Tonight I threw together another Asian style veggie dish; spicy bok choy and mixed veggies in garlic sauce. This made two smallish servings.
You’ll need:
6 - 8 baby bok choy, trimmed, rinsed, and roughly chopped
hand full button mushrooms, chopped (and/or any other veggies you have on hand)
good hand full snow peas, tips trimmed (and/or any other veggies you have on hand)
1/4 red onion, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
chili flakes
ginger, grated (optional if you don’t have it/don’t like it)
(a tip for fresh ginger: use a cheese grater or lemon zester to grate the ginger rather than mincing it with a knife)
olive oil, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce
How to:
I probably didn’t do this with the most flawless method, only because I was throwing stuff together as I went along. But it worked. Definitely fiddle with the flavours in this recipe to find what you like best.
Pour two glugs olive oil in a large pot or pan over low/med heat (you’ll need a lid large enough to cover whatever you’re using). Once warmed, add minced garlic and onion and ginger. Add maybe 3 tbsp toasted sesame oil (I use more but I love the stuff) and stir until garlic and onion are fragrant, 3 minutes.
Add mushrooms, snow peas, bok choy and toss to combine. Pour a glug or two of soy sauce and however many chili flakes you’d like into the pot and cover. Steam until the bok choy is almost tender but still crunchy, maybe 5 minutes.
Once the boy choy is almost ready, uncover the pot and turn up the heat only slightly to allow the liquid to boil down into a thicker sauce/glaze. When you’re satisfied with the consistency of the liquid and the tenderness of the veggies, it’s ready to serve!
Hey guys!
So I know I’ve been neglecting this blog over the summer, but now that school is getting back in gear I’ll hopefully be updating way more regularly!
Tonight for dinner I had mushrooms and snow peas sauteed in toasted sesame oil and soy sauce with garlic and green onions over whole wheat linguine. Whew, that’s a mouth full. As usual, my measurements aren’t exact because I fiddle with the flavours until I find something I like. I encourage you to do the same! This dish serves 2.
You’ll need:
2 portions of whole wheat linguine
12 - 18 button mushrooms, sliced
12 - 18 snow peas, tips removed
1 clove of garlic, minced
3 - 4 green onions, bottoms removed, chopped
a few tbsps extra virgin olive oil
a few tbsps toasted sesame oil
a glug of soy sauce
sesame seeds (optional)
salt and pepper to taste
How to:
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add linguine, cook until al dente.
Meanwhile, heat olive oil and sesame oil in a large pan (I used a wok). Once oil is warm, add snow peas, mushrooms, and green onions. When mushrooms are starting to sautee down (they get smaller as they cook), add the garlic and a glug of soy sauce. Stir frequently. Once the snow peas are a little tender (not overly wilted though) and everything is tasting the way you like it, add the strained pasta to the pan and combine. Pepper to taste and serve!
Note: You could do this with pretty much any veggie in your fridge so mix it up! If you want to skip the gluten in the pasta, use a substantial veggie like broccoli to pump up the volume and turn it into a veggie stir fry.
I never liked spinach until I made an adventurous decision to buy some at the grocery store anyways… and turn them into Oven Baked Spinach Chips.
Now, spinach is my new best veggie friend. It tastes sooo ridiculously good. Let’s start baking!
Ingredients
• Bucket load of spinach leafs. I am talking about handfuls here!
• A bit of extra virgin olive oil, to coat the leaves. You don’t need a lot - for 400 grams of spinach leaves, I used 1 tablespoon of oil.
• Herbs. I used pepper, curry powder, red pepper powder, garlic powder and thyme.
Directions
1. Preheat oven at 120°C / 250F,
2. Rinse and dry the spinach leafs,
3. Place spinach in a large bowl, pour in some olive oil to coat the leafs,
4. Add herbs, toss it all around,
5. Place some baking paper on a tray, and lay out the spinach nice and evenly,
6. Pop them in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Keep checking on them until they’re crisp!
I could eat buckets of this stuff. Yum! Enjoy your crispy veggies. :)
Salad Time!
Salads are a wonderful thing, even though they usually get a bad rap. And guys think that they can’t get full off a salad. If that’s you then let me tell you - that’s because you’re shit at making salads. Salads can have an almost unlimited number of ingredients, and take no time to prepare, and are colourful, living food that bursts into rainbows in your delighted stomach. Salads are fucking awesome. Period.
