Turkish Celery-Coconut Salad

I like to convert recipes into healthier versions of themselves. This one didn't take any conversion. I was browsing through my Turkish food cookbook, which is full of questionable ingredients, but is also full of amazing spice combinations and very wonderful ingredients as well. I made two modifications: the recipe called for the usual brown-shelled coconut meat and I replaced it with fresh young coconut. I also added some avocado, but you don' t have to if you want this to be a very low calorie salad. It would be a perfect summer breakfast, in my opinion.

1 bunch celery
2 fresh young coconuts (scroll down to the coconuts section) you can get these at Whole Foods.
1 lime - juice and 1 tsp zest
2 avocados

Wash the celery. Remove the tops and the base of the celery, and put it through the Cuisinart on the shred blade. Or chop it in very thin slices.

Poke a hole in each coconut with an awl or a phillips screwdriver hammered in with a mallet. Poke a hole on each side of the coconut and drain the water into a glass. DRINK IT while you make the recipe, because it's heavenly and delicious.

Use a cleaver (okay, it doesn't have to be a $200 one from William-Sonoma, it was just the first photo that came up on Teh Google) to pound each coconut in two pieces. You can do this by hammering the cleaver into the coconut with a mallet or if you have a really sharp cleaver I guess you can just do it with arm strength but that sounds like a recipe for cut-off fingers to me. My cleaver is a piece of crap, which is actually good because I don't feel bad about hammering it into the coconut with a mallet and it works really well. My kids know when I'm getting a coconut ready to eat. "There she goes again with the coconuts!" they say.

Dig out the meat with a spoon. Work the spoon in under the coconut meat backwards-- in other words, don't try to scoop it out like ice cream in a dish. Face the outward-rounded part of the spoon towards the inside of the coconut and it will pry the flesh away from the shell much more easily. If the coconut is not under-ripe (and therefore jellylike in consistency) I can get the whole thing out with one motion this way. Dont' worry if you can't, just dig out all that delicious coconut meat and cut it into strips.

Skin and cube the avocados.

Toss everything (celery, coconut, lime juice, lime zest, avocado) in a bowl together. I like to garnish it with Italian parsley, but cilantro would also work.

This is so crisp and clean tasting!

Vegetable Terrine

This is pretty similar to a lot of the "raw" lasagne recipes out there, but I prefer to call it a terrine because I like that word. It sounds gourmet. :-)

I also like to use lots of very, very thin layers of vegetables and spreads to stick them together, instead of big thick layers of various things. I've tried to make raw lasagne with thick layers and the whole thing just glops apart. I love the aesthetic of many thin layers too.

So obviously, I'm not an expert at the thin layers method yet, but I'm getting better. Some of the sauces are still glopping out, but I had to post this because it tastes SO good.

4 zucchinis
5 vine-grown tomatoes
bunch fresh basil
1 or 2 cups of baby spinach
2 carrots
2 cloves garlic
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes, soaked until soft
1 cup cashews, soaked 1 hour
2 tbs nutritional yeast
1/2 lemon
sea salt
1/2 cup of pitted olives, any kind
pinch chili seeds or other spicy seasoning . i like the Asian garlic-chili paste. It's pickled.
A little olive oil (optional)

peel the zucchini and carrot , and cut the zucchini down the middle lengthwise. Then push each half through the mandoline slicer until there is none left (the long way) so you get long flat strips of zucchini. You can just use a peeler to make long thin strands of carrot. Put all that aside.

Put the tomatoes (quartered and de-seeded) , sundried tomatoes, a big handful of basil, and one clove of garlic in the cuisinart with a small dash of salt. this makes the most heavenly tomato sauce you've ever had. Go ahead and add a little olive oil too, if you want. It's heaven. I can't say this enough times. You have to use those lovely vine-ripened tomatoes though, for the flavor.

clean out the cuisinart. drain the cashews. pour them into the cuisinart. add the nutritional yeast, the lemon,and the garlic and whirl it all around until it's a very smooth paste. Like hummus. this is in lieu of ricotta cheese, there are tons of recipes for this on the raw blogs, so use any you want. Some use cashews, some macadamia nuts, some pine nuts. Go for it. I use cashews mostly because they are the most affordable (and tasty).

if you don't have a Magic Bullet, clean out the cuisinart again. :-) sick of that yet? I guess you don't really have to, but I'm big on preserving the unique flavors of each of my various mixes. Add the olives, a little olive oil - just a dab - and a pinch of chili. Whirl it around til it's yet another paste.

Now you're ready to build.

1. put down one strip of zucchini on a plate. use a knife to thinly - thinly!- smear some cashew ricotta on it. then add 2 or 3 baby spinach leaves. Dab each leaf with a dab of Olive spread. Layer some carrot peelings on top of that and some more spinach leaves. Add a thin layer of tomato sauce on top of that. Then put down another zucchini slice on top of that and do the whole thing again. If you have any fresh basil left over layer that in too. Be creative. Add mandolin-sliced red peppers marinated in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, add red or green onions, add mushrooms, whatever sounds good just thin slice it and layer it up. Use the cashew ricotta, olive spread, and tomato sauce to hold the whole thing together.

