Guilt Free Ice-Cream

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  If you've sworn off something for lent, maybe today is the day you allow yourself a treat.  This is a great option, delicious but really not particularly guilt inducing ;-)

 Over Christmas, Mountain Man and I visited a friend and I had the rare opportunity to sit and chat while someone else cooked.  We were fed homemade bhajis to keep us (or me, really) calm, while the most amazing vegan Indian spread was prepared.  I was in heaven.

I did help with one thing, which was to make some ice-cream.  Possibly the easiest thing on the planet to make, basically this is a mix of cashew nuts, dates for sweetness, water and cacao nibs or dark chocolate to make the mix deliciously chocolatey.  Our host directed me, as I hadn't made it before and within about 10 minutes, it was ready to go into the freezer.  

Cashew nuts are a fantastic alternative when you don't want to use cream or milk.  Simply blitzed in a blender with water they make a gorgeous creamy sauce, brilliant for lasagne or in this case, ice-cream!  Nutrient wise, they're high in protein and energy rich, so a small amount is quite filling.  They're also good sources of Magnesium, Manganese and Iron as well as Vitamin K.

Recently, I decided to make two versions, one as a plain vanilla and the other as chocolate chip.  They start the same way and chocolate chips are added at the end.  You could add cocoa powder for a really chocolatey version, which, as I type, sounds really good! 

So, to make the ice-cream:

• Put a cup of raw cashew nuts into your blender.
• Add 5 soft pitted dates, 1/2 a cup of filtered water and 1 tsp of vanilla extract.
• Turn on the blender and blitz everything.  Stop occasionally to scrape everything down the sides of the blender and repeat until the mix is really smooth.  It can take a while, as the nuts can be a bit grainy so keep at it.
• Once it's super smooth, pour the mix into a container for freezing.  
• If you want to make it chocolate chip, add a handful of dark chocolate to the blender and blitz for 30 seconds so the chocolate is still in small chunks.
• For super chocolatey gorgeousness, add 2 tbsp of cocoa powder and a handful of dark chocolate and blitz well.  
• If you have an ice-cream maker you can use that.  I don't, so I took the container out of the freezer every hour and gave it a stir.  This stops it from turning icy.

 

Serve on it's own, with some melted dark chocolate poured over or, as I did recently, a shot of Baileys  (Obviously, this will not be vegan, but it is yum!)

Enjoy.

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 Coffee, But it Doesn't Love Me

I really like coffee.  It's a relatively new addiction.  I blame an old boyfriend of mine, who made a delicious creamy latte for me once when I was horribly hungover.  I didn't know coffee could taste the way it smells.  I had only ever experienced nasty instant or flat, dull filter coffee and I just didn't see the point.  I became hooked on one lovely, creamy, devilishly good coffee a day about 4 years ago.  I can go without.  I don't turn into an antichrist.  I have convinced myself I don't get raging headaches.  I certainly do miss it if I don't have it.  I miss the ceremony, the time it takes to make it, the luscious texture, the smell as the coffee brews.  Ahhhh....coffee...

I've decided to give it up though.  Why?  Surely one cup a day is ok.  It is, yes...I suppose, but I have noticed that I can get a bit mental if I don't have my one cup a day.  Not the usual coffee 'cold turkey', but definitely a bit touched.  I've noticed too that my energy levels are not what they used to be and my very strong and sturdy digestive system is struggling a bit.  For a mid morning snack, I used to have a herbal tea and some nuts, or maybe an oatcake with some almond butter.  Coffee has completely displaced that, so the healthy snacks have diminished and coffee has taken over.  Not good.

There is a lot of mixed press about coffee.  In a nutshell, my opinion on it is that one coffee a day, made with organic beans is probably no big deal.  However, coffee does interfere with the absorption of various nutrients, so it's probably better to drink coffee away from food for that reason.  It also suppresses stomach acid, which might sound good if you suffer from reflux, but stomach acid is really important for digestion and protection from weird bacteria and parasites.  Hmmmm....  Infuriatingly, coffee also dramatically raises adrenaline and blood sugar levels.  So, if you drink coffee on an empty stomach, it can really make any problems you might have with low energy, weight gain & insulin resistance much worse.  That's all before you get into the kind of milk in the latte.  Dairy linked with cancer and bone problems (yes, really) Soya connected with hormone problems and cancer (again) Other milks just don't cut it for me...  For these reasons, and more, there doesn't seem to be a good time or way to drink coffee.  Being a nutritional therapist, I know all of this in rather a lot of detail.

