Chocolate Cake #2

I made another chocolate cake! This one is from the ebook Raw on $10 a Day (or Less!). I prefer this one to Ani Phyo's cake because it tasted more like a cooked chocolate cake. I plan to contact Lisa to see if can share the whole recipe with you.

The batter consists of soaked dates, buckwheat groats, ground flax, banana, salt, vanilla, olive oil, agave, and cacao powder. The batter smelled and looked like chocolate cake batter.

The frosting is the same one I used from Ani Phyo's dessert book because it rocked: Medjool dates, agave, avocado, cocoa powder, and sea salt.

It's a five layer cake. Mine doesn't look exactly like Lisa's picture in her book. My cake layers were flatter than hers. But it was worthy of making a second time, and sharing with other people :-). Tasty stuff, good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner :-).

I'm about to make an easy Strawberry Fruit Cobbler from Sweet Gratitude now!

Love,
Althea

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Chocolate Cake #2

Blueberry Bread

This blueberry bread is an easy one from Alissa Cohen's Living on Live Food. All it is wheat berries, dates, and blueberries.

Recipe

2 cups sprouted wheat berries

1/2 cup soaked and pitted dates

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries.

Blend the wheat berries and dates in a food processor. Put into a bowl. Fold in the blueberries.

Shape into a loaf and dehydrate fro 16-24 hours. Turn the loaf after 8-10 hours.

I would add some agave, or another liquid sweetener to the bread. Maybe it needed a pinch of salt. Salt enhances the sweet flavor in baked and raw goods. I would make it again, but change it around a little bit. My oldest son loved it though.

Love,

Althea

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Blueberry Bread

Carrot Raisin Bread

This bread is from Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen. It came out a little dry, but when I topped it with the Cream Cheese Frosting I'd used on my Carrot Cake, it worked. Me, Rom, and Raymond ate it all it up. Rom even asked if there was more left. That's always a good sign.

Carrot Raisin Bread
2 cups sprouted wheat berries
1/2 c. dates, soaked and pitted
1/10 teaspoon nutmeg
1/10 teaspoon cinnamon
1 c. shredded carrots
1/2 c. raisins, soaked for 1/2 hour

In a food processor (FP) blend the wheatberries and dates until smooth. Add the nutmeg and cinnamon and blend again. Remove "dough" from the FP and place in a bowl. Add in the carrots and raisins. Fold them in until well-mixed. Form the dough into a round loaf on the mesh dehydrator screen for 16-24 hours. Turn over after 8-10 hours.

I left mine in for 24 hours. Since the bread was a tad dry, I'll leave it in 16-18 hours next time.

Cream Cheese Frosting
From Have Your Cake and Eat it Too! by Monique Bastien.
2 cups cashews, soaked
Juice of one large lemon
1/4 cup agave or raw honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2-4 tablespoons water, orange juice, or another juice
1 tablespoon coconut butter (optional)
Blend all ingredients in an food processor. Add a little water at a time until smooth.

Love,
Althea ◦

Carrot Raisin Bread

BLT Raw Vegan Style

I have been aching to make Chef Russell James' Buckwheat Bread for the past nine months. I finally made it yesterday. It was worth the wait. Chef Russell's recipe can be found at his website: http://therawchef.com/.

Sign up for his newsletter, and you will receive his Top 5 recipes for free. This is one of the recipes.

This bread is so light, so fluffy, that I forgot it was a "raw" bread. It just tastes like bread. The cooked kind. The lightness is what trips me out.

Let's talk about the mushrooms, AKA "the bacon" in the BLT (my name for it, not his). Marinate portabello mushrooms for a few hours or overnight in an olive oil & tamari marinade. Dehydrate overnight. I put Veganaise on the bread, added lettuce, tomato, and cilantro, and BAM: a raw vegan BLT.

I have a ranch dressing that I think will go well with this sandwich. The bread "batter" took some chopping, cutting, and food processing. But I have a lot of bread left to eat. It'll be sandwiches for days in my house.

I'm raving. This stuff is something you make to impress your friends who think raw vegans only eat lettuce. 10 stars for sure. Make this and tell me what you think afterward!

