper Aioli sauce which went well with the ravioli. I didn’t show it in the photos because of the orange color (which was similar to that orange font!). I was hoping for a pink color but the sauce still tasted great. I didn’t write it down but here are the approximate ingredients as I remember:

1. 1/2 cup of soaked pine nuts
2. 1/2 cup of soaked cashews
3. less than 1/2 of a red pepper
4. garlic (one  sm-med clove I believe)
5. lemon juice (1 or 2 TB)
6. 2 TB Olive oil
7. water – enough to make a sauce

Blend together in a Vitamix. Taste & adjust!

The Papperdella with saffron Crème was a bit challenging. It’s a fantastic idea. When I showed Scott the recipe he instantly wanted me to give it a try! The sauce is made with the following ingredients: pine nuts, young coconut meat, olive oil, saffron, garlic & sea salt. We both thought the sauce was missing something so I added agave which helped it a lot! Later on when our friends arrived, Sabrina also tasted it and felt it needed some lime juice. None of us liked the wide, thin zucchini noodles. (that might be the last time we make flat zucchini noodles as it’s now evident we just don’t fancy them as a pasta substitute! There’s no accounting for taste sometimes!). The noodle mixture was topped with red peppers and halved cherry tomatoes. My variation was that I marinated the toms and peppers in olive oil, sea salt and black pepper and dehydrated them for most of the day. That totally helped the recipe in general. Also added were frozen organic sweet peas from Cascadian Farms. (normally don’t use frozen fruits or veggies). And finally we topped this off with capers which made the dish OK tasting for myself. The funny thing was when everything was put together, the dish had a fish/crab taste to it which Mark and Sabrina both agreed. I thought it was interesting. Sabrina said she would have liked it w/o the zucchini as the peas and other veggies were good in the sauce. Perhaps kelp noodles would have been a better alternative to the zucchini noodles! But it was still a very pretty dish to photograph!

My left over snack yesterday!!!!!!!! We were both really tired on Sunday and had a very lazy day (which is always nice on occasion).

We hope everyone had a lovely Valentine’s weekend! Cheers for now! xo

Favorite post Valentine’s day photos:

Our First Raw Potluck

Scott and I headed to downtown Burlington this past Sunday evening to the New Ethic Cafe. This great new vegan restaurant hosted a raw potluck organized by Joshua Pfeil. Many thanks to Joshua and the owners of the New Ethic Cafe for a fabulous potluck. Scott and I were both delighted with everything. There was even a very informative workshop on how to make sauerkraut which was fun to watch. We met some lovely people and tasted some wonderful food. It was so good to learn about a small raw food scene in Burlington, VT which will only grow bigger as more events like this happen to promote and encourage a raw food lifestyle. 

I do have to admit that Scott and I were both a bit nervous and tentative about going to the potluck as we didn’t know anyone there. I felt rather shy, especially since I am relatively new to the raw food lifestyle. But everyone was very nice and friendly and made us feel at home. I’m so glad we went! We plan on going to the next one in March! With regards to the raw food community, I feel like I have many friends out there who I just haven’t met yet. I truly look forward to meeting and getting to know more like-minded folks who share the same values. Thanks Joshua and everyone for a lovely evening!! :-)

The above photo is what I brought to the potluck. This is Carmella’s “Dazzling Chocolate Hazelnut Cream Pie.” (the recipe is from Carmella’s e-book: The Best of the Raw Freedom Community. To obtain the e-book, you can make a small donation) Wow, everyone loved this pie!! I received so many compliments and positive feedback from this brilliant recipe. People were just mad about it! Well, being close to Valentine’s Day, nothing says love like chocolate.  A perfect winter dessert for February :-)

Here are a few more photos from the potluck:

Scott going back for seconds ;-)

My favorite at the potluck was Joshua’s Apple Pie!! (pictured above next to my choc hazelnut pie).  Joshua’s pie was a recipe in Cafe Gratitude’s new dessert book, Sweet Gratitude (see my book list at top right). This was fabulous! As good if not better than any traditional apple pie!

Not only was I delighted by Joshua’s apple pie, but I was also surprised at his choice of dessert! As it turns out, I also made the apple pie from Sweet Gratitude on Saturday morning!!! I have been feeling a bit under the weather this past week so I decided to do a recipe with apples because of their anti-viral properties.  Here are some photos of my apple pie:

Joyce’s Notes: This is a lovely raw apple pie recipe. I thought that Joshua’s turned out better than mine. His apples were softer and the topping was moister and sweeter. I had to get the scoop from Joshua so here’s what I learned: He used more apple juice than the recipe called for and soaked his dehydrated apples longer than one hour as the recipe states (he did 2 hours). For the topping, he soaked his walnuts and used more dates. It was much more authentic tasting than my topping where I followed the recipe and instructions to the T.

I would make this again but I would also make a few more modifications: Firstly, the crust in the recipe calls for 3 cups of macadamia nuts and a tiny bit of sea salt. Scott and I weren’t too keen on the taste of just using macs for a crust. Next time I’d use the pasty crust from Heathy’s Just Desserts e-book (see information at top right).  She uses macs, coconut flakes & agave. For the filling, I would probably cut my apple slices smaller like Joshua’s and soak them longer after being dehydrated. And I’d use more apple juice. The Irish moss seemed to work well in the recipe so I’d use it again. For the topping I might make it out of pecans and more dates. I make a raw apple cobbler (click here for recipe) which is fantastic! I brought this to a Thanksgiving dinner in 2007 and no one knew it was raw until I said something!! The cobbler uses a pecan topping and it’s so much like the real deal!

Here’s a photo of my filling with the large apple slices. With the skins on, it was hard to cut the pie up into slices, so small pieces of apple would have been better:

The ice cream in the photo above with the slice of apple pie is Ani Phyo's Lucuma Ice Cream. This recipe is posted on the Raw Freedom Community. This was a nice and simple recipe that went well with the apple pie. Lucuma powder has a similar taste to vanilla. This was my first time using Lucuma. Tasty and unique!

Well that’s all for now. I’m still deciding on what I’m going to make for a Valentine’s Day dinner and dessert this coming weekend :-) Stay tuned…….

My two office assistants were on holiday this weekend.