Sometimes knowledge is an annoying thing.

When we moved into our new apartment in Malmö, I realised the kitchen hob was induction, which meant my aluminium espresso pot wouldn't work (there's another problem - aluminium!).  I've been using a camping stove since then, to make the espresso I need for my daily latte.  Seem desperate?  I could have bought a special espresso pot that would work on the hob, but I didn't, because I keep toying with the idea of giving up and it would be a bit daft to buy a new kitchen gadget that I won't use, right?

To further slow down the removal of coffee from my world, I've discovered that coffee in Sweden is bloody gorgeous and meeting for 'fika' here is the social equivalent of a quick pint in the local pub.  Opting out of coffee could have dastardly effects on my brand new social life here!

I've made the decision though.  I'm giving it up.  I started my new coffee free life on Saturday the 1st of December and yesterday put away the espresso pot and camping stove.  Right now I am sipping on a cup of 'Relax' tea from Pukka and nibbling on some home made raw chocolate treats.  Gorgeous calming, soothing herbs in the tea and nourishing goodness in the raw choc treats.  No real cravings for coffee, though I have had some rotten headaches...  I do miss the ceremony, but I'll just have to find ceremony elsewhere.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Decadence on a Monday

A jar of molasses does not travel well on it’s side. 

I know this now, but when I left Cork and packed it on it’s side, in my plastic box of baking ingredients, I didn’t.  

This was the result.  A gift really…on cleaning up the mess I discovered that quite a few packets of dried fruit were out of date and thankfully chucking them out saved me from cleaning molasses off their packets.  Narrow escape.  That task complete, I was inspired me to make something sweet.

I borrowed the recipe from Susan Jane White, a nutritionist in Ireland who creates the yummiest food, always keeping in mind food intolerances and sugar levels.  So the below recipe is a version of her Raw Cacao Brownies but doctored a bit, as I didn’t have everything specified in my dwindling box of goodies.  These are dead easy to make and full of nutrients – the nuts provide oodles of B Vitamins, Vitamin E, Calcium, Magnesium, Manganese, Iron, fiber & essential fats as well as tummy filling protein.  There's buckets of stress busting magnesium in the cacao powder and a lovely balance of electrolytes from the salt.  One of the beauties of this treat is that it doesn't have lots of refined flour, processed sugar and weird flavourings and preservatives as so many shop bought treats do.  As well as that, it is fit to bursting with goodness, usually removed from the raw ingredients used in chocolate or sweet offering in the shops.  A decadent treat that is actually good for you, wow!

What you’ll need:

½ cup of walnuts

½ cup of hazlenuts

Pinch of Himalayan Crystal Salt

2 tbsp maple syrup

1 dsp agave syrup

5 dates (soaked in water as they weren’t all that sticky)

4 tbsp raw cacao powder

1 tbsp normal unalkalised cocoa powder

50g or so of dark chocolate

Put everything except the dark chocolate in a blender or food processor and blitz until it starts to come together.  Susan Jane suggests you stop blitzing as soon as it starts to make a ball, otherwise you’ll overdo it.  I had to add the agave syrup, as it wasn’t coming together at all.  Perhaps due to my dates not being super sticky, so start without the agave and see how you get on.

Once the mix has come together, remove small lumps of the mix and roll into ping-pong sized balls between your hands.  You will get a bit messy, but you also get to lick your hands clean, so it’s worth it.

Poke a little hole in each ball and smoosh it together if it starts to fall apart.

Once that’s done melt the chocolate over a simmering bowl of water.  Once melted, put a small dollop of chocolate into each ball.  Susan Jane added probiotic yoghurt to the chocolate, but Mountain Man had finished off the yoghurt with breakfast, so I figured dark chocolate on it’s own would suffice.  Yum, it did…

If you have a little chocolate left over, as I did and some strawberries in the fridge, I’d suggest dipping the strawberries into the chocolate.  It would be a shame to waste it after all!