Tag Archives: hemp

The Solar Salad

This salad came up after googling for a new dressing and feeling inspired by the apricot, ginger orange one. It turned out so deliciously orange that my hands unconsciously started weaving around the colors of the Sun: more orange, more red and yellow.

This is how I started peeling carrots and squash, adding some beautiful local tomatoes, cauliflower rice, red peppers and sweet corn. I balanced everything with fresh lettuce leaves and sprinkled sesame and hemp seeds.
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If you want to save the looks of this salad, keep some carrot slices away from the dressing and add it right before serving (something that I haven’t done here 🙂 Same for the lettuce! Everything gets super juicy with the apricots

list of ingredients

  • carrot & squash tagliatelle
  • cauliflower rice
  • tomatoes
  • red peppers
  • sweet corn
  • olive oil
  • orange juice
  • apricots
  • fresh ginger
  • seeds (hemp, sesame, sunflower, etc)

Vegan Raita

Is hard to hold back the temptation of posting one more Indian inspired recipe 🙂 Hope you’ll like it as much as I do! This time we have a salad, the traditional Raita which is basically a curd dish with cucumbers and tomatoes and sometimes a bit of sugar. Not this case :p

Initially I thought about making a simple tahini dressing that would soak the veggies, but then other little add-ons came in mind. And the most important one is the sweet smoked paprika flavor. So eventually I got to a recipe that looks like this:

  • small chopped tomatoes & cucumbers
  • tagliatelle style squash (or zucchini)
  • tahini based dressing with smoked paprika, ground cumin & 3 colors’ pepper
  • lemon juice & salt

optional:

  • dried yeast flakes in the dressing
  • sunflower & hemp seeds

Depending on the amount of water you use for the dressing and the juiciness of the tomatoes, you can have it soupy-ish or thicker, perhaps more suitable for a saturday night salad snack.

Energy Drink

There’s one drink that can make your mornings resemble the kind of treat you’d get in a fancy cafe. Except it doesn’t have any caffeine or milk. Yet everybody flips out as if they were drinking cappuccino or milkshake. I think that’s why I’ve ended up calling it energy drink.

To begin with, you have to prepare the nut milk – it can be made from almonds, walnuts, cashews and so on. Use sesame seeds as one third of the whole nut quantity, so you can add up to the calcium intake for the day. After soaking the nuts, rinse them well and drop them into the blender with fresh water. When they start turning into a watery cream, strain it by pouring the entire composition through a nut milk bag. If necessary, fold in more water.  You’ll be left with the milk and the leftover pulp, suitable to use in further deserts. Why not prepare 1-1,5l of nut milk, store it in the fridge and have it at your disposal over the next few days?

Once you get the milk done, start adding into the blender one or more of the following ingredients:

  • bananas
  • dates/ raisins/ figs or honey
  • coconut cream
  • rose water / orange blossom water
  • fruits tea or masala chai
  • carob / cacao
  • ground cinnamon / vanilla/ cloves, etc
  • any kind of berries (fresh or frozen) – in this case better not mix it with banana or dried fruits
  • ground flax or hemp seeds

You’ll get a pretty thick consistency, but you can always dilute it to your taste.

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With this kind of quantity you’ll enjoy full energy until lunchtime or even later!

Go Red with Beets!

Beets are just amazing! I remember that during my childhood it was the only vegetable I use to consider it rather awkward. Maybe because most of the times we were having it roasted and served with grated horse radish?

Anyhow, since I’ve discovered beets are to be consumed raw, it doesn’t seem I’ll get bored of them anytime soon. I love to turn it into spirals and marinate it in soya sauce, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and thyme, like Cynthia taught me to do it at the beginning of my path. Adding sesame or hemp seeds at the end creates a pretty nice effect!

 

You can leave the beets to marinate overnight.

One of the things you should have in mind when preparing beets is that there’s no way back from red! Once you add another vegetable – either in the marinade or in the mixing – it will sooner or later become red. So instead of throwing everything into the beets salad, better leave the rest of the vegetables or greens for a side dish. Or, if you want to create a reddish coloring, choose something like cauliflower or sprouts and mix it right before serving .

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list of ingredients

  • beetroot (grated or spiraled)
  • olive oil
  • soya sauce
  • lemon juice
  • dry thyme
  • crushed garlic
  • sesame/ hemp seeds