Kombucha Starter Kit

Our New Zealand online store is now open!

Kombucha Starter Kits are now on sale. This ancient health tonic is so easy and inexpensive to make, but you need to find a kombucha culture to get started. Nearly everyone who’s bought one from me has told me that it’s very hard to find them. So, with that as my inspiration, I’ve opened this store. Currently the Kombucha cultures can only be shipped within New Zealand.

These Kombucha SCOBYs (as the kombucha culture is called) are grown in organic green tea and organic, fair-trade sugar. So if you want to start making your own tasty and healthy kombucha tea, visit the store and grab one now.

I’ll be adding more fermented food starter kits soon, including kefir and water kefir grains, as well as organically grown herbs dried at low temperatures to keep all the enzymes and nutrients intact. I also have plans to add heirloom varieties of seeds we have grown organically for those of you who want to save money and get superior taste and nutrition by growing your own (highly recommended if you’re interested in eating a healthier diet).

If you want to be notified when new products have been added to the store, the best way is to sign up to the New Products announcement list by filling out the form below. Be sure to click the ‘New Products’ checkbox, and you may want to tick the ‘Special Offers’ checkbox as well to receive notification of special sales and discounts.

Raw Garden Vegetable Soup

Since I haven’t gotten around to making any raw soups yet, I thought I’d go in search of a video recipe, and I found a good one. Garden Vegetable Soup, by Jennifer Cornbleet. It looks and sounds delicious. I actually have enough of the ingredients to try one myself tomorrow. They are not so different than a green smoothie, except in the seasonings. Jennifer talks about the 6 basic components of a raw soup in the video, I love the way she breaks it down so simply, it gives me a much better foundation to work from when I create my own. I’m really good at creating delicious cooked soups, but raw soups seemed a bit daunting. Not any more

So here’s a rough transcript of the video, which is further down the page:

Garden Vegetable Soups are a great way to get more greens and vegetables in your diet. Lots of great soup recipes in her book, Raw Food Made Easy For 1 or 2 People .

There’s 6 basic components that go into any great tasting blended raw vegetable soup

1. Some kind of watery vegetables and/or greens. For example tomato, zucchini, celery, spinach, red bell pepper, Romaine lettuce, chard, kale. Try not to mix together too much red and green or the color won’t be so great. One tomato in an otherwise green soup will be fine, but try to keep it either mostly red or green.
2. Water to thin out the soup a little bit.
3. Some kind of citrus juice, lemon, lime or orange to perk up the flavor.
4. Salty seasoning. Natural sea salt or miso (fermented soybean paste) gives it a nice deep flavor similar to what you would get from vegetable stock or bouillon.
5. Pungent seasonings such as fresh herbs and spices, garlic, onion, a bit of curry powder.
6. Some kind of fat to make the soup creamy. You can use avocado, olive oil or soaked nuts and seeds.

Instructions:

Use a blender to get a nice creamy consistency.

Coarsely chop zucchini (no need to peel it because you get a lot of nutrients in the peel), chop celery. Cut a tomato roughly, no need to remove the seeds since it’s a blended soup. Add some spinach, Swiss chard or kale. Add basil (pungent herb), use quite a bit so it’s both a pungent flavor and another green. Add some water (looks like about 2 cups).

Seasonings: lemon juice, natural sea salt and miso (mellow white miso) – about a tablespoon. Pungent seasonings: crushed garlic, green onions, a little bit of cayenne pepper.

Blend all the ingredients and add the fat (avocado) afterward. Blend until the soup has liquefied.

Cut avocado in half, twist to separate. Scoop half the avocado right into the blender. You can remove the avocado stone by pressing your knife into it just a bit and twisting the avocado while holding the blade of the knife still.

Blend again, just enough to blend the avocado in. If you over-blend avocados it can ruin the flavor and color.

You can serve in a bowl, or put it into a jar with a tight-fitting lid to take with you.

