"Raw" Sundried Tomato Spread

I've kind of made this sundried tomato spread recipe before, but it's so simple that it easily got changed around a little for the 3rd Annual Volk/Watson Christmas Extravaganza (in the photo, it's the dip on the right):

1 cup macadamia nuts (soaked for 30 minutes to 1 hour and drained - not just because of "raw" food dogma - mostly because you need them to soften up and be creamy)
Juice of half a lemon (or to taste. I like it kind of sharp)
2 tbsp raspberry vinegar (it was unpasteurized, so I'm not sure if it was raw, but you could just use twice as much lemon juice if you want and be a little sadder)
Pinch of salt
1/2 cup "raw" sundried tomatoes (So this is a bit fishy, I know. Sundried tomatoes are often a chemical process involving sulfites for preservation and things that aren't the sun for drying, but you could just dehydrate your own tomatoes in an oven on the lowest possible temperature with the door slightly ajar. This is probably not what happened to the tomatoes I had stored in oil...so this particular version of the recipe wasn't exactly raw)

I love raw food recipes for this reason:
Directions: Blend.

That's all. You only need to roughly chop ingredients, if at all, and then all you do is stick them in a good blender or food processor. Add a little of the sundried tomato oil or olive oil or water if it's too thick. You can optionally add a pinch of garlic powder or an entire raw clove for immune benefits (and taste, though bad breath comes along with it), or half a shallot (again, breath). You can also use cashews instead of expensive macadamia nuts if your mother is not currently in a digestive fight with them.

"Raw" Basil Walnut Spread

The recipe for this basil-walnut spread (pictured in the middle of the three dips above) kind of came from here, but mostly it came from the inspiration of my mother's kitchen, which is happily filled with special vinegars from the "O" Farm, the organic farm in Newfoundland where she gets her summer vegetable and herb baskets. There was conveniently a basil garlic vinegar in the cupboard, so I'm not sure if it is actually raw (though it may be because it's unpasteurized) but I figured no one would mind. I won't be bringing it to a raw food potluck in Montreal on Saturday just in case. Well, that and other transportation reasons that include the handle of my suitcase breaking in the middle of the one intersection that separates my Montreal apartment from the bus stop that takes me directly to the airport. One intersection! And of course that's where my suitcase decides to curl up and die. Needless to say I hauled it up on top of my other one whose handle was a brute and kept walking...

Anyway, what I actually ended up doing (though you could use this recipe of the other, or something in between...or something completely different and it would still be good) was:

2 cups walnuts (soaked for 4 hours and drained. The original recipe calls for cashews but my mom doesn't do cashews. If you do, however, use cashews you'll end up with a much creamier texture, but lose a lot of the bitter, endearing flavour of the walnuts)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds (soaked for 3 hours, drained)
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tbsp basil-garlic vinegar (the website above has a way of making basil oil that works just fine. The dip will be more lemon-y this way and less complex than with vinegar, but still good. You can add a clove of garlic to the blender if your oil or vinegar isn't flavoured with it already. Be caaaareful with fresh garlic, though. It's strong. Same for if you decided to, say, add half a shallot on a whim)
1 teaspoon lemon juice (only if you didn't use vinegar)
pinch salt
pinch ground pepper

Directions:
Blend in a workhorse of a blender or food processor. The water should be enough to help it along but you may need to scrape down the sides. I haven't lost a spatula to a blender in awhile. I figure my technique is better. ALWAYS turn off the blender before scraping down the sides. Don't do like I do. I won't have any spoons much longer if I'm not careful...or eyes when spoon shards escape the blender).

Raw Macadamia Nut Ricotta

You take some macadamia nuts, and you take some lemon juice...

The macadamia nut dip is the one on the left. I garnished them all with green onions and did a little design with a spoon to make it look a bit fancy, but the recipe -- very, very simple.

Lemon and macadamia nuts are a really nice combo, and whether you follow the "raw" food doctrine of soaking your nuts to reduce the or not, a good 30 minute minimum soak for these nuts before blending them up with some freshly squeezed lemon juice will give you a creamier texture. Salt is kind of important, and the lemon zest helps too, but the oil is really only there to make this creamy. The pepper is very much optional

The downside of this recipe is that the ricotta (albeit the least smooth ricotta you'll probably ever have) doesn't last more than a few days, so don't blend up more than you can chew, so to speak. A half cup of nut ricotta is a fair bit, so starting with more than a cup of nuts might be a bad idea.

With that in mind:

1 cup macadamia nuts
4-7 tbsp fresh lemon juice
sprinkle of salt (up to 3/4 tsp)
zest of one lemon
freshly ground pepper (optional)
2 tbsp olive oil (optional) or 2 tbsp water (or more to make it blend)

Soak the nuts in cold water for a minimum of 30 minutes, max an hour. These are not long-soaking nuts to remove enzyme-inhibitors, apparently. Drain the nuts and stick them in a strong blender or food processor along with the lemon juice, zest and some salt. Purée to creamy goodness, cursing if your blender dies, complaining if you have to add some water to get the darn thing to blend, and imagining how to apologize to your mother for breaking her blender (it later came back to life, miraculously. The wonders of "raw" food?).

What Else Do You Put On Dosa?

Better question: What DON'T you put on dosa?

