Almond and Pepita Butters

I am in hardcore love with Almond Butter. I honestly eat the stuff every single day, a few tablespoons a day. Now I understand that most people would recoil from that, saying it "has too much fat", but my insistence is that fat is a very good thing. The only reason people really have to fear fat is because either they eat too much processed foods, which mess with your system in a plethora of ways, especially with respect to fat, or they eat too many fatty animal products. Since neither of these apply to me, I really don't care about what the USDA says about my "daily intake"(or pretty much anything else the USDA has to say either, really). Furthermore, nuts are filled with mono and unsaturated fats, which are proving to be good for heart health and proper weight control(Ahh, irony). I made my first pepita(raw pumpkin seed) butter today and I found it excellent spread on fruit. So eat up and enjoy, these butters are amazing:

Almond Butter

1 cup raw almonds(technically almonds from California are not strictly raw, they've been steamed and are ordered by law to be so in order to avoid salmonella outbreaks)

1/2 tsp sea salt(optional)

Put the almonds in a food processor. Chop the almonds for twelve to fifteen minutes until they become a smooth butter, and the following steps of the butter should be seen:

- First the butter should become a meal, and regular scrapping of the outside of the food processor is going to be necessary.

- The meal will begin to stick together and ball up and will stay like this for around half to one minute, it will them break back apart into a meal.

- The meal will quickly turn into a butter but it will need to be processed for a few more minutes to get that proper smoothness and shine that one expects from an almond butter.

This may take as little as 10 minutes, depending upon your food processor and the freshness of your almonds. As a rule, use as fresh as almond as possible because otherwise you'll have to add oil to get the proper smoothness. Do not soak the almonds before making the butter though because it will never get pas the initial meal stage; I learned that the hard way.

This butter is much faster than the almond butter:

Pepita Butter(Raw Pumpkin Seed)

1 cup pumpkin seeds

2-3 tbsp pumpkin oil(I have yet to find raw pumpkin seed oil, so I used refined sunflower oil because it doesn't have a flavor strong enough to effect the butter's flavor)

1/4-1/2 tsp sea salt

Put the pumpkin seeds in a food processor and run on high until they make a fine meal, this will only take a few minutes at most. Slowly add in the oil a tablespoon at a time until the butter becomes nice and smooth. The amount of oil will depend on the moisture content and quality of the seeds. Add the sea salt in once the desired consistency is reached and mix it one last time.

You can use either of these butters anywhere that you use peanut butter for allergy reasons or just to get a new twist to things. I'm currently searching for raw peanuts(fairly difficult to find) and will make a post about peanut butter when I finally find them.

Carrot Beet Curry Soup

My oh my, it is one delicious soup. I admit, it may sound odd at first glance but I assure you, it is one of the most amazing soups I've had in a while. The sweetness of the carrots and golden beets, along with the curry and coconut milk make an amazingly filling meld of goodness. I originally found a recipe online for a vegetable curry that they decided to make into a soup and I decided to accommodate the basic idea to what I have on hand. It's an easy soup to make and you will not regret it.

Golden Beet & Carrot Curry Soup

3 large golden beets, cut into around .5 x 1 inch segments(wing it)
1 bunch of carrots(around five or six, I believe), cut into ≈1 inch segments
1 large onion, cut into crescents
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced
2-3 tbsp Yellow Curry Powder(I opted toward the larger amount, as I love curry powder)
1/2-1 tsp salt
The zest of one lemon, cut into thin strips*

2-3 cups water
1 can of coconut milk
Lemon juice, to taste



*If you have lemongrass, cut the amount of ginger in half and omit the lemon zest. Use one six-inch piece of stalk, quartered and sliced thin instead.

There really was no methodology to making this soup to be honest; I had started cooking the beets in the water and decided I didn't want another repetitive beet & carrot soup so I winged making this instead. Basically, throw everything except the lemon juice in a large pot and simmer it until the beets and carrots are soft, then run it through a food processor. Add more salt or lemon juice to taste if you wish. It should probably take 30 minutes or so. Serve hot.

Harvest Co-Op

I was literally giddy with joy today. Why? Because I not only found Eden Organic tomatoes(the only canned tomatoes I've personally seen that are only tomatoes, no citric acid crap), I also found some Willow Run soybean margarine at the same place. What is this nice place you ask? Why, the Harvest Co-Op Market, right by Central Square in Cambridge, MA. I know, not very useful for anybody who's not in the Boston metro area, but very useful to us(it's the only place I know of that sells either of these goods). Also, the place being a co-op has fringe benefits:
- Community owned and proceeds go to them, not some unknown corporation
- Have local produce when in season
- Mostly fair-trade and organic
- Has a nice cafe that serves many different teas
- Bulk spice area(I don't buy spices in bulk usually due to contamination concerns. However, I always buy Bay Leaves and whole seeds in bulk, as they are always extremely overpriced, especially Bay leaves).
- They're nice people.

