GreenChefs is the modern “G” Food Network. The new Organic Food Lifestyle featuring luscious organic and seasonal based recipes from the top Green Chefs around the world.
Yummy yummy elegant goodness is abundantly found in this soup. The sweetness from the squash and the smoky nuttiness from the chestnuts are a decadently delicious combination — a perfect compliment to any holiday dinner party or lunch. You’ll be amazed at how easy this is to make and how easy you will WOW your guests…
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This is one of those, I need a delicious beautiful dessert now recipes. Tapioca is a quick dessert that will definitely delight you and your guests! You can even make the tapioca part the night before for simple assembly the next day. Just be sure to marinate the berry topping the day you are gonna eat this yummy dessert.
A little about the berry topping. You can make it with or without the Brandy and/or Cognac. I like the flavor and the little warmth the Brandy brings to the berries. If your serving this to young ones, its just as good with the pure sweetness of the berries.
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It’s time to get the basics down people. Making nut milk couldn’t be easier. Almond milk also happens to be a goto milk for most of my recipes. It’s one of the most versatile of all the nut milks. So, no more heading to the grocery store to buy factory made boxed up milks. Trust me. When you taste this you will never wont to buy that (crap) old stuff again.
To make nut milks you only need to invest in a very inexpensive nut milk bag. You can substitute other nuts for the almonds… hazelnuts, pecans, cashew, brazil nut, walnut…and if you want a richer milk increase the amount of nuts or decrease for a lighter version… Now go make some milk!
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Now that you have mastered making your own Almond Milk... :) … what, you ask, do you do with all the left over almond pulp…? Make COOKIES!!
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One of the many amazing gifts, my BF gave me this year was a beautiful Wolfgang Flour Mill. I know. He did real real good. :) So I have been experimenting a little with all the grains I love. In they go and out comes some lovely flour. You have to get one of these! It turns out, fresh milled flour really is better.
For this recipe I found a bag of heirloom purple barley and milled it into a fine flour. Then I found a bag of frozen organic blueberries and thought to myself, how beautiful the two would look together. You can alway substitute another whole grain flour if you don’t have barley on hand and of course, you don’t need to mill the flour yourself. Either way, this cobbler is subtly sweet and seemed to get better with the passing days in the fridge.
Now go out and get a mill! They are more fun than…. well, you get what I mean. Oh and they save you a small fortune if your a power flour user like me.
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Photographer V Blak
I am a huge fan of making homemade dressings. They are extremely easy to make, cost effective and much more delicious, not to mention healthier than the bottled stuff. Think about it.
Now I am a true blood New Yorker at heart which means, I must hit the town and dine out a few times a week. This gives me plenty of tasting opportunities and when I run across a yummy dressing…I make sure to ask for the recipe. Most of the time, I get some vague answer, but that isn’t a problem, that is a challenge. With my new flavor discovery, I go into my kitchen, and like a mad scientist, I try my hand at re-creating it. This was one of those inspired moments….
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Possibly an interesting documentary by our friends over at Café Gratitude. I have to be honest, I say possibly, because I haven’t seen it yet. I have only seen the trailer but the trailer alone made me want to post about it. I love when people turn their lives around and find happiness on the other side. Congratulations to Cary, Ryland, Conor and Gregg for bringing May I be Frank to life.
New York Times: “May I Be Frank,” by Cary Mosier, Ryland Engelhart, Conor Gaffney and Gregg Marks, at S.F. DocFest. This film came about by accident: when Frank Ferrante, a depressed and overweight New Yorker, ate at Café Gratitude, a feel-good vegan and raw food restaurant, he did not imagine the effect that meal would have on his life. But after Mr. Ferrante, a divorced drug addict with hepatitis C, declared to three young male managers at the restaurant that he wanted to fall in love again, they set out to change his life and took a camera along.
Over the course of 42 days, the Café Gratitude workers put Mr. Ferrante through a regimen of wheat grass, colonics and touchy-feely advice. The New Age jargon may put off some viewers, but Mr. Ferrante proves to be a compelling on-screen presence: at once honest and manipulative, hopeful and frustrating.
Flesh Monkies prepare yourself for what I am about to tell you. This is V Blak by the way. I know you and I don’t feel this way, we are freaking Monkies after all, but the truth is, sadly most people, HATE, I mean really hate Beets. Even our hip youngish first lady, Michelle Obama has something against these red bloody beauties. She told Ladies Home Journal “Neither the president nor I have the beet gene”. What does that mean? You have to have a gene to like one of the best veggies on the planet? I am taking a wild guess here, but I bet they had that all to common first taste beet experience, you know the one, the dreaded dirt taste.
Yes dirt, come on, lets admit it, beets are very very earthy and if you are a clueless fleshy, like I was, you just don’t know how to properly bring out the lushes side of beets. The result can have them coming out tasting like the backend of a dog. Okay not that bad and no I haven’t tasted a backend of a dog, and anyways I think that taste is exclusively reserved for Durians.
“Neither the president nor I have the beet gene”.
