Who knew raw chocolate was so easy to make?!

On Friday night, as I waited to collect Mountain Man from the train station, I had some time to kill so decided to try my hand at making raw chocolates.  I have never made them before, but always planned to.

I'm told that the bag of very expensive raw cacao butter in the baking cupboard has been there for 2 years.  I made lip balm, once...and then just kept meaning to make chocolate.  Another nutritional therapist friend of mine beat me to it last week and made her own, posting the recipe on facebook and inspiring me to give it a go (when I saw how simple it was).  So, I made some chocolates.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If you're wondering why you'd bother making chocolate, when there are plenty of options in the shops, home made raw chocolate is different.  For a start, there's no soya or milk powder or other weird fillers in chocolate you make yourself (why is soya used in chocolate?)  Secondly, you can put whatever you want into them and have fun experimenting.  Thirdly, raw cacao is super rich in health giving nutrients as it has not been heated to the point where nutrients are damaged.  So those promises of chocolate being full of mood boosting chemicals, antioxidants, healthy fats and minerals are true, but more true with raw chocolate than the highly processed varieties we tend to see in the shops.

I have no doubt that what I made was pretty basic and master chocolatiers would laugh at my efforts, there are all sorts of clever things you can do to make it even more impressive.  However, as a first attempt, I'm pretty chuffed and they taste mighty fine if I do say so myself!

Ingredients:

60g raw cacao butter

60g raw cacao powder

40g coconut sugar, milled to a fine powder in a nut or coffee mill

Filling - I used

2 dsp pumpkin seeds, toasted and milled

3 dsp Super Life breakfast topping, also milled

To make:

Melt cacao butter in a glass bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (make sure the bowl doesn't sit in the water)

Once melted, add in the cacao powder & sugar

Mix thoroughly, then add whatever filling you fancy and keep mixing until it's smooth and gorgeous

Pour the mix into silicone sweet/chocolate moulds, or as I did onto a baking sheet (because I completely underestimated how many moulds I'd need)

Put the moulds into the fridge and ignore for at least an hour

Eat and rejoice at how good raw chocolate tastes.  YUM!

I Love Sprouts!

Yes, I do love sprouts - not brussels sprouts particularly (or at all in my case) but the kind of sprouts that you can grow yourself and at this time of year add buckets of nourishment to your meals, when locally grown fresh green veggies may be a little hard to get.

I brought a little bag of seeds for sprouting with me all the way from Ireland (mad I know) and last week decided it was time to get sprouting.  We won't have any more farmers' markets on Drottningtorget, so no more local organic veggies, SOB!  I figured I had better get cracking on my own supply...

In the bag is a mix of organic radish, broccoli, alfalfa & quinoa seeds.  This is a particularly tasty mix; the resulting sprouts are quite delicate and work really well in salads or added last minute to a stir fry.  That particular mix is also incredibly rich in nutrients, some of which have growing evidence to support a theory that they can fight or protect against cancer, support immune health are antibacterial and can help the liver to detoxify.  They're also good sources of protein, so are quite filling.  Impressive!

There is another advantage to sprouted seeds, beans and even nuts.  Naturally, all of these things contain enzyme inhibitors, which Mother Nature devised as a way to protect the bean, seed or nut from sprouting in the wrong place or at the wrong time and keeps them fresher for longer.  Enzyme inhibitors also make them hard to digest, but by sprouting them the enzyme inhibitors are deactivated, so you can unlock all the goodness and digest them easily.  Even more impressive is that sprouts increase in protein and decrease in carbohydrate as the seed uses the carbohydrate energy stored inside to grow. 

I have a personal preference for mung beans and lentils, as they're bigger and crunchier and are almost a meal in themselves.  They make great snacks if you're pushed for time and want some real 'fast food'. You can sprout almost anything, apart from kidney beans, which can be toxic when sprouted.  Once it's organic you can assume it hasn't been heat treated and should sprout for you.  You don't have to buy special bags of seeds or beans for sprouting, a bag from the supermarket or health shop will do.

Here's what you do:
Find a jar and a piece of muslin that will cover the top, plus an elastic band
OR
Buy a sprouter - either the jam jar kind or the variety with different levels for more sprouts!  A. Vogel do a lovely range of different styles and sizes.  I have their glass germinator and it has a handy stand on the lid to make draining much easier

• Put a few dessert spoons of the seeds/beans into the jar and soak overnight.
• Drain off the water the next day and cover the jar with muslin, or a lid & leave on the windowsill all day.
• When you get home from work, sometime before you go to bed, rinse the seeds/beans - so fill the jar with water or just run the tap over the trays you have bought and then drain off. 
• Rinse your seeds/beans twice a day, morning and evening, until they start to sprout.  Rinsing is important as it prevents the sprouts from getting musty and mouldy.
• Once they've sprouted, they're ready to eat.  You can give them a day or two to grow a bit more, whatever your preference is.
• Keep them in the fridge for a few days, but the sooner you eat them the more nutritious they will be.

 

Yesterday I made a rather delicious sourdough ham, cheese, chilli and mustard toastie.  To balance out the nutrition and make it a bit healthier, I added a salad of rocket, sprouts, chopped fennel bulb and sliced carrot.  Fantastic for digestive function and took about a minute to make.  Sprouting seeds and beans might sound like a lot of work and only for die-hard hippie types, but this is the easiest thing to do and notches up your nutrient intake like nothing else. 

If you'd like to give this a go and have any questions, just post a comment below and I'll do my best to answer.  Happy Sprouting!

Mojito for Dinner Anyone?

When we moved into our new apartment, Mountain Man made me a promise (or threat, depending how you look at it).  'If you don't cook from every single one of those cookbooks while we're here I'm burning them'.  Oh...oops.

The poor man carried them from our house in Cork into a van and then from the same van in Sweden into an apartment in Malmö and then, into and out of another van and up 2 flights of stairs into our new-new apartment.  In my defence, I gave away at least half of them before we left Cork and I have read through lots of them.  And fondled their pages, particularly the pretty ribbons that some of them have, but I can't say I have cooked that many dishes from them.  Point taken. 

Yesterday I pulled out one of my more recent purchases, Donal Skehan's Good Mood Food and selected 3 recipes I would cook from it this week.  The first appealed because it reminded me of the cocktails we had on our wedding day just over a year ago - sigh.  Lime & Mint Mojito Chicken.

What a gorgeous recipe and so easy to make.  Basically, you marinade 4 chicken breasts (butterflied for faster cooking) in the juice of two limes, 2 cloves of garlic finely chopped (Donal said 1, but I like garlic) a handful of mint finely chopped and 5 tablespoons of Rum.  Bung everything in a ziploc bag and put in the fridge for the day.  When you get home from work (or in my case when I retired from working on my laptop at the dining table) put on some rice or cous cous and fry up the chicken breasts and more lime quarters.  The chicken developes a lovely caramely crust and the limes are turned into sweet juicy nuggets of gorgeousness. 

 

Serve with rice or cous cous or maybe some herby quinoa (I wasn't entirely happy with the rice I made, it was a bit boring) and a side salad.  Really quick and particularly delicious, even for plain old chicken breasts!  It is that simple.  Cooking takes, oh...about 10 minutes, so total prep time is as long as it takes to cook your rice/cous cous/quinoa and um...make a mojito to sip on at the hob.  Tough work this cooking business.