With that all done and out of the way, I’m going to give you one of my go-to salad dressing recipes, along with a few tips for compiled a phenomenal bowl of kick-ass.
First off, the type of green you use is really important. Don’t use iceberg lettuce (ever, for anything), and even romaine is a little lacking. Spinach, arugula, kale, or any combination of those are a great start.
Secondly, don’t be shy with toppings. Red peppers, avocado, seeds and nuts (sunflower seeds and sliced almonds are some of my faves), olives, cucumber, tomato, mushrooms, or any other veggie. Pile it on. This is healthy food, remember?
Don’t neglect the protein. Chickpeas are a good option. Or a hard-boiled egg, chopped, or chicken/beef/etc cooked and sliced. A no-protein salad isn’t fulfilling everything you need it to be.
Fresh herbs will skyrocket your salad into utter sublime eating pleasure. I grow chives and green onions on my window sill and add that to my salads. If you buy green onions at the grocery store, save the bottoms and plant them. They’ll grow, I swear! It’s like getting free green onion refills!
Basically, anything I can possibly think would go well in a salad, I put in my salad. Now, for a quick, versatile dressing that I use quite often.
What you need:
a few glugs of olive oil
a few glugs of balsamic vinegar (but like one or two less glugs than the olive oil)
A good mustard, the yellow stuff won’t work for this, maybe one teaspoon?
Herbs of your choice: basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley, etc dried
salt/pepper
garlic, minced
How:
The best way to do this is take a small jar with a lip or a small tupperware container. Put your ingredients in (I have no idea how much of each I use. Fiddle around with it til it looks/tastes right) and tighten the lid. Shake the snot out of it. Open up the jar and swirl your finger around to taste it.
Making it in a container is great because it’s easy to mix and if you have any extra it just goes straight into the fridge.
Enjoy!
Here’s balsamic sauteed asparagus when I decided to be civilized and use a plate.
You know you’re a student (or just lazy) when you eat food straight out of whatever you made it in. Or perhaps it’s just being environmentally friendly because it’s one less dish to wash…
This is the other half of the bunch of asparagus that I used in the quinoa salad. This asparagus is sauteed in a little olive oil with basil, rosemary, and balsamic vinegar. Absolutely delicious!
Quinoa Salad!
Great for lunches, can be made in bulk and is easily altered to suit whatever is in your fridge! I usually use red/brown quinoa but they only had white when I went grocery shopping, so that’s what I had this time around. There is absolutely NO difference in the taste - I just find the colour combo more aesthetically pleasing with dark quinoa. Use whatever veggies you’d like for this recipe; there’s no absolute for ingredients. This recipe gets me about 3 lunches, you can easily just make more quinoa to make more salad.
What you need:
1 cup quinoa
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 - 3/4 zucchini
1/2 bunch of asparagus
1/2 red pepper
1 cup carrots
1 small onion
1 tsp cumin (roughly)
olive oil
lemon juice
salt/pepper to taste
hot sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
feta (optional - the salad tastes amazing without, but I’m obsessed with feta)
How:
According to package instructions, cook quinoa. Meanwhile, chop up all your veggies and throw them in a skillet with a little bit of olive oil. Sautee them until they’re tender and fragrant.
Combine quinoa and veggies in a large bowl. Stir in a few glugs of olive oil, maybe 2 to 3 tbsp lemon juice, cumin, garlic, salt and pepper, hot sauce, and feta (if you’re using it). Easy peasy!
A tip if you’re using this recipe for lunches: Cottage cheese containers (and any other container roughly that size) is a perfect amount of quinoa salad for a lunch. Split up the recipe into tupperware right after making it, letting it cool before you put the containers in the fridge. If you portion it ahead of time, grabbing lunch out of the fridge in the morning takes no time at all!
Homemade Tomato Sauce!
Tonight for dinner I decided to make pasta again. Penne (short pasta) with a nice, bright tasting tomato sauce.This is only one way to make your own tomato sauce.
I made it to serve two, you can alter the ingredients to feed however many you’d like. Takes about 25 minutes.