Love,
Althea ◦

BLT Raw Vegan Style

Carrot Cake and Green Drinks

Carrot Cake

This is the cake I made a few days ago. I adapted it from Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen.

Cake
7 carrots
1 cup walnuts (dry)
1 cup dates, pitted and soaked (I used Medjool)
3/4 cup raisins, soaked
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cardamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
pinch sea salt
1-2 tablespoons agave

Blend carrots in a food processor (FP) until ground. Set aside in a large bowl.
Blend the walnuts until find in FP. Place in bowl with carrots.
Blend the dates until smooth. Add the spices and agave into the FP and blend well.
Add the carrots and dates back into the FP and blend until smooth.
Place batter into a bowl, and add the raisins. Mix well.
Place entire batter into a pie pan and a cake pan. ( I used an 8x8 square pan.)

Cream Cheese Frosting

This is from Have Your Cake and Eat it Too! by Monique Bastien.

2 cups cashews, soaked

Juice of one large lemon

1/4 cup agave or raw honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2-4 tablespoons water, orange juice, or another juice

1 tablespoon coconut butter (optional)

Blend all ingredients in an food processor. Add a little water at a time until smooth.

Here are two green drinks I made recently :

The Kitchen Sink Green Juice (on the right)

2 apples

4 celery stalks

cilantro

kale

parsley

1/2 lemon, peeled

Juice them all together. I call it kitchen sink juice because I used all the greens I had at the time.

Zing Smoothie

2 oranges, juiced

2 apples

1/2 a lemon or a lime

small piece of ginger

handful of parsley

Blend the orange juice and the other ingredients in blender. If it needs more liquid, add more juice instead of water. Enjoy!

Love,

Althea

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Carrot Cake and Green Drinks

Chocolate Cake and Citrus Dressing

Ganache Fudge Cake

I'm keeping it simple these days. I had a revelation last night. I want to be a gourmet raw food chef + inspirational speaker + author. There is nothing wrong with that ambition. Currently, I am a wife, mom to two sons, a caretaker, a yoga teacher, professional intuitive, blogger, author, cook/cleaner/laundrywoman/ chauffeur/teacher/grocery shopper, etc., etc.

See where I'm going with this?

I am busier than I ever thought I would be. And my Candida is kicking my tail up and down the eastern seaboard. Anytime I even bite into cooked food, I feel my energy decrease and my mood shifts.

I have not given up on blogging through Everyday Raw and Light Eating for Survival. But my shift has got to be on simple raw food that heals me. I can make super impressive gourmet food later. Right now, I'm making simple, tasty raw food which holds my interest.

Recently, I adapted a recipe from Ani's Raw Food Desserts. Ani's Raspberry Ganache Fudge Cake has, well, raspberries :-). I don't care for raspberries with chocolate. I left them out.

The "cake" is walnuts, carob powder, sea salt, and Medjool dates mixed together in a food processor.

Ganache Fudge Cake

The frosting was wicked good. It's Medjool dates, agave, avocado, cocoa powder, and sea salt. That could be a pudding. Jona would only eat the frosting. The rest of us ate the cake. The carob gave it a malty feel. I would absolutely make it again.

Creamy Citrus Dressing

This is from Raw Food Real World. It's a blend of avocado, orange juice, lime juice, cilantro, green onion, shallot, sea salt, olive oil, and black pepper. The recipe calls for jalapeno pepper, but I left it out. This dressing lasted me a week, and it was very simple to prepare.

Coming up, I made an easy carrot cake that took less than a half-hour to make :-).

love,
Althea

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Chocolate Cake and Citrus Dressing

Step Nine in the Raw Vegan Hero's Journey

9. I practice juice and smoothie fasting
Inspired by the mythical Hero’s Journey first compiled in The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (photos are of famous, recognizable characters on their own journeys).

Tony Stark a.k.a Iron Man drinking a green smoothie

If you're not including smoothies and juices, especially green smoothies and juices, in your raw vegan diet, you are missing a large component.

-From The Wheatgrass Book by Ann Wigmore: Chlorophyll is the blood of the plant...it is condensed solar energy. Chlorophyll increases the function of the heart, affects the vascular system, the intestines, the uterus and the lungs. It is a tonic which, considering its stimulating properties, cannot be compared with any other.

