Pesto

I must admit: it took us quite a while to start preparing a home-made, raw pesto, but it quickly became our regular food. Here are our favorite recipes.

Basil Pesto

Basic recipe evolved from what we found in Cousens' book, page 269. We prefer more basil and less nuts, oil and salt:

• 1 C fresh basil leaves
• 1 C pine nuts
• 3 T lemon juice
• 3 T olive oil
• 1-2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp salt

We found several variations of basic recipe on the net, e.g. Sundried Tomato Basil Pesto :

• 5 cups fresh basil leaves
• 2 cups walnuts
• 2/3 cup sundried tomatoes
• 3 tbs olive oil
• 3-4 cloves garlic
• 1 1/4 tsp sea salt

Arugula Pesto

After googling several recipes, we ended up roughly with following:

• 2 cups arugula
• 1/2 cup parsley
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• some garlic
• salt or liquid aminos (use sparingly!)

Mix all ingredients in a food processor.
A nice inspiration: serve with tomato and golden beet salad.

Waldorf salad

Zora use to make a Winter Waldorf Salad, published in Rawsome! p.158, by Brigitte Mars. I am pleasantly surprised today to see the complete recipe displayed in Google books. Just follow the link above. Google books is an amazing service - often you can read half the book there to decide whether it is worth to invest into the rest.

Italian sauces (Marinara, Primavera, etc.)

I am really keen to Italian dishes, anytime.
Today I made "Pasta Primarawva", Rawsome! p.203, by Brigitte Mars.
However, squash was replaced by daikon and zucchini. Instead of sun-cured olives, our home-made olives are more bitter, we used less than half of amount. Didn't have enough sun-dried tomatoes, replaced with celery, oregano, and more tomatoes. Still, result was excellent (even with some sprouted alfa-alfa added).

Few weeks ago, Zora prepared "Exquisite Raw Marinara Souce" (page 219) with "Pasta Marinara", both from RAW The Uncook Book. As usual with Juliano, a lot of ingredients, but fantastic result...

Poppy Seeds Dressing

I have to capture this fantastic dressing, shared by our friends Diana and Milan, although measures are missing:

• lemon juice
• orange juice
• liquid aminos
• apple cider vinegar
• raw honey
• olive oil
• garlic
• poppy seeds
• pine nuts

We made it several times since the last potluck, where we've got the list of ingredients, leaving amounts to our imagination. We are using whole oranges (peeled), so the result is quite thick. Not really fond of vinegar, using just a tablespoon or so. I am really curious how far is our creation from the original...

Our previous favorite dressing was Ranch Dressing (or Thousand Island variation, with added red bell pepper) from ?, page 104. I am going to prepare it tonight, to have a short break from poppy seeds.

Kale salad... finally!

I heard many praises about kale, and sampled some salads on potlucks. However, we used kale and related vegetables only in smoothies - until today. I decided to prepare a salad for lunch and it was so good! I followed The Raw Gourmet (one of our favorite cookbooks, by Nomi Shannon), page 67 "Kale and Hearty". Surprisingly, I found all the ingredients the recipe calls for, including red peppers, grated sweet potato (commonly called yams, which is probably a different plant), and dehydrated mushrooms. Only change I made was to reduce amount of lemon juice to half - original is too sour for our taste. Two of us left the bowl almost empty...
Next time, I must try a simpler variation, e.g. this Kale Salad (using lemon juice instead of vinegar).

Chili for a Spaghetti Western Party

We've got invited to a party with old Italian western movies and a lot of Mexican food. Well, cooked food... So, we needed to bring our own creation to survive. By a lucky coincidence, a book we are currently exploring provided us with the right inspiration. Carol Alt is surely into Mexican kitchen! The book, co-authored with David Roth, is called "The Raw 50". Don't panic, fifty is not an age; just breakfast, lunches, dinners, snacks and drinks - 10 each (just do the math :-). However, total number of recipes is much higher, because most meals have several courses.

We prepared "Sweet Melissa's Autumn Chi-lee" (page 62 of the book), with exotic ingredients like pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, and mango; along with more mainstream tomatoes, peppers, and jalapeños. Reasonably easy to make, fantastic taste and a huge success at the party!
Notes: We didn't have tomatillos, used half of zucchini instead, plus added around one cup of sprouted lentils.
How To Make 1t of Pumpkin Pie Spice: mix 1/2 t cinnamon, 1/4 t ground ginger, 1/8 t nutmeg, 1/8 t allspice or ground clove.


To minimize risk of an untried recipe, Zora decided to un-cook another chili in parallel. "Everyday Chili" (page 102) has eggplant, zucchini, and mushrooms, with marinade and a tomato based sauce. We didn't bring it to the party, but enjoyed it at home the next day. Another recipe we can return to without hesitation.


There are more Mexican/Texan recipes in the book to complement chilis, e.g. Lettuce Shell Tacos, Zucchini Crackers, Guacamole and Lettuce Burritos. By the way, the most popular recipe from the book, according to voting in this blog is "Raw Pizza" (page 84), followed by Melissa's Chi-lee.

Erik's Name Day

Today is Erik's name in Slovak calendar. We celebrated with a Carob-Hazelnut Torte. We liked it, but kids didn't. It's very rich and filing, suitable for special occasions. The recipe is from Raw Truth: The Art of Preparing Living Foods by Jeremy Safron (page 173).

A lot of cooking, trying new things from an inspiring Australian e-book. Curried broccoli is very simple: just a little bit of coconut oil with curry powder massaged into broccoli heads. Goji-berries cookies are fast; we used freshly sprouted buckwheaties. No currants at home, so I've used some raisins and two fresh peaches. Cookies have nice orange color (they look almost artificial).
We made a big batch of vegetarian jerkies for party tomorrow (eggplant, zukini, butternut squash, sweet potato/yum, red pepper), using all 9 dehydrator trays. Recipe from Gabriel Cousens Rainbow book.

Meal log for today:

• Two kinds of green smoothies: kale, pears, mint (inspired by Green for Life), and salad, napa, blueberries, banana, chia seeds
• Dumplings with sheep cheese and bacon (bryndzove halusky) for kids - their favorite Slovak traditional food, with sauerkraut (probably the only healthy part of their meal). I've got similarly tasting lunch: sprouted buckwheat ("dumplings"), avocado with sprouts ("cheese"), marinated mushrooms and olives ("bacon") and the same home-made sauerkraut
• Haselnut-carob cake (tons of it :-), jasmine tea, banana, pear, apple
  
• curried broccoli with tomatoes, onion crackers, garlic toast, crab cake
• nuts and red vine with friends (well after midnight, very unhealthy!).