Raw food author and chef Jennifer Cornbleet shows you how to quickly make a delicious raw Garden Vegetable Soup. From her DVD, Raw Food Made Easy .
Raw Food Made Easy For 1 or 2 People

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WISH Register for free

Today is International Women’s day, and in celebration of women, and how far we have come, there’s a very special event that starts tonight at 8pm Eastern time. It’s called W.I.S.H. – Women’s International Summit for Health. It happens online, and you’re invited to attend. For free. Even if you’re a guy

This is an amazing opportunity to listen to some of the top speakers and thought leaders in the fields of health, fitness, spirituality, relationships, abundance (Law of Attraction) and more. In all there are 40 speakers, spread over 10 days. So every day you’ll have 24 hours to listen to that days speakers.

The thing I really like about this one is that the range of speakers presents a truly diverse, and holistic approach to health. I’ve signed up already! I hope you take the opportunity to as well. I attend a few of these events.

So who’s on the agenda? Well, you could just go see for yourself, click on anyone’s photo to find out a bit more about them. But there are lots of the top advocates in the field of food/nutrition, health as well as spirituality, fitness, relationships, money, beauty, family and more. Here are some of the speakers just in the area of food and health:

• David “Avocado” Wolfe: one of the world’s leading authorities on nutrition, raw food advocate, author and founder of the non-profit Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (www.ftpf.org) whose goal is to plant 18 billion fruit trees on planet Earth.
• Victoria Boutenko: author, inventor of green smoothies, raw food advocate who healed her family of diabetes, asthma and other serious health problems.
• Donna Gates: nutritional consultant, author and lecturer who has helped thousands of people overcome candidiasis and other immune system disorders, probiotics advocate.
• Rory Freedman: author of the bestseller Skinny Bitch and vegan animal rights activist.
• Jules Dervaes: founder of the modern urban homestead movement, educating and inspiring millions of people to pursue a more sustainable way of life.
• Dr Joseph Mercola: bestselling author, founder of the massively popular mercola.com founder of world-renowned Natural Health Center where tens of thousands have come to be treated with his multi-disciplinary natural approach to health.

So how does it work?

First step, you need to register. Remember, it’s free. It’s really simple too, just your name and email address (so you can receive the information you’ll need to listen it.  Click here to register.
Then tonight at 8pm Eastern, you’ll get an email with a link where you can access the first set of speakers. You’ll be given access to listen for 24 hours before they post the next day’s speakers on Tuesday evening. So if you miss that speakers time slot, no worries, you still have 24 hours to listen to the recording.
Every day, for the duration of the event you’ll receive an email letting you know about the speakers for that day with the link to listen to them.

In the Spirit of International Women’s Day

According to the United Nations, International Women’s Day was started in 1911 with this intent:

It is an occasion for looking back on past struggles and accomplishments, and more importantly, for looking ahead to the untapped potential and opportunities that await future generations of women.

Looking at the lineup of speakers at this event, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity to learn more about your “untapped potential”.

It All Started With The Secret

If you’ve clicked through to the WISH summit site from one of the above links you probably noticed that Neale Donald Walsch, one of the stars of The Secret is one of the speakers on the first day. I really enjoyed The Secret, even though I already knew about the Law of Attraction, I’d kind of forgotten about it, and I wasn’t always attracting what I would choose.

Well, after watching The Secret I started attracting more along the same lines to me. Often in the form of online teleseminars (as these types of summits are also often called). So for the past year or so I’ve been attending online health and self-development summits (also called teleseminars) and I’ve personally received tremendous benefit from them. I’m so grateful that I’ve attracted the information into my life. In fact I could give you a heads-up when more of them happen if enough people are interested. They don’t necessarily have to do with healthy eating, but all are along the lines of health, awareness, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), and other things that, like healthy eating, I think would benefit everybody. So take a moment to cast your vote in the comments if you’d like to know when these other teleseminars are happening.

In the meantime, don’t miss out on WISH! Go register today, it’s free and there’s nothing to lose if you find it’s not your thing. But I’m pretty sure you will get a lot out of it.

Register for WISH: Women’s International Health Summit

Raw Vegan Marinated Portobello Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms cooked, but can’t stand them raw. So when I decided to start eating more raw food, I was missing my mushrooms! Or having to eat them cooked. I’ve tried a few different raw vegan recipes featuring mushrooms, like stuffed mushrooms, and while it was better than eating them plain (yuck), I still didn’t really love them. I figured my best chance for creating a raw mushroom dish that I loved was to use my dehydrator.