Well, if you followed last year's Christmas party, you know I enjoy layers. So in a twisted kind of canapé style I'm a big fan of dosa + gloopy thing + cheese-like thing + meat-like thing + sauce-like thing. That doesn't sounds delicious at all, does it? I'll try to be more explicit with my descriptions:

1. Dosa + caramelized onion + Quebec Oka Cheese + smoked herring + fig jam (encircling the caramelized onions above, inside the circle of smoked herring)

Or

2. Dosa + saag  + "raw" (vegan) macademia nut ricotta + crab meat (NOT imitation pollock...) + raspberry/blueberry compote

You could also do these combinations on other carb-y things such as baguette or even the dry gluten-free bread I put out for my mother's sake (though I will admit the tapioca bread is growing on me, but only when warm).

 So lets start with caramelized onions:

Ingredients:
Tons of onions (4 is what the original recipe calls for, but I feel like I was chopping onions forever since I did a triple recipe. The other measurements below are for 4 onions)
a little balsamic vinegar (about a tbsp, but I like 2 since the balsamic I used was pretty subdued)
the same amount of sugar (again, a tbsp, but I like 2)
oil to slow-cook the onions (about 2 tsp. Extra is fine but unnecessary)
2 cloves garlic, minced (optional)
a little salt
a little fresh parley or basil, finely chopped (optional)

What you do:
Slice the onions into very thin strips then add them to a pan of heated olive oil (medium-high heat). Reduce the heat immediately to medium and let them cook, unstirred, for about 4 minutes, or until they brown a little on the bottom. Now you're allowed to stir and keep cooking for another 5 minutes, spreading the light caramel colour throughout the onions and letting them wilt.

Now sprinkle the onions with the balsamic and the sugar and stir and cook for 10 more minutes. They should be very brown and very tender. You don't want to crunch caramelized onions, so test them now. If they're soft enough, sweet enough, and acidic enough, add a little sprinkle of salt and stir in the parsley. Test again. With so few ingredients you can't hide in this recipe and if it needs more salt, it needs more salt. If it's undercooked, cook it longer.

That's all. 

For the herring, I didn't trust how salty they were so I soaked them a little, basically depriving the already bland fish of any taste whatsoever. I should have gone with the pickled stuff, or pickled some herring myself, but, well, this way was easier and nobody was going to care. I cared. The soaked and dried stuff was junk, and the texture was nothing. In the future I will accept the salt or make fresh herring instead of wimping out.

Next post: Macadamia Nut Ricotta

"Raw" Granola: Dried Apricot, Almonds, Sunflower Seeds, Sprouted Oat Groats Sweetened with Date Paste

This recipe sprouts for 1 day, soaks for one hour, takes 30 minutes to prep and then 2/3rds of another day to dehydrate. Why would anyone got to the trouble of making this? Well, I'm a sucker for recipes that end with the instruction to "enjoy", and I suck at "real" (sugar high-inducing) granola (see efforts 1 and 2). So I figured a raw one might work for me better. Besides, it's SO much better for you (and me). But I'll admit, some of it became beautiful granola clusters and some just didn't, and by the time I ate my way through 3/4 of it I decided to take the rest and kill its raw food goodness by sticking it on the stove with some water and turning it into oatmeal-like hot comfort food. I'll never be raw. I'm okay with that. In fact, I'm ecstatic.

1 cup oat groats (a bit weird, but I don't get along with buckwheat and these are less processed than flaked oats)
1 cup medjool dates (soaked for at least 1 hour in 1 cup water if they're not that soft. Medjools are the big ones that taste only halfway like cough syrup. Tunisian dates are better since they're more honey-like, but you'll need more of them. Iranian dates have a bit of a fruitier taste to them which would work, but might be too much for the recipe. Use what you have...just not regular, pitted dried out dates that should only ever be used for your Grandmother's disgusting date squares. Don't get me wrong, I love date squares! Just not those)
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup almonds
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/2 vanilla bean

1) 2 days before you want to eat raw granola soak the sunflower seeds in a bowl of cold water and place in the fridge overnight. Do the same with the almonds and another bowl, and do the same with the oat groats and another bowl. Or you can do like many raw foodists do and soak your nuts the day you purchase them, then the next day dehydrate them on a baking sheet in the oven at the lowest possible temperature with the door left slightly ajar (takes about half a day if you remember to turn them over halfway), then freeze them for later use. Enzyme-inhibiting-free nuts at your service.
2) In the morning soak the dates in just enough water to cover for 1 hour. (Skip this step if they're soft)
3) Drain the dates and reserve the soak water in a small saucepan. Bring the water to a boil and add the vanilla bean. Reduce heat to a simmer (you can also add fresh ginger here instead of or in addition to the powdered ginger later). Simmer the bean for at least five minutes. The longer, the better. 
4) Pour the liquid into the blender and remove the vanilla bean and ginger. Wash the vanilla bean and leave it somewhere to dry. You can re-use it if you store it in an air-tight container once it's dry.
5) Blend dates, cinnamon, nutmeg, and powdered ginger along with the vanilla-infused liquid. 
6) Drain the sunflower seeds, almonds, and oat groats and rinse under cold water. Spread evenly on 2 large baking sheets.
7) Pour date mixture over oats and seeds and stir to combine.
8) In a real dehydrator you could just dehydrate this at 115 degrees for 16 hours and it'll get beautifully crispy and granola-like. the oven won't get you to that state of granola perfection, but it's not bad. Stick the trays in the oven on the lowest possible temperature with the door slightly ajar for about half a day and stir periodically. Rotate the pans around so the granola dehydrates sort of evenly. When you're happy with the crunchiness of it, it's done. If you pre-soaked and dehydrated your nuts they may want to burn on you, so be careful. Even at this low a temperature your seeds can go from flavourful to dead pretty easily.
5) And, as always, enjoy!