They also have white willow bark in bulk form, as to make a tea from. As far as I know, the tea is supposed to be fairly bitter but still have the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties. They also sell gelatin and vegetable capsules(which I do not trust) in bulk, so I guess one could make their own white willow bark pills, if you had a way of measuring the weight needed for each pill. I just don't know how safe it is to buy the herb in bulk.

It's a bit of a hike from Boston College, but it was well worth it. Check the nice people out.

Almond Cheese!

When I went to the Prana Cafe the other day, I had some nut cheese there. It was the first time I'd actually eaten it but I had heard about it before many times. Now if you're being really strict about it, it wouldn't truly constitute a cheese because it doesn't undergo the formal fermentation and separation process(though I have heard of a company in NYC that does make true nut cheeses, they are expensive as hell though). However, I did ferment this cheese for a day to make the flavor a bit more full bodied and complex tasting. The texture is much like a ricotta cheese and the taste, though not like cheese, is quite good and unique. I would recommend giving it a shot for anybody who (occasionally) misses the nice, rich cheese often used in things like ravioli. The basic gist of how to do it:

- Take 1 cup of raw almonds and soak them for at least twelve hours in water at room temperature. This should start them sprouting, which makes the proteins more easy to digest and nutritious. Take the almonds and pinch them to pop off their skin. If the skins won't come off easily and the almonds aren't fairly engorged, then allow them to soak for a longer time until it's easy to pop the skin off.
- Put all the skinned almonds in a blender, they should fill to around the two cup mark. Add water up to the 3.5-4 cup area, and blend the almonds for at least five minutes on high speed(use ice crush in the beginning to chop all the almonds up initially, your blender will thank you). Pour this mixture into a bowl and cover it with a towel or cheesecloth and let it ferment for twelve hours.
- Using either a sprouting sack or cheesecloth, separate the cheese curd from the whey. Let it continue to drain for another twelve hours. It is optional at this point to put the cheese in the fridge; try the curd and see if you like the flavor. If you want it to be a bit more flavorful and sour, let it sit out at room temperature at this point(if it's hot where you are, I would recommend putting it in the fridge regardless. It's be quite sad if it went bad).

That's all. Take the curd off the cheese cloth or out of the sack and eat is however you wish. I've been using it as a spread in wraps, though it is commonly used as a fake cheese in raw pizzas and would be excellent on crackers with fruit. Watch out for how much you eat at one time though, as it is very rich and it could make you feel ill if you eat more than around a quarter cup at a time. It should hold for around five days in the fridge.

As for the whey, it is commonly used in salad dressings or to add a flavor to raw soups. I unfortunately did not know what to do with it and let it it out considerably longer and threw it out due to fear that it went bad. I vow that I will find some tasty use for it though, it seems promising.

This can also be done with other nuts, especially cashews and macadamia nuts due to their high fat contents. I believe you follow the same procedure for cashews but you skip the soaking process for the macadamia nuts; I've heard soaking gives them an odd flavor. You'd want to double check that elsewhere though. Happy Experimenting!

Prana Raw Cafe

This cafe easily made my weekend. It's a Raw Food Cafe located in Newton Center, Massachusetts(around six or so miles outside of Boston) and due to various parts of the Raw Foodist philosophy, they are completely corn free. It has to do with the fact that most corn needs to actually be cooked before it's eaten and it's viewed as a micro-toxin, therefore being unappealing as well.

Anyway, while this cafe is a bit pricier than the average college student place to go, it's well worth it. The total meal cost me around twenty bucks but I got warm Pizza Du Jour with a carrot-beet-apple-ginger juice. My friend got some raw tortillas that were quite excellent as well. While I don't have any pictures(my camera officially died a while ago), there are a few comments:
-Raw Food's version of cheese(all raw food is completely vegan) is by far the best fake cheese I've ever had. It has a fairly high fat content due to it's making out of tree nuts, an excellent creaminess, and the consistency is proper. In other words, it maintains all the pleasant elements of actual cheese without the whole animal product-ness or the weird rubberyness that most vegan cheeses do.
- Their version of bread is still fairly unusual to me, but it's not bad. Raw Foodists don't eat any grains because they require cooking for proper digestion, so their breads are usually dehydrated vegetables of some kind. It gives more variety than one would initially thinks and works excellent for things such as tortillas.
-They have a nut ice cream and a plethora of desserts and while it was my initial intention to get some of these as a fairly belated Birthday treat to myself, I didn't feel like spending quite all the cash I had on me. However, it does give me an excuse to go back :).