If you want to eat a raw vegan diet, but you still love the taste of cooked food, a dehydrator will save you. Keep the temperature setting at 115 degrees F or below, and you won’t destroy any of the important enzymes in raw food, but the warmth is enough to change the texture and taste of the food, similar to cooking at higher temperatures. In the case of mushrooms, these are every bit as delicious as sauteed mushrooms.

Ingredients:

200g portobello mushrooms
5 tbsp (100ml) virgin cold-pressed olive oil
1 small clove garlic
1 small lemon
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp rosemary (fresh if possible)
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/4 tsp garam masala
1/4 tsp Himalayan sea salt (more or less to taste)

Instructions:

Brush any debris off the mushrooms and cut into slices about 1 cm (1/4 inch) thick. If you have a Pyrex baking dish that will fit in the tray slots of your dehydrator that works best, otherwise the teflex sheets will be fine, you just may need to add a bit more olive oil. Put the mushroom slices in the baking dish if you have one, otherwise put them into a bowl.

Crush or mince the garlic as fine as possible. Add to the bowl with mushrooms. Strip the rosemary leaves off if using fresh rosemary and chop as fine as possible. Add to the bowl with mushrooms, along with all the olive oil and other spices.

Using your fingers toss the mushroom slices in the oil and spices until the mushroom slices are  evenly coated. The portobello will absorb the olive oil, you may need to add more if you still have any ‘dry’ patches.

If you are using a baking dish, spread the mushrooms evenly over the bottom of the dish and insert it into the tray slots of your dehydrator. Otherwise, spread the mushrooms evenly over a teflex sheet and insert the tray into the dehydrator.

Mushrooms tossed in olive oil and spices before dehydrating

Turn on the dehydrator and set the temperature at 115 F (45C). Check on them occasionally, to mix and add more olive oil if they are getting too dried out.  In about 2-4 hours your mushrooms will be done and ready to eat. You’ll have to do some taste testing to see when they are right for you. When they are getting close to done, squeeze some fresh lemon juice over them.

Leftovers will keep in the fridge for a couple of days.

Serves 2-3

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Sunflower Walnut Pate (TuNo) on a bed of sprouts

I love this pate, it’s so tasty, nutritious and versatile. It can be used in sandwiches and wraps, as a spread or dip or simply drop a scoop on top of a green salad. It’s also called TuNo because it tastes and looks very similar to tuna salad, but it’s vegan, in fact it’s a super-healthy raw vegan dish. Now if you’re one of those vegetarians or vegans who hates the taste and smell of tuna, you’ll still love this no fishy taste or smell. I suspect what most people really love about tuna salad is more to do with the added ingredients than with the tuna itself. But the tuna provides a vehicle and texture that holds it all together and gives you that high-protein full feeling. Well, the walnuts and sunflower seeds do the same in this case, and the taste really comes from the spices and other added ingredients.

Great dish to serve to your non-vegan friends – see how many of them can guess that it’s not actually tuna.

Ingredients:

1 cup sunflower seeds, soaked
1 cup walnuts, broken into pieces, soaked
1/2 cup celery, finely chopped
1/4 cup parsley, finely chopped
1/4 cup sauerkraut, finely chopped and juice to taste (can substitute pickles instead)
2 tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1/2 teas kelp or wakame flakes
2 tbsp tamari
1 teas apple cider vinegar (ACV) or kombucha vinegar
2 teas ground cumin
1 teas paprika

Instructions:

Soak the sunflower seeds and walnuts for 4-8 hours. Drain and throw away the soak water. The soaking neutralizes the natural enzyme inhibitors in nuts and seeds making them more nutritious and easily digestible.

Add the sunflower seeds, walnuts, lemon juice, garlic, kelp, tamari, cumin, paprika and apple cider vinegar to the blender. Blend until smooth. If you have trouble blending it, add some of the sauerkraut or pickle juice. You don’t want it too runny, aim for the consistency of tuna salad.

Transfer to a bowl and mix in the chopped celery, parsley and sauerkraut (or pickle) by hand.

This will keep for several days in the fridge stored in an airtight container.