One of the Strangest Things I Ever Made: Dehydrated Butternut Squash

Starts like this:

Turns into this:

Then turns into this:

 

Weird, huh? Yeah, I thought so too. So you take a butternut squash, peel it, cube it (1-inch cubes), soak the cubes for 8 hours in cold water (or overnight), drain, put them on a baking sheet, and stick it in the oven (or dehydrator. Imagine! What luxury) on the lowest possible temperature with the door open for about 16 hours. Turn the pieces over about halfway. Better yet, put the pieces on a rack so they dry on all sides at once and you can cut the dehydrating time in almost half. 

Of course, I can't follow a recipe for the life of me. So I forgot to soak the squash, which is the whole point; it makes it easier to digest. I then puréed the whole thing for some reason (I guess I figured the liquid would evaporate more easily that way?) and lined a baking sheet with the purée. God was it hard to blend that thing. Took forever. I had to coax my blender into cooperating by promising it something liquid later, such as a juicy smoothie with no ice cubes. I tell you, that thing's a workhorse, though. Wouldn't trade it for anything, not even a VitaMix. (Wouldn't trade it, but would accept a VitaMix as a gift).

Then I stuck it in the oven as per the instructions above. Took forever to dehydrate, more than 16 hours. I added fresh thyme, though, which was a lovely idea for once. You need to stir it in or it'll just dry out and be bland, though. 

Hours and hours later I sort of flipped the stuff over and broke it up a little. It's the inside that doesn't dehydrate well so the more surface area exposed to air the better. I even stuck it back in the blender after about 12 or 16 hours to break it more. It ended up looking like a strange kind of granola and the colour got bright orange, though the flesh had originally been pale. The taste is really interesting! Usually squash is mild and sweet, but this was a lot more pungent. With an acid (vinegar), it would work REALLY well. So I'd use this as a garnish for salad with a vinegar dressing. Kind of like raw croutons. They take a fair bit of chewing, but they're interesting. Originally the recipe from Rawmazing said to wrap it up with sage and some raw nut cream but that didn't sound like a good idea, so I just snacked a little. Just want to say that I'm glad I'm not actually "raw", and experimenting with these things is just fun and not a "life or not-eating" (aka death) thing...

Pauper's "Raw" Sun-dried Tomato Pesto and Life-Lemon Juice at Chez Snips, Part 2

I ran out of lemon juice, but I doubt that jives metaphorically with life not giving me lemons anymore. My point is that there was plenty of "life-giving-me-lemon"-juice left over after I made a pound and a half of roasted jerusalem artichokes, and plenty of free time. What do you do in this situation?

1. You get a haircut (check)
2. You eat super healthy and affordably (and check)

So I went back to my fabulous hairdresser, Nadyne Kasta of Chez Snips, who even sneaked me in before she sneaked out of town for some birthday celebrations. Of course, I brought jam to thank her. Then I went home feeling 100% better to blend nuts.


Raw Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto

2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 cup sunflower seeds (soaked overnight and dehydrated in your oven until dry, or in a dehydrator)
3 tbsp olive oil
1-2 tsp lemon juice
a pinch of salt
1/2 cup parsley (or basil)
1/3 cup sun-dried tomatoes, coarsely chopped, or snipped with scissors (basically I just wanted to use my amazing home-made oven-dried tomatoes.  My goodness they were good)

In a blender or a food processor (preferably the latter), process the garlic cloves, sunflower seeds, olive oil, lemon juice and salt. Process until very well combined and you have a pesto consistency. It's going to be really, really thick. If you want, you can add a little water, or not dehydrate the sunflower seeds as much, but that takes some of the crispness out of the pesto, and with raw food you don't want to give up any crispness without a fight. So fight that blender until everything's processed. 

Then add the chopped/hacked/snipped parsley or basil. Process until well combined. Add the sun-dried tomatoes and process until combined. This may take forever if you don't have a VitaMix or a good food processor, but it's worth it, and there's actual cooking involved, so you're not going to burn anything. Dehydrating the nuts doesn't give as great a flavour as toasting them, so if you don't care about raw, just make this as a standard pesto by heating the probably not soaked and dehydrated nuts in a small frying pan for a few minutes, moving them around until they're browned on all sides and aromatic.

Serve with pasta (wheat or zucchini), or as a dip or spread. Adjust the lemon juice content (unless you just ran out like me, and are forced to use lime juice instead. Lime was interesting...but not lemon. I guess I'm just happy life gave me lemons and not limes, though maybe that would inspire to cook more Thai and Mexican, neither of which are bad things).

"Raw" Zucchini Noodle Pasta With Sun-Dried Tomato Spinach Cashew Sauce

I wanted to make zucchini noodles. It's basically impossible to find Quebec organic zucchini now. The season is over. If you see them it's unnatural, and it reminds me of strawberries in December (not jam), but I bought them anyway because I wanted to make zucchini noodles, and I figured that in the winter I'm going to buy zucchini one way or the other, and it definitely won't be local organics then either. Horrible reasoning, I know, but there you have it. Welcome to my head.

I have a slicer thing that I inherited from a former apartment. I used it for my daikon radish threads (amazing by the way. So much better than raw radish. The salt and vinegar cut right through the stomach-turning quality of it and made it something almost sweet)...and then the crank went missing. I have a feeling I threw it out...forgetting what it was for, thinking it was some leftover junk in a wild purge of apartment things. 'Wild' being a relative term - it's not as though I turn into a savage when I clean my apartment . I probably thought about it hard for maybe 5 minutes and weighed my options for a machine-less crank before deciding it was useless and throwing it out. Idiot...