-From Your Right to Be Beautiful by Tonya Zavasta: Our blood is very similar to green juice. The main difference between a molecule of chlorophyll in green juice and a molecule of hemoglobin in the blood is the central atom. Hemoglobin, the protein that makes our blood red, has iron as its central atom. Chlorophyll, the protein that makes plants green, has magnesium at its center.

-From Heal Thyself by Queen Afua: Chlorophyll detoxes and rejuvenates tissues, cells, blood, arteries, and nerves. The more we consume chlorophyll, in the form of eating green leaves like salad and herbs as well as green veggie juices and wheatgrass, the healthier our skin, hair, and bones, the purer our thoughts, and the more harmonious and healthy our relationships will be. Chlorophyll consumption brings heaven on earth...I would go so far as to say that if a community, a country, or even the world consumes chlorophyll consistently, we would see an end to world famine, dis-ease and war.

People ask me all the time, "How do I get started in raw food?" My answer is, "Add green smoothies and juices to your diet."

Get Green Smoothie Revolution by Victoria Boutenko (www.rawfamily.com) and any book on juicing.

What's the difference between the two?

Smoothies have fiber. All you are doing is blending fruits and vegetables and water, retaining the fiber in them. That fiber has to be extracted by your digestive system, which takes time. Juicing extracts fiber from the fruits and veggies. The digestive transit time is much faster than smoothies. In my opinion, one is not better than the other. They are simply different. (Anyone can feel free to comment about this.)

The most successful fast I did was fourteen days, from March 31 to April 13, 2008. The first seven days I did both smoothies and juices. The last seven days, I only did juice. To read about it, click here: Juicing. Scroll down 6 posts, and Days 13-14: Success! will be there. Scroll down to Inspiration: Terilynn. That is the beginning of the journey.


If you have never fasted before, start for one day. Then perhaps a three-day weekend. Regardless, you need to prepare your body for a fast. Cut down, or eliminate, acid-forming foods: processed foods, dairy, meat, sodas, etc. Eat more salads, and fresh fruits and veggies. You are making your body more alkaline. Trust me, if you go from eating french fries on Thursday to fasting on Friday, you will be hungry, cranky, headachy, and bitchy. Do yourself a favor and ease into a fast. Read as much as you can before you start one.

You will experience emotional breakthroughs you don't expect. When you stop eating, clarity comes rushing in. The mental, physical, and emotional clarity will knock you over.

Relating this to the mythical Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey, the best time to fast is when you are "in the belly of the beast." This is when you are the middle of some crap that feels like it's going to kill you. You can't see straight. Your life, or emotions, are dark. You've had it.

Movie examples of characters trapped in "the belly of the beast":
-Star Wars (the first one): Luke, Han Solo, and Princess Lea are trapped in the garbage section of The Death Star. The walls are closing in on them, literally. C3PO and R2D2 have to stop the walls remotely. The three leads are not physically strong enough to stop the walls from crushing them. Death is imminent. The robots stop the walls just in time.

-Finding Nemo: Marlin and Dory are inside a whale. It's dark. They feel trapped. Marlin believes all is lost. He will never be able to rescue his son. Dory, who also happens to "speak whale :-)", says, "if you promised your son that nothing would ever happen to him, then that's not realistic." Marlin awakens, determined to find Nemo.

-Toy Story: Woody and Buzz are trapped at Sid's house. Woody is stuck in a milk crate. Buzz is strapped to a rocket. Sid plans to explode Buzz the next morning. Their owner, Andy, is moving to a new house that same morning. It appears the toys will never see their owner again. All is lost. But Sid's mutant toys come to the rescue.

In all three examples, the protagonists are either about to die, literally or metaphorically. That is the belly of the beast. What follows is "resurrection." (The last three steps in this twelve step series reflects this truism. Remember, the Hero's Journey is a metaphor for life.)

Fasting will certainly resurrect you. It will heal your pain, and release energy you thought you had lost. It's a critical part of your raw journey. Be gentle, and ease into it when you feel you are ready.

Love,
Althea ◦

Step Nine in the Raw Vegan Hero's Journey