This is a great , healthy alternative to unhealthy pasta- and-cheese lasagne. And it doesn't take anywhere near as much time or effort, and, I am pretty sure it's safe to say, costs far less, too.

Don't forget to average in the energy cost of baking in the oven when you think about the price of preparing raw foods versus cooked. :-)

Acrylamide

Acrylamide is a compound chemical. It's a by-product of heating certain types of high-carbohydrate foods, such as potatoes and bread:

"Acrylamide levels appear to rise as food is heated for longer periods of time. Though researchers are still unsure of the precise mechanisms by which acrylamide forms in foods, many believe it is a byproduct of the Maillard reaction. In fried or baked goods, acrylamide may be produced by the reaction between asparagine and reducing sugars (fructose, glucose, etc.) or reactive carbonyls at temperatures above 120 °C (248 °F).^[5][6]"

^{Acrylamide may be linked to certain kinds of cancer, particularly bowel cancer. High doses of acrylamide have showed to cause nerve damage in people and cancer in animals . It's not entirely clear how much acrylamide in food is "too much", but overall the prospects sound risky to me . Different studies have varying results, but this Dutch study is worth a read:}

"those who ate 40 micrograms of acrylamide a day - equivalent to half a pack of biscuits, a portion of chips or a single packet of crisps - were twice as likely to fall prey to these cancers compared with those who ate much less acrylamide. "

<sup>So beware French Fries, potato chips, breakfast cereals (!) , Cookies, canned black olives (different process also creates acrylamides in these) prune juice and coffee.

Just for fun, you can read about all sorts of creepy chemical contaminants at the FDA web site.</sup>

Simple Buckwheat Breakfast

Buckwheat is not a grain, but a fruit seed. I never knew this until recently.

It's also inexpensive - far less expensive than any kind of granola or commercially produced cereal. It's easy to keep around , easy to prepare, and it's a filling breakfast.

Buckwheat is high in manganese, magnesium, tryptophan and fiber. it's full of disease-preventing flavonoids and helps to control blood sugar levels. With all these benefits it would be a shame to miss out on getting some buckwheat in.

HOWEVER. That being said, buckwheat should never be sprouted and eaten. The green leaves of buckwheat are full of a substance called fagopyrin, which creates a photo-toxicity in people (and animals). The groats are safe to eat, but never sprout buckwheat and eat the shoot or the greens, because it can cause you some serious side effects.

This is the way that I like to prepare and eat buckwheat :

1. Get raw (white, untoasted) buckwheat groats.
2. Soak them over night in a bowl of water until soft. They will expand about 2 times their original size.
3. strain the water off and put the buckwheat into a small sieve or colander
4. set the colander in a bowl and store, covered in the fridge. (this keeps the buckwheat from getting wet and soggy). It will keep for quite a while this way, especially if you rinse it and re-drain it from time to time.

I like to eat mine with dried cranberries and some almond milk poured over them. You could add all sorts of things to it , though, such as nuts, or bananas, or really anything you can think of.

Sweet Potato, Kale tortillas with Lime and Chili Sauce

I guess its because the weather has been warm here recently, but I've been uncooking up a storm and loving it. I like cooked vegan, but I honestly LOVE raw vegan. It's something to do with the freshness of the taste of everything, the fact that I know I'm eating completely healthily, AND the fact that so much of raw vegan is not just about the taste but about the presentation. I'm inspired by Russell James' blog at The Raw Chef Blog because not only is the food he prepares completely delicious sounding but also looks gorgeous. Which to me is such an important part of preparing food: make it look as appetizing as it tastes. So, I've been on a renewed raw food kick. My family seems to be enjoying it, luckily!

Here is tonight's dinner: Sweet potato, kale tortillas with Lime & Chili Sauce.

So, about a day or two beforehand, dehydrate some corn tortillas. There are recipes all over the blogosphere for this, but mine consist of about two cups of corn, one vine-ripened tomato, a half cup of ground flax seeds, and some cumin. Mix it in a cuisinart. Pour the batter onto dehydrator sheets and flip when the edges start to curl and the bottom is dry enough not to tear. The whole process can take hours or even 2 complete days if you have a vertical dehydrator like mine.

It's okay if you over-dehydrate it, as I found out the hard way. Just stick all the tortillas in a plastic bag together and about a day later they are all soft enough to roll. Crazy. You've got to love this kind of food prep. Mistakes come undone.

The filling is 2 raw sweet potatoes (peeled and) shredded in the cuisinart on the shred blade, mixed with one bunch of deveined kale, which is put through the cuisinart on the S blade until it's fined pulverized. Mix it together in a bowl with a half cup of pumpkin seeds.

Make the chili lime sauce with a cup of olive oil, 1/4 to 1/2 cup shoyu, several garlic cloves, 2 tsps of that pickled asian chili-garlic sauce, juice of 2 limes, and two tsp either agave nectar or honey. I used the Magic Bullet to whip this into a perfectly emulsified sauce, then mixed it into the sweet potatoe, kale, and pumpkin seeds to marinate a while.

Then I just dropped a couple tablespoons of it into the corn tortillas and rolled them up, drizzling some more sauce on top.

I have to say, it was totally delicious.