The point is my blade doesn't work anymore. I tried using a bobby pin to replace the crank that keeps the machine together, but that didn't work. I tried a chopstick but that didn't work. Then I decided to just grate the zucchini. It's not the same. In fact, it sucks. All the liquid comes out of the zucchini and you end up with watery "pasta". I mean it's bad enough it's not real pasta, but it's worse that it tastes like chewy strands of watery mush.

Anyway, I had some green zucchini and some yellow and I threw in some red pepper for colour, so at least it looked beautiful.

Really the dish was all about the sauce anyway, which was wonderful. Raw food gets a bad rap, but that's mostly because you find some bad recipes. When you find a good recipe, keep it, use it, and appreciate it.


"Raw" Spinach Cashew Sauce (or spread, or dip...)
Here's the recipe from one of my favourite raw websites, Rawmazing. It's very lemony, this sauce, but that's good because you want something to cut through the mild sweetness of the cashews. I hate using raw shallots and garlic, but it does taste really good. You could also sauté the onions and garlic in the olive oil first, and then add them to the purée if you're not actually a raw foodist. I didn't out of laziness, not out of dogma. The nice thing about raw food is you throw a bunch of things in the blender and don't use a million dishes, pots and pans. The downside is it's all baby food...

...purées and chewy dips. It's a nice, healthy change, but, well, I couldn't do it all the time. On the upside, I feel really strong the days I eat this way (even one meal a day of it, as long as the other meals in the day aren't really starchy or refined sugar-y). I don't get the "raw food high" or "glow" that I see on people who do it all the time, but I'm quite convinced that in a fight I could take them. Well, me and my animal protein could take them, maybe even especially on the days I eat raw, though, if that makes any sense...it's kind of like cross-training, raw food...you do it sometimes and it makes you stronger. Then you do other things other days, and together you're better off.

Anyway, for the pasta sauce I didn't add any extra salt (you put the nut spread into the pasta sauce recipe below on the website) and I didn't have enough sun-dried tomatoes to add a whole cup, but I had maybe a quarter cup and that worked just fine. I'm currently oven-drying my own, so I'll have lots for next time. Hard to get the sun to do that for you this time of year in Montreal...

Anyway, I was very happy with this dish and ate it with more zucchini pasta for the next three days, because that's how long it keeps. The cashews keep fermenting a little in the liquid if you store it in the fridge (or freezer), so either you're going to be eating a lot of nuts or you're going to be throwing some out or sharing (God forbid). Just remember that it can be a good dip or quiche filling as well, and don't let that limit you because I think it's the perfect sandwich spread too. Mmm...lemon. Succo di limone at the Fromagerie Atwater (pure, imported lemon juice, much better than the organic lemons from California, and I would never use non-organic since they're from the same place and are just worse, and I'm a lemon snob). Sorry, carbon footprint.

One of the Best and Worst Dishes I've Ever Made: Amazing Slow-Cooker or Stove-Top Tomato Sauce with 'Raw' Cheese on VERY Not Raw Fresh Pasta

Sounds a bit Dickensian, doesn't it? "It was the best of dishes, it was the worst of dishes".

Here's what happened:
I made the most amazing tomato sauce. I'm serious. If you were me and I was you I would marry you for this tomato sauce. Honestly the best tomato sauce I've ever made, including many attempts with San Marzanos, supposedly the best and naturally sweetest canned, imported tomatoes. No, I used market fresh big ones from my farmer John at the Mile End market. I hope he knows what a difference his tomatoes have made in my life. Am I being overly dramatic? No, you need to try these tomatoes and this sauce. Italian Grandmothers will love me for this sauce. I will never again be hit over the head with a spatula by a woman yelling, "Che stupida!" I don't think that one needs translation...it hasn't actually happened yet, the yelling and the beating by spatula I mean, but it seems rather inevitable when I make such horrible pasta.

That was the problem, see, the pasta. The sauce was divine and the pasta was a disaster. I tried to do it quickly. You take 2 cups of flour in the pasta maker (I used Première Moisson, not my gluten-free blend, to make it fuss-free. I can't remember the last time I had so much wheat and gluten in my stomach...it feels like a pile of rocks) and then pour in a combination of a beaten egg, 1 tablespoon of olive oil and a bit of water up to the line on my little container that comes with the magical machine. MIX for 4 minutes, and then EXTRUDE with whichever pasta die you want. Simple. Couldn't be easier. Except the pasta maker wasn't properly set up, so everything seemed to be mixing correctly and then when I pressed extrude things started spinning and falling over and flour flew all over the floor and nothing was coming out and I swore...a lot...and probably scared my relatively new roommate. I didn't even swear in Italian. Do I even know how to do that? I do now:

"Vaffanculo a Lei, la sua moglie, e' la sua madre. Lei e' un cafone stronzo. Io non mangio in questo merdaio! Vada via in culo!"

 

Yeah, look it up. I'm going with this one because there's no direct translation of what I actually said...I wasn't quite as long-winded, and I was certainly more repetitive, but this one gets the gist of it.

