Making Love in the Kitchen

One of my favourite things to do in my free time it to take on kitchen projects. This can range from re-filling spice jars, brewing some kombucha, plotting and planning to create the best gluten-free pie crust there ever was, or this little ditty here.

Summer is a time of fun, sweet fun, but as Jen has been enlightening all of us, it also does not need to be a time for consuming poison, gross poison (dressed up as ‘summer favourites’). Hence her breakdown yesterday of the Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cake, or what I am now referring to as the “Toxic Hydrogenated Oil and High Fructose Corn Syrup Cake-Shaped Frozen Food Processing By-Product”. Not for consuming my fair ladies, gents, moms and kiddies. A treat is not a treat if every ingredient in it lends itself to killing you softly. You with me here?

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Oh my love sweet lovers. I can only go so long without sharing some sweet, sweet chocolate love.

I created this gem for the attendees at my Raw Food Power workshop a couple weeks ago. I always have a challenge when I do the same workshops over and over again.

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Carob is a funny thing. I find that people either love it or hate it. I personally love it and find myself defending the poor thing a lot. Meghan is not such a fan of it and whenever I mention the stuff she gives me an “ew” look. I was introduced to carob really early on since my grandmother used to bake with it. Since chocolate kept her up at night, she used carob in its place in a lot of cakes and cookies. I don’t think carob tastes like chocolate, but it is sweet and brown so I suppose it can stand in as chocolate when necessary. I prefer to think of carob as its own unique flavour. I can’t really describe it -malty, molasses, sweet with a little bitterness at the same time. Something along those lines. I do appreciate that it is naturally sweet on its own and is so versatile. It can be added to smoothies, baked goods, and even savoury dishes to balance out the flavour and add a certain complexity.

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Guest post by Marie Poulin

I first met Meghan in the fall of 2009. In the summer, I had been looking for vegetarian cooking classes as a birthday gift idea, and I landed on Meghan’s website. Back then it was a little more “homemade”, and I had difficulty finding what I was looking for. I didn’t have the patience to dig (I am a web designer after all), so I left her site, and ended up going with wine tasting classes instead.

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I know, I know… you’ve seen this pic before because you never miss a day of my blog. Well you know what, I’m over it! Hopefully tomorrow I can share with you what’s been vampiring my time. In the meantime so as not to leave you blogless today, I thought I’d share with you a little something I wrote for Metro News last week. They wanted a little something on Superfoods and whether they’re really as jazzed up as the health mags would make us think. So I decided to put together my list of top five fave superfoods. Now if this is old hat to you, it might be a great way to introduce some superfood love to the skeptics in your life. I know we all have some!

Enjoy!!!

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I swear to my mismatched stripey socks that if I see another root vegetable recipe or some creative concoction of squash I am going to throw my spatula out the window and light my aprons on fire. I done with winter cooking. Done I say. DONE! Are you listening???

It is time to bring in some spring. I am ready for the first harvests. I want some new kale, I want some wild leeks, I want Spring earth mother lovers. Spring.

This is where my man would look at me and say, “Why stress over what you can’t change”. Or even more annoying, when I am pouting like a school girl who’s knee highs won’t stay up, he’ll say “Use this as an exercise”. Well I won’t goodness darnnit. I won’t.

So to soothe my soul because the boob-like shape of buttrnut squash no longer amuses me the way it did when it was fresh and new back in the fall, I decided to make one last ditch ever to find some love in my heart for this cancer fighting, immune boosting, fibre-tastic fruit that everyone thinks is a vegetable and turn it into something we all know and love.

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I know, I know… you want to get your sticky fingers all over my nuts. How could I blame you really. They are the best tasting nuts ever. The very best. What’s super cool about this is that you don’t even need to be a nut lover to enjoy this candied delight. Nut allergies in your homestead? Do this with a mix of seeds. Same, same lovers. Same, same.

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What is lucuma? Well, in short it is the newest ‘superfood’ to enter my world. It is sweet and delicious. It looks like an avocado sort of. You can get it in dried powdered form from your fave superfood supplier (soon to be me, when that bit of my website is up and running). But really, what is this strange fruit?

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If you didn’t love me before, these ‘things’, will win you over. I don’t really know what to call them because they aren’t really chocolate. What they are really is amazing. Really amazing. They have all my fave things including vanilla bean and the ever so decadent cocoa butter. See, what’s confusing here is that the vanilla bean is what gave them that brown on top but in factory farmed confectionery- vanilla is always shown as a ‘white’ flavour. Why is that when the bean is so clearly black as night?

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Everyone loves home baked cookies. And they really don’t take much time at all.
You mix the dry.
Chop a little chocolate. This was Green and Blacks dark chocolate with crystallized ginger in it.
Throw a couple blobs of cookie dough on a parchment lined cookie sheet.
And just like that, fresh home baked cookies are served.

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For those of your embarking on the 21 Days To Health program this Saturday with me, you have noticed that little pesky change being recommended on Day 15, where we say Nope To The Scary White Powder. You might be thinking that no white flour and no white sugar means no fun sweet treats in the kitchen. Let these brownies be exhibit A. And let this be your persuasion:

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If you are ever going to indulge in sweet treats, best time is of course during the holidays when you are either so stressed out that you NEED it, or you are having so much fun that you are kind enough to yourself to enjoy it guilt free.

Here are my top five favourite dessert creations.

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Aside from my father, who’s throat has the potential to close allergic reaction style at the mere sight of a banana, is there anyone who doesn’t love a good loaf of BB?

While I was travelling in Africa six or seven lifetimes ago and staying with my friend Matt, we had this brain wave to make some banana bread. Within 26 seconds we were in the back of a taxi, going to a local ‘supermarket’ to find all we needed to make the perfect banana bread.

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Two months until the first St. Lucia retreat. Don’t be left out in the cold! And don’t miss this week’s special holiday Vitamix offer. We all know that famous quote by Hippocrates right? “Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food”? Of course. And of course it’s true. What if we look [...]

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You can still have your goodies while on a low glycemic lifestyle. Yes you can.
See, when we want to keep things low on the glycemic scale, we can’t just look at the individual food but also how it is being combined. We can combine higher glycemic index foods, like honey for example, with foods that are right in healthy fats, protein and fibre. This means that even though honey may be high, all the other things being partnered up with it could be low, and thus bringing down the whole load of the treat, making it a-okay!

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