What you need:
EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil)
1 clove garlic, minced
dried herbs of your choice (I used thyme and rosemary, about 1 tsp of each. Basil, oregano, etc would work too)
salt and pepper to taste
1 shallot (or half a regular cooking onion), minced
1/2 can of tomatoes (either whole or halved)
The juice and zest of 1 lemon
capers (optional if you hate them)
penne or other short grain pasta
1 can solid white tuna in water, drained
How:
Over medium heat, put about 1 tbsp EVOO and the dried herbs in a skillet. Once the herbs become aromatic (a minute or two once the oil heats up) add the garlic and shallot. Stir and let saute for a few minutes. Meanwhile, put a pot of water on for the pasta to boil. Add about half the can of tomatoes. If you’re using whole or halved, you can crush the tomatoes into smaller pieces with a wooden spoon. Turn up to medium-high (depending on how strong your elements are) and let simmer and bubble until the tomatoes break down and the liquid simmers down, 10 - 15 minutes.
Add your pasta to the boiling water and cook until al dente. Strain and set aside. Zest the lemon and set the zest aside. Once the tomatoes have started to look a little more saucy, add the lemon juice and tuna. Combine and let the tuna heat through, maybe 2 minutes or so. Reduce the heat to medium. Add capers (I really like capers so I used like 2 tbsps but use however many you like) and and lemon zest. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir. Toss with the pasta and serve.
Yum! I am going to make my version of this today using blueberries instead of raisins.
Breakfast banana split. Banana with almond butter, raisins and cinnamon. So delicious!
This is Jónsi’s and Alex’s wonderful little Recipe book here to download from their website. It is very beautiful and full of lovely raw food recipes. When you download it you can turn the pages and see their lovely recipes. On their website you will find samples of their music too.
I always buy avocados and use half of them in one recipe but never really know what to do with the other half. This is a great idea for an awesome breakfast!
Looks good and is so much more tasty than something that has been processed in a factory and then stored in a jar for ages. I make raw almond butter . I just soak the nuts for a few hours first rather than cook them. I do not usually put salt in mine but if you want it just add a little salt to taste as the recipe suggests x
Ingredients:
2 cups raw almonds
1/2 teaspoon salt
How to:
- Toss almonds onto ungreased cookie sheet & bake at 350 degrees for 5-10 minutes
- Throw almonds into food processor
- Process those almonds unto they look like butter!
- Enjoy :)
So good…so simple…so healthy!
A big cup of Mean Green Juice from the recipe in Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead,
because this is the yummiest juice ever!
1 apple
2 leaves of kale
2 medium celery stalks, leaves removed
1/3 of a large cucumber
1/2 lemon
a small chunk of ginger
Clever idea! I usually just find a knife but this is good!
when you want a cut up apple to pack in your lunch… cut up an apple and then put a rubber band around it to prevent it from turning brown!
how have I never thought of this?
what?! really!
Some tips on how I love the planet and my wallet at the same time:
Wash out your Ziploc bags: Soap and a sponge, be gentle though. Rinse and hang to dry. I use a clothespin to pin bags to the cord for my blinds in my kitchen. I wash out my Ziploc bags if they’re relatively clean to begin with. If they’re gross, I toss them.
Use food containers as Tupperware: Yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, jarred stuff (like artichokes or sundried tomatoes) all have containers that work great as Tupperware for leftovers or packing lunch for school. Just wash them out. But don’t put plastic containers in the microwave unless you want weird diseases!
Don’t buy salad dressing, pasta sauce, or mayonnaise: If you’ve stocked up on my kitchen essentials list, you have everything you need to make these things. It’s really not as hard or time-consuming as you might think it is, and it is so much cheaper and tastier. Classico pasta sauce is like $6, a can of tomatoes is a dollar. It’s also SO MUCH healthier for you. Have you ever read the ingredients on that shit? It’s creepy.
Don’t buy more than you’ll eat: I get that going to the grocery store once for everything is easier. But chances are, some things will go bad. That’s like tossing money into the garbage. Try to have a plan when grocery shopping, and know how long things will last in the fridge.
Reduce your meat and dairy intake: I know none of you boys (and some girls) want to hear this. But the whole meat and dairy industry has horrible ramifications on the environment. And you don’t really know what’s going into your meat if you buy it at the supermarket. I don’t buy meat usually but dairy (cheese, etc) is always the most expensive thing on my list. If you start by making one dinner a week meat-free, it will help your wallet. And waistline.
Buy your kitchen supplies used: I listed some of the things you can get at Value Village - go there first for kitchen supplies, then Dollarama, then IKEA or whatever.
Also, we’re LAs so loving the Earth is our duty and whatnot!