The point is, I took all the marble-sized pieces of pasta and threw them straight in boiling, salted water instead of extruding them into linguine, or fettucine, or penne. The pasta was dense from a bit of over-mixing, and then I boiled it too long because I didn't care at that point, and, well, it really didn't matter in the end, because:

Tomato Sauce 

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (yes, I actually used all two tablespoons. You don't need a lot of this sauce, since it coats everything and is so flavourful, but olive oil is good for you, and as long as you don't abuse it too regularly, you will be happier using 2 tablespoons than 2 teaspoons)

2 shallots, diced

3-5 cloves garlic, crushed with flat of knife and sliced thinly (remove the germ, the greenish bit in the middle, since it supposedly makes the dish bitter. Apparently crushing the garlic also makes it less bitter. I actually did this step. Normally I read this instruction and scoff, but I wasn't taking any chances)

1/2-1 cup diced, fresh parsley. I wrapped it all around itself and kind of did a chiffonade (wrap it up like a cigar and then make thin slices. It doesn't bruise the herb as much this way)

1/2 cup red wine. ("Good enough quality to drink". I went overboard on the quality part because I had an incredible - well, for me, very nice - bottle of a Languedoc-Roussillon wine open that needed to be used)

1/2 tablespoon cane sugar (I used xylitol, a sugar substitute, since it's so little)

Salt (a pinch) and freshly ground black pepper (a few grinds)

5 very large, sweet, ripe, perfect market tomatoes

1 tsp lemon juice (use this only if you DON'T use parmesan or another cheese on top. It's too much acid with the cheese and takes away from the incredible sweetness of the sauce. There's enough acidity in most cheeses to do the trick)

3 tablespoons brandy (optional. I think it will overwhelm the tomato and wine flavour so I skipped it. I ate the pasta with the rest of the red wine, so I didn't want different alcohol messing up the wine pairing either. Don't worry, I'd been working on this bottle for a week, so it's not as though I downed a whole bottle minus a half a cup. You're probably laughing at me because who drinks a bottle of wine a half a glass at a time over the course of a week?)

As I said, my farmer John was the key to my success. Buy incredible tomatoes, let them ripen, don't eat them all for salad. So do like I did with my figs, buy way more than you think is necessary so some are left for this sauce by the time you get around to making it. Blanch the tomatoes in boiling water until the skins are loose and wrinkled (about 45 seconds-1 minute, 15 seconds). Use tongs to transfer them to a bowl of ice water (you don't want to drain the whole pot in case the skins aren't ready to be removed and you under-blanched them. Sucks having to wait for water to boil AGAIN. What are you? Pregnant?) and remove the skins once the tomatoes are cool enough to touch. Then dice them.

Now the important part: drain the excess juice from the tomatoes. Put the tomatoes over a big sieve or put them over a little sieve like I did in batches. It's mind-numbing and frustrating (to the point where I bought a big strainer today after I'd done this, so next time it will be easier) but it makes all the difference in the world. If you do this sauce on the stove you only need to drain the tomatoes a little since some of the juice will evaporate in the cooking process and you don't want it to burn. But if you do it in a slow-cooker like I did, you need to get rid of all the excess liquid. Don't bother removing the seeds. If the seeds make it more bitter, then the sauce would have been too sweet if I'd taken them out. 

 

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a pot if cooking on the stove, or in a frying pan or pot if cooking in the slow-cooker. When hot, add the shallots. 

Turn the heat down to medium-low, cover the pot, and sauté for 10-12 minutes. I forgot to cover it, but I don't think it really mattered since the heat was so low and there was so much oil.

Add the garlic and parsley and re-cover for another 5 minutes or so. This time I actually read the instructions correctly and covered it.

Uncover and add the wine. Reduce the liquid by about half (5 minutes-ish). 

Add your diced, sieved tomatoes, and salt and pepper. Transfer the contents of the pot to the slow-cooker, or cook fifteen minutes on the stove. I like the slow-cooker method because you turn the heat to low for a good 2 or 3 hours and all the flavours marry. It's more like the traditional idea of leaving the pot on the stove all day to cook. 15 minutes feels like a quickie - convenient, but not as satisfying. So I hear, mom.

If you're using lemon juice or brandy, add it 20 minutes before you want to eat for the slow-cooker version. In the stove-top version add it 3-4 minutes before serving.

Serves 4. Top with fresh parsley and cheese, or my version of cheese:

Raw Cashew Cheese:

A handful of soaked cashews (a few hours in a big bowl of water, and then drained. Or soak them in advance and then dehydrate them and freeze them until you need them) thrown in the blender with a splash or 3 of lemon juice, a sprinkle of salt (as much as you'd get from a parmesan - "parmiggiano"...what am I? English? - cheese, to a good pinch), and a few grinds of pepper. If you don't die of happiness on first tasting the tomato sauce it's your tomatoes' fault. Trust me. It's all about faith and good tomatoes and a little bit of prayer thrown in because it's Italian. You could yell a little if you want, too. That makes it more authentic.

 

Raw Tomato Cream Sauce

 

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Brazil nuts (soaked 8 hours or overnight, or soaked and dehydrated...or not? Peeled is best but I didn't care about a smooth texture, and there are healthy things in the skin, I think)

1/4 cup water

1 medjool date, pit removed (soaked or not. Again, didn't care about a smooth texture)

6-8 cherry tomatoes

pinch of salt

Optional: 1/4-1/2 an avocado, a little lemon juice (lime for a fake, mediocre, but satisfying Thai dish), parsley, basil, or other fresh herb for garnish (or blend it in), garlic or onion, balsamic vinegar (not raw, I don't think...)