Sunflower Walnut Pate on flax crackers with sprouts and arugula

Serving suggestions:

• Eat by the spoonful
• Add a scoop to top off a salad
• Use as a dip with crudites
• Eat with flax crackers and sprouts
• Use in place of the rice, and add other raw vegetables for raw sushi
• Serve a as a spread on bread, in a pita pocket, or wrap with lots of salad vegetables

Let me know how you like it, and what other creative ways you invent to serve it.

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Fruity Chia Pudding

This healthy, filling, yummy dessert is quick to make as long as you remember to start the chia seeds soaking in advance. If you start the chia seeds soaking in the morning you can have your pudding for dinner.

The bee pollen and camu camu powder give an extra nutritional boost to this pudding. I’ll often eat this as a meal on it’s own. It’s great to have for breakfast because I find it really lasts me through the day without being too heavy and filling.

Chia is very sustaining and great for endurance. So this is my favorite breakfast if I have a lot of physical work to do in the garden or if I’m going on a bushwalk for the day.

Ingredients:

1 cup chia seeds, soaked in 3 cups water for 4-6 hours
2 tablespoons honey or agave syrup
1 tablespoon tahini
1 teaspoon camu camu powder
1-2 tablespoons of bee pollen
dash of Himalayan or Celtic sea salt
Fresh fruit in season (juicy fruit works best, especially berries, pineapple, mandarin, grapes)

Instructions:

Soak the chia seeds in 3 cups of water ahead of time. You can start soaking them in the morning, mix everything together around lunchtime, pop it in the fridge and it will be ready to eat for dinner.

Add the honey or agave syrup, tahini, camu camu powder, and sea salt to the soaked chia and mix thoroughly. Then add the fruit and mix just so that it’s evenly spread throughout. Spoon the mix into a pie dish or jelly mould. Glass pie dishes or silicon jelly moulds work great.

Sprinkle the bee pollen on top and pop it into the fridge. You can also eat it straight away if you want too. This recipe usually makes a bit more than my glass pie dish can easily hold, so I usually have a small bowl immediately and pop the rest in the fridge.

The chia are so filling and sustaining that I can’t eat a lot at one sitting. It will keep well in the fridge for several days.

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Himalayan Goji Berries

Goji berries (Lycium barbarum) are the most nutritionally dense fruit on Earth. They are a member of the nightshade family (Solonaceae), which contains many other common vegetables such as potato, sweet potato, tomato, eggplant, and pepper, as well as some poisonous plants like belladonna and deadly nightshade. Native to the Himalayan Mountains of Tibet and Mongolia, the goji berry is now grown in many other countries as well.

Although they have only been introduced in Western countries in recent years, gojis have been used for thousands of years in Tibet and China, both as a culinary ingredient and medicinally.

Unique among fruits because they contain all essential amino acids, goji berries also have the highest concentration of protein of any fruit. They are also loaded with vitamin C, contain more carotenoids than any other food, have twenty-one trace minerals, and are high in fiber. Boasting 15 times the amount of iron found in spinach, as well as calcium, zinc, selenium and many other important trace minerals, there is no doubt that the humble goji berry is a nutritional powerhouse.

This amazing little superfruit also contains natural anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal compounds. Their powerful antioxidant properties and polysaccharides help to boost the immune system. It’s no wonder then, that in traditional Chinese medicine they are renowned for increasing strength and longevity.

In traditional Chinese medicine, the goji is said to act on the Kidney and Liver meridians to help with lower back pain, dizziness and eyesight. They are most often consumed raw, made into a tea or extract, or as an ingredient in soups.

Gojis are most commonly available in dried form, and make a great snack eaten as is, added to trail mix, muesli or oatmeal. They can also be soaked for a couple of hours in enough water to cover them. Then the soak water can be drained off and makes a delicious drink, or both water and berries added to smoothies.

Please note that there can be adverse interactions if you consume goji berries while also taking medication for diabetes, or blood pressure, or take the blood thinner warfarin. So be sure to consult your health care provider if that is the case.

Gojis can often be found in Asian food stores, but most of these come from the commercial growing regions of China and Tibet, and contain high levels of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Even some brands which claim to be organic may not be, so be sure to source your goji berries from a reputable source.