The restaurant's website:
www.pranaraw.com

Yellow Split Pea Soup

Split peas are basically lentils bigger brother that really isn't spoken of much. If you really want to make a soup or the like that requires lentils, split peas will substitute in fine and have a large amount of protein and iron as well. However, the only place I really see or have heard of them being used is in Split Pea soup, which I always imagined as a kind of being made of green garden peas and therefore pretty gross sounding. Once again, my conception was terribly off base(I mainly subsided on Northern Eurpean/Irish food as a kid, so I didn't know about all these things) and the soup is actually delicious. The recipes I found were fairly sparse in flavorings though, so I mixed the ones I found with Vegan Dad's tarka dahl recipe, keeping the parts of each that I preferred. My composite:

Yellow Split Pea Soup

1 cup split peas, rinsed
2 cups water
1" ginger, minced
3-4 garlic cloves, minced
1 large onion, cut into crescents
2 tbsp oil
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp red chili flakes, or two large whole dried chilis
1/4-1/2 tsp salt, to taste mainly

1/4-1/2 tsp ground mustard, optional

Cook the onion, ginger, and garlic in a pot with the oil until the onions are translucent. Add in all of the other ingredients and cook until the split peas are very soft(they will basically disintegrate) and serve hot. Make sure not to undercook the split peas, I did that one time and it ends poorly.

Hummus, Tabouli, and Baba Ganoush

Never buy hummus. It's terribly overpriced and extremely easy to make yourself. That is, if you have a food processor. You can do it in a blender or by hand as well but it's a considerably larger pain to do so(but still much more cost effective). Tabouli is also quite easy to make, though it does take some more ingredients you may not have on hand and a bit more time. Still, it's a much better choice than buying it greatly overpriced. Baba Ganoush is much more work compared to the other two but still worth doing yourself(especially for us corn-allergics who dislike buying such things).

Hummus

Can of Garbanzo Beans(15 or 19 ounces)
Fresh Juice of 1 Large Lemon
3 Tablespoon of Tahini(sesame seed paste, often found with Indian or Southeast Asian foods in the store)
3 Tablespoons Olive Oil(I always use more than this to get the proper consistency. The more you put in, the smoother it will get, to a point. Too much and you'll have some freakish oily soup.)
4-5 Cloves of Fresh Garlic, Minced
A Pinch of Sea Salt.

You can put just about anything you want in hummus to be honest, here are a few other recommendations: green olives, marinated artichokes, pine nuts, or parsley.

Put everything in the food processor together and blend until smooth. It should hold quite a long time in the fridge if you use fresh garlic, as it is an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial all in one.

Tabouli

1 cup Bulgar Wheat, presoaked
1.5 cups Parsley, finely minced
2 tablespoons Mint, finely chopped
1.5 Green onions, finely chopped
1/8 teaspoon Ground Pepper
1/8 teaspoon Ground Cumin
1/4 teaspoon Sea Salt, extra fine
1 Medium tomato, seeded and diced(I recommend something fleshy, like a Roma)
1.5 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 medium cucumber, or 1 small one, peeled and sliced
1/2 head Romaine lettuce
1.5 tablespoons olive oil

Soak the Bulgar in 2 cups of water for one hour. After one hour, drain(it won't soak all the water up, don't worry). Mix all the ingredients excluding the lemon juice, oil, cucumber, and romaine lettuce leaves. Add the lemon juice, toss, and chill for one hour. Mix in the olive oil by tossing and serve upon the lettuce leaves arranged in a spoke fashion. Sprinkle on the cucumber on the top. Serves 3-4. It will last a few days in the fridge.
Note: I swiped this from Bob's Red Mill, though their product is by no means necessary. I haven't made my own in quite a while so I cannot verify the safety of that brand's product either.

Baba Ganoush
Adapted from David Lebovitz

3 medium-sized eggplants
1/2 cup tahini (roasted sesame paste)
1 1/4 teaspoons coarse salt
3 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1/8 teaspoon chile powder
a pinch or two of cummin
1 tablespoon olive oil
a half bunch picked flat-leaf parsley or cilantro leaves

Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 375F.
- Prick each eggplant a few times, then char the outside of the eggplants by placing them directly on the flame of a gas burner and as the skin chars, turn them until the eggplants are uniformly-charred on the outside. (If you don’t have a gas stove, you can char them under the broiler. If not, skip to the next step.)
- Place the eggplants on a baking sheet and roast in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes, until they’re completely soft; you should be able to easily poke a paring knife into them and meet no resistance.
- Remove from oven and let cool.
- Split the eggplant and scrape out the pulp. Puree the pulp in a blender or food processor with the other ingredients until smooth.
- Taste, and season with additional salt and lemon juice, if necessary. Chill for a few hours before serving. Serve with crackers, veggies or toasted pita chips.

Storage: Baba Ganoush can be made and refrigerated for up to five days prior to serving.