Instructions: Blend. That's all. As fine or as chewy as you want. It won't be crunchy unless you cut down on the water and rehydrate the nuts (I'd actually toast them until they're aromatic...but I'm not raw)

This experiment in "raw" oxymoronic cooking was a huge success. I wanted a tomato sauce that could also work as a dip or maybe even a bruschetta topping. I had these beautiful, sweet cherry tomatoes and some soaked and dehydrated brazil nuts (there's a ton of conflicting info on this. Some places say soak 8 hours or overnight, and others say don't soak at all...), so I threw in one medjool date for sweetness, a quarter cup of water, maybe 6 cherry tomatoes, a pinch of salt and...I think that was everything. Sounds bland, but my plan was to re-adjust the seasonings after, maybe add some lemon, but I decided not to in the end since it didn't need any.

For a first attempt at throwing stuff in the blender and calling it a sauce I was pretty happy with it as it was. I don't like raw garlic or raw onion and the powdered stuff tastes either too weak or too metallic. Next time maybe I'll experiment with herbs - add (or garnish with) some chopped parsley.

It's the end of zucchini season. Really, it's already pretty much done, but I found a bunch of big ones at the Plateau Farmers' Market yesterday and these will be put through my handy metallic grating thing and turned into noodles. Raw tomato sauce are generally junk because they're more like chopped tomatoes than sauce, but the creaminess from the brazil nuts (could also have used cashews or pine nuts) makes it into a pesto-type sauce. It reminded me of the pad thai that was not pad thai, but wasn't bad, at Rawlicious in Toronto. Except mine cost pennies and I wasn't disappointed.

Oh, I should explain how to use this differently. For a bruschetta just dice the the ingredients instead of blending, or use a food processor to chop finely. Don't use the water.

You can dilute the sauce to your liking, but thicker is usually better so it doesn't turn soupy. It's easy to make it more liquidy, but hard to make it less so once you've added too much water. If you want it less creamy use fewer nuts. Or think about adding some balsamic vinegar.

A New Farmers' Market: Almost "Raw" Banana Cream Pie

You might think I'd be getting farmers' market-ed out by this point. How can I keep up my frenetic pace of purchasing fresh produce? Well, it's not like I buy a week's worth of groceries everywhere I go. I buy one or two items, and only what I need for specific recipes I have planned (plus a few whimsical purchases (yes, I call half a dozen corn a "purchase of whimsy"...). My last expedition was to the Fete Éco-Bio Paysanne out at Tohu, the home of Cirque du Soleil. I was expecting more a of a farmers' market setup with tons of fresh produce, and there was some of that, but mostly it was companies offering samples of products, everything from energy bars to soy and rice milk, to yogurt, cheese, ionic foot baths, reflexology, skin care, make-up and two raw restaurants' booths. There was a lot of variety, but I found a conversation I had with a "raw" woman the most interesting.

She started off by explaining the concept of "raw" in a very much "holier-than-thou" kind of way, discussing how bad everything else was for your body, and eating raw is the best thing in the world for absolutely everyone. She got into talking dogmatically about soaking nuts, at which point I interrupted her practiced rant to tell her about the raw banana cream pie I had just made. I told her, self-congratulatorily, that I'd soaked and dehydrated the nuts, but before researching the recipe I hadn't known that this should be done. Her response was something along the lines of, "Sorry to burst your bubble, but almost as important as soaking your nuts is the length of time for which you soak them," and certainly I hadn't soaked them properly, even though she didn't ask me for specifics. I went home and found out later (since she didn't know off-hand...) that almonds need 8-12 hours, but cashews only need 2-3. Now I wondered if soaking for too long was an issue, because I certainly hadn't under-soaked them, but this woman had berated me for my nut ineptitude. Apparently it's not really an issue for most nuts, but cashews are already processed twice so they really don't need much soaking to get them soft. Also, if they soak too long, or dry too slowly, they get a "disagreeable" taste. The soaking is supposed to remove the enzyme-inhibitors that make it harder to digest the nuts, but cashews you don't have so much to worry about because of the processing. Walnuts, brazil nuts, macademia nuts, etc. soak longer. 

Anyway, the point is that I got away from that booth fairly quickly and found my way to the Crudessence booth, my favourite raw-food restaurant in Montreal. They had samples of their "cheese"-cake that was FAR superior to both my raw orange chocolate cheesecake and this banana cream pie, which were both very good, mind you.I think it's mostly because they use a LOT of agave nectar so it's incredibly sweet.

I'll get on with it now. I got this recipe from the same raw site as my last orange chocolate cheesecake, Rawmazing, and I decided to just do one big pie instead of mini, what they call "individual tart servings", but which are much too big for that. This is a perfect dessert when you want to be full after a meal without eating a whole bunch of sugar and things that aren't "good for you". This is NOT low in fat or sugar, but it's all the healthy kinds - nothing refined, nothing saturated.

Crust:

1 1/2 cups walnuts, soaked and dehydrated

1 cup brazil nuts, soaked and dehydrated

5 fresh dates (soaked until soft. After doing some research it seems that medjool dates are the dates of choice for raw recipes. They're much bigger than the pitted dates you'll find at bulk places. I actually used fresh Iranian dates, which are smaller in size, but much juicier. They also don't have that intensely sweet cough-syrupy taste to them. Good medjools don't either, but I was eating my way through the box of fresh dates anyway AND you don't have to soak fresh ones. Les Douceurs du Marché as well as the bulk place in the Atwater market carry them, but I've seen them in P/A supermarkets and La Vieille Europe on St-Laurent. Also, who knows how long you're supposed to soak the dates for! At least there are presumably no enzyme-inhibitors in those.