It’s called a Walking Gratitude Meditation, but you don’t have to be walking, just moving in some way.
Read the full article: Regain Inner Peace When You’re Busy: Walking Gratitude Meditation

Vegan Vanilla Ice Cream

I was having a sweet craving this evening… actually it was going on all day and I was trying to come up with something I could make with what I had on hand. Finally, the idea for this hit me. And oh did it hit the spot… the tahini adds an extra smoothness to this so it’s even more like real ice cream than most frozen banana-based non-dairy ice creams. The vanilla extract and rapadura go so nicely together, creating that sweet, vanilla flavor.

Even if you eat dairy, it’s worth trying this for it’s own sake. Totally guilt-free desserts, I love ‘em! Try some of my other raw vegan ice cream recipe too.

Ingredients:
1 ripe banana
3 frozen bananas
1 tbsp tahini
1 tbsp rapadura sugar (or sweetener of your choice)
1 tbsp water
1 teas organic vanilla extract (or vanilla pod if you have it)

Instructions:
Peel the ripe banana and break it into pieces into blender. Add the tahini, rapadura, water and vanilla extract. Blend until smooth. Add the frozen bananas and blend again until smooth and creamy.

If you want this to be an all-raw dessert, be sure to use raw tahini. Often the ready made tahini is made from lightly toasted sesame seeds. I’ve had trouble finding raw tahini in New Zealand, but you can buy grinders and juicers with attachments that allow you to create your own. I love tahini so much, and it’s such a small part of most of my recipes that I just use the best organic tahini I can find, even though I’m trying to eat a mostly raw and living food diet.

Eat immediately!

Serves 2.

Kitchen tips: To cleanup I added about half a cup of water to the blender jug (no soap, just water) and blended on high until most of the remains had been ‘water blasted’ off the sides of the jug.

Zoe loves Vegan Vanilla Ice Cream

I poured this ‘vanilla banana milk’ into a bowl for my dogs and Zoe loved it! She lapped up every last drop and came to see if there was more of this yummy stuff left.

Zoe works hard, her day-job is in excavation. It’s hot, thirsty work. A cool, thirst-quenching treat like this is just the thing after a hard day’s work.

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Espresso Non-Dairy Ice Cream

My very favorite ice cream is coffee ice cream, and nothing else even comes close. Not only is it very difficult (read: impossible) to find good coffee ice cream in the shops here in New Zealand, but now that I’m not eating dairy, ice cream is off the menu… or is it? NO! Because there is a healthy, delicious, non-dairy, non-soy alternative. And it takes about as long to make as it takes to get a tub of ice cream from the freezer and serve it up. But the best part is, it’s so healthy, it’s virtually guilt-free.

I love this non-dairy ice cream, in all it’s variations, so much I don’t think I’d be satisfied going back to eating ice cream made from dairy.

Ingredients:
1 ripe banana
3 frozen bananas
1/4 cup brewed & cooled espresso
1 tablespoon coffee chicory essence
1 tablespoon honey or agave syrup
1/2 teas vanilla extract (optional)

Instructions:
Break bananas into pieces and add to blender. Add all other ingredients and blend on low until until the banana starts becoming smooth, then turn the speed up until thoroughly blended.

If you brew the espresso earlier in the day, or save some from your morning coffee you can make this delicious treat in about 5 minutes for dinner or lunch. In fact, it’s you can still make a nice cold dessert even if the espresso is still warm.

Many health experts argue that coffee is actually healthy because of the high level of antioxidants it contains. As much as I’d like to believe that I know from my own experience that coffee is addictive and too much is definitely not good, for my body at least. But I love it all the same.

If you don’t like coffee, or are trying to give up, you could use a healthy coffee substitute instead. Roasted chicory is one option, but I’ve also seen, though not yet tried, roasted maca root. Raw maca has a sweet, rich, malty flavor which I imagine is enhanced by the roasting, so I’d certainly love to try some! Both chicory and maca are very nutritious and healthy in their raw state. Roasting, like all forms of cooking will destroy some of the nutrients, including vital enzymes. But it’s a trade-off if you feel coffee is not good for you. The caffeine in coffee can certainly have a detrimental effect if you tend towards insomnia.

This is a great raw vegan ice cream recipe to use as a starter and just play around with the ingredients to create a delicious concoction of your own. What variations have you come up with? Leave a comment and let me know.

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