The original recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of coconut butter in the crust as well, but I just skipped it since the orange cheesecake recipe had the same kind of crust but didn't call for it and I'm slightly intolerant.

So you need to soak the walnuts and brazil nuts for at least 8 hours (overnight is fine) in at least twice as much water (preferably at room temperature covered in a breathable material like a clean kitchen cloth). You can also put them in the fridge, which I think doesn't work as quickly, but is safer for contamination. When you're fermenting anything (and that's basically what this is doing to the nuts) I don't trust "room temperature". In the morning drain and rinse the nuts, place them on a baking sheet (or several) and put them in your oven on the lowest heat with the door open for 12-24 hours. My brazil nuts and walnuts dehydrated well this way, but I had the cashews in a better-insulated dish, so they didn't dry out completely. This was fine, though, since I was using them right away and they were just supposed to be soaked and not dehydrated for the banana cream pie filling below. NOTE! I soaked extra cashews and the ones that didn't dehydrate completely after the soaking got moldy in my cupboard! Freezing them with a little water left in them is fine, I believe, but here's where "room temperature" comes back to haunt you. Throwing out formerly-delicious cashews is sad, but very necessary.

Pulse walnuts and brazil nuts in food processor until coarsely chopped. Add the dates dd to food processor with coconut butter (or not). Process until well blended. You might need to press down to get everything to process well, so be careful. Press into a large pie shell, reserving about 1/4 cup of the filling for garnish. I ended up with a bit too much filling, so you can either snack on it or make an extra little tart. The topping also works well on top of yogurt (very not-raw, I know, though ironically I only eat "raw" (unpasteurized and un-thermised) cheeses and probiotic (similar) yogurts anyway. The crust should be 1/4″ thick all around, but who can actually tell? Just make it as thick or thin as you want. It'll add some savoury-ness and crunch to the pie since the filling is creamy and sweet. I'll just say "crust to taste" and leave it at that.

Filling:

2 cups cashews (soaked 3-4 hours, not dehydrated, but dehydrate any extras you're not using for this recipe)

1 cup young coconut flesh (doesn't that just sound creepy? For a type of eating that doesn't eat animal life this sounds awfully meat-a-tarian. I skipped this because coconut and I don't get along, and just used an extra banana and an extra 1/4-1/2 cup of cashews. It makes the filling less creamy and rich (probably the difference between my cake and the amazing one at Crudessence) but my stomach will be happier. 

1/4 cup coconut water (from fresh coconut). Since I didn't use the coconut I just used water here.

1/4 cup coconut butter (I used 3 tablespoons of earth balance. The flavour is strong and creamy. If you're not vegan or lactose-intolerant, I very much promote using amazing cultured butter here. There's also Becel vegan, which in my opinion tastes better than earth balance (even better if you live in the US and can find the soy-free version of earth balance) but I hate supporting Unilever, the becel company. 

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1/4 cup raw honey (the recipe calls for agave, but I don't like it. Honey has a higher glycemic index, but it also has more flavour, and my unpasteurized "raw" version is delicious.

1 vanilla bean...or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract. Yeah, vanilla beans are expensive...but so is my organic, THICK vanilla extract. I really need to make my own extract. It's just vanilla pods and alcohol.

2 Bananas, sliced (I used 3 because I replaced the coconut flesh)

Your blender or food processor gets a workout. You need to clean it out (or not if you don't mind an imperfect texture in your filling) after making the crust. I processed the cashews, 1 banana and the water first. Then I added the lemon juice, honey, earth balance and one more banana. It was really hard to process this since it's very thick, so be very careful if you press down into the blender when it's turned on. If you make a lot of these desserts, invest in a good food processor or vitamix. When it's all mixed, add the last sliced banana (the first two just need to be roughly chopped so they blend, but this one should be a little more carefully sliced) and just stir. Don't blend it in. Pour the filling into the nut crust, sprinkle the top with the remaining crust, and refrigerate for 30 minutes. The pie will thicken as it cools, and the top will turn a darker shade of purple since the banana oxidizes, which is beautiful. 

The online recipe says you can drizzle with "raw" chocolate, but I didn't like the recipe since I didn't have any cacao butter and I didn't want to use anymore earth balance to replace coconut butter.

I would have been more happy with just finding some really good quality dark chocolate, melting it, and drizzling it over top. You could also melt it with a little sweetener (agave or honey) to make a bittersweet chocolate with a high percentage of cacao into a semisweet chocolate without the refined or cane sugar generally used, or add a little almond milk to turn it into milk chocolate...so many options.

Oh, and since this cake only lasts a few days in the fridge, freeze it after 2. It's even better when you eat it frozen since the banana becomes silken and smooth.

Dehydrating Things...

I kind of love the idea of taking a whole head of something green and easily turning it into something deliciously snack-able. I decided to try more dehydrating since it was so easy and I never otherwise eat chips. Back to "Making Love In The Kitchen" from the National Post, from where I took a few more recipes, decided I didn't quite like them, changed them, and created my own batches of kale chips.

Macro-Asian Kale Chips
Ingredients:
1/2 head of kale, washed and torn into small pieces
juice of half a lemon
1 tbsp miso
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tbsp ground almonds

Sweet Thai Kale Chips
1/2 head of kale, washed and torn into small pieces
3/4 tsp sugar substitute (or sugar, or honey)
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1/4 tsp sriracha hot sauce (the big red bottles at Thai, Chinese, or Vietanamese restaurants, or a sweet hot sauce, or hot sauce plus a bit of extra sugar)
1 tbsp chopped peanuts
1/8 tsp salt

Basically I had some leftover sweetened vinaigrette from some thai noodles in a small container along with some peanuts and hot sauce from the Cambodian/Malaysian festival at Parc Jean-Drapeau last weekend, so I figured I'd use it here instead of on more noodles. I kind of O.D.'d on noodles...mmm...The macro-asian chips I just wanted to try without sesame and oil. Basically I wanted to see if this worked fine without the added fats. I only added the almonds at the last minute for a bit of texture, but kept the quantity very low.

All you do is mix all the ingredients together, lay them out in a single layer in two big baking sheets, and stick them in the oven with the door slightly open on the lowest possible temperature for about 4 hours, or until they're crispy. They stick to the bottom of the pan, so you can use wax paper and save yourself some clean-up (and some waste, since the kale dehydrates and you actually lose a fair bit to the baking sheet).

It kind of helps to turn them halfway, to make sure it all dehydrates evenly, but if you don't it's really not the end of the world. So some chips are more crispy than others. You can honestly use any ingredients here and these will be delicious, as long as there's a tiny bit of salt involved. Dehydrated plain kale is all well and good, but it has no taste. The miso is very salty, so feel free to cut back on that if it's too much, and if you want to avoid sugar, feel free to leave it out, along with honey or other sugary substitutes. The only way to make this gross, I think is to have no real seasoning. Herbs won't cut it. Dairy is not a great idea because you're leaving it out at a not so great temperature. Miso is okay because the fermentation is good, that's why I left it in there, but meat would be an awful idea, because I don't know what this is like for bacteria and contamination. Keep it vegan-friendly and you'll be in the clear. Oh, and happy. Probably glowing, like all those raw foodists seem to be.

Dehydrated Kale Chips

More raw eating. How can you make kale any better for you? Well, I don't think it gets better, but it gets tastier and less of a trial to force into your body, like potato chips. Not in that potato chips are hard to force into your body, but that it's easy to eat a lot of them...too many in fact. Is there such a thing as too many kale chips? Yes, it turns out that there is. My ill-made point is that it's easier to eat a whole bag of potato chips than a small bag of bland, uncooked potatoes. Maybe not the best comparison, but it does the trick.

Much more delicious than they sound, these chips are from The National Post's cooking blog "Making Love In the Kitchen". I like it, overall. The woman's pretty knowledgeable, happy, and honest. Globe & Mail, if you want to compete with this, I am available (feel free to contact these people on my behalf. Choose someone from the Life section). I'm not saying I'm her equal, but you can definitely afford me. Anyway, the blog gives all sorts of different seasonings for dehydrating kale chips, all of which have too much fat, in my opinion, but the method is sound, and the result is delicious.

These things fall apart in your mouth, the chips. They dissolve from paper-thin pieces of green parchment to pools of salty, spicy flavour. I love it.

My variation on the Macro-Asian Kale Chips recipe:

1 Head of Kale, washed, dried and torn into bite size pieces
3 sheets of nori, cut with scissors into small pieces (this took forever! but it was very much worth it in the end, since the nori doesn't fall apart like the kale, and you end up with chewy little pieces that are covered in the delicious marinade)

Marinade
2 tbsp cup black sesame seeds (or white will work too)
2 tbsp miso paste
2 tbsp lemon juice (the juice of 1/2 - 1 lemon)
1/2 tsp fleur de sel (it's what I had, but use any salt is fine)
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tsp tamari
cayenne to taste (I ended up dumping in too much by accident. Good thing I like it spicy...)

Put the marinade ingredients in a blender and process them until they're smooth. The recipe says as a little water as you need, and I think I used about 2 tbsp. It just takes longer to dehydrate the kale if you use more water.

Then put the nori, washed kale and marinade together in a large bowl and massage well with your hands. You really want to coat everywhere. Oh, the recipe originally called for 1 tbsp of maple syrup and I just left it out. Normally I'd replace it with honey, but I wanted a more savoury chip. Use your liquid sweetener of choice.

Line a baking sheet in parchment paper and put it in the oven on the lowest possible temperature with the door open. I'm pretty sure in the current Montreal weather this step is unnecessary...it certainly feels like my apartment is hotter than my oven. I have never felt so much like a baked good...I should just put the raw kale in me to cook and by the time it digests it'll be dehydrated, along with the rest of me.

So you can also do this recipe in a dehydrator but who has one of those? Unless you're "raw". The oven works fine. I left it overnight. I know I know, I shouldn't leave the oven on overnight, but it was so low and I was there the whole time, and my fire alarm works, so I took my chances. It was worth it. The chips were absolutely delicious. I don't like all the sesame, but the lemon and cayenne with the miso and tamari gave a really nice acidic and salty bite to the chips. Basically it feels like you're eating marinade and air...more delicious than you'd think. So the next time you don't know what to do with a head of kale and you don't feel like chewing, and chewing and chewing, try this out. You won't believe how fast the head of kale disappears into your stomach. OH! and feel free to leave out the oil in the recipes. It's kind of a preservative if you use it, so the kale'll l last longer in the fridge, but you can happily eat more of it at once without it. You won't even get sick from eating too heavy a snack, or, God forbid, spoil your dinner. People apparently still do that. Not just kids.