My own first experience with beets almost completely turned me off them forever. I was just beginning to juice and I tossed in way too many beets, greens and all and the result, I could barely keep from tossing the thing back up. I thought I was going to be sick. I just completely over did it. I may have also added garlic to that juice. I think I was sick or something. My point is, it was just too many beets and too little of the sweet stuff. Life is about balance and sometimes I just completely forget that. Oh well, lucky for me, I have an experienced beet lover close at hand now days and she has completely turned me around. I’ll admit it, her beautiful smile and her contagious laugh might have opened me up to giving the beet a second chance, but in the end it was her Beet dish which closed the deal. And maybe if your unfortunately in the hater camp, she can do the same for you. I present to you, GreenChef Aria Alpert and her love love love for the dirty little Beet.
Aria and I whipped up a short GreenChef video just for you, about you guessed it, the Beet. Sit back, click play and enjoy the first GreenChef video from the new G Living Pad in Palm Desert and afterwards, jump down to the comment section and tell everyone why you love or hate beets. And if your in the love category, spill the beans and maybe even share your beet recipe / story. We would love that…. Recipes and photos after the jump.
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Photographer: Julia Morris
I have to admit, as a natural food enthusiast, Halloween and the entire holiday season ( Thanksgiving, Christmas ) really puts me in quite a quandary. On one hand, I love the mild madness that ensues around this time of year. The costumes, the parties, the creativity, the (idea of) candyland-come-true . . . clearly there’s some serious residual little-kid excitement in full force here. The irony is that much of what Holidays is about (conventional candy . . . and lots of it) is basically my nemesis. It’s not a matter of fun-size package denial, it’s a matter of reality: hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, red #5, or any ingredient made in a labcoat for that matter, generally equates to things humans should not consume.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to pull a scrooge moment. I understand this isn’t the time of year to tout the benefits of things like toothbrushes, raisins, or a nice apple. But don’t you worry; I’ve got plans for us. Better plans. Plans like, ahem, chocolate hazelnut plans. And while these chocolate hazelnut plans may still totally reside in the treat category (aka – don’t eat the whole recipe in one serving . . . everyday), this dessert is billions of times more beneficial than traditional holiday candy fare. Aside from using clean natural ingredients, it’s full of superfoods too. Raw cacao powder lends its copious antioxidant content and abundant minerals, and the chocolate coating utilizes the natural sweetness of mesquite powder (the milled mesquite pods from a low-lying South American shrub) making the exterior especially low in sugars. I’ve even snuck a little bit of optional adrenal-supporting maca powder into the filling of these candies, perhaps as a preemptive healthy strike against any conventional sugary “incidents.”
This dessert is billions of times more beneficial than traditional holiday candy fare.
Needless to say, these candies are an all-around “yes.” The exterior chocolate coating will remain solid at room temperature, and the inside pocket is a soft, sweet blend of cacao and hazelnuts. You can use ice cube trays for as molds for these, or get fancified and use real-deal candy molds with deep vessels to properly contain the filling. If using candy molds, double the amount of chocolate coating that the recipe calls for (the filling will remain the same). Short on time? Simply melt down a dark chocolate bar and use as the exterior coating instead of the raw chocolate recipe below.
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Photographer: Nadia
This is not one of my typical nice and easy recipes, but it’s so delicious that I couldn’t help myself and spend half of my day in the kitchen trying to recreate something I ate a couple of days ago. To be more precise, these should be the infamous mini bites with cashew, vegetables and portobello mushrooms as stated on the menu of the Food Forum list. They were part of our free lunch menu, created by the Chefs of Menu magazine and tasted so good that I ignored my natural sense of shame, got back to the table and asked for one more :)
The main problem with preparing the bites at home was that I had absolutely no idea what’s in them except for the obvious part – vegetables and mushrooms. So I decided to trust my palate and cooked them combining most of my favorite vegetables – broccoli, cauliflower, aubergines, carrots, garlic, red peppers and baby spinach. A feast for all the senses with the added portobello mushrooms, cashews, ginger and powdered indian pecans.
Except for the divine food the Forum was also rich in interesting lectors and visitors, a bunch of raw chefs, vegans, Ayurveda specialists, nutritionists, all kinds of healthy foodists and some misguided adventurers like my paraglider instructor. The best place to meet “one of your kind” and share ideas. Like the girl who offered to sell me earrings made of small jars filled with flaxseeds… really cute. Or a vegan canadian woman working for the bulgarian Cru restaurant. People like “uncle Mitko” who decided to start a biodynamic agriculture farm at the age of 55 and working in it for 15 years now! That man looked better at 70 then most 50 years old you can meet on the street. A marvelous event, which I wish will happen more often from now on, because the 400 seats theater was sold out well in advance and lots of people couldn’t attend. Great job, Gorichka, for the Food forum!
“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die” – a graffiti quote seen in Belgrade from one of the Food Forum lectors, Yana Petkova.
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Photographer: Callie England
I have two passions in life: Health and Art (in the sense of being creative and working with my hands). My goal: To eventually figure out how to merge the two together. How the hell I do that, still to be decided. I could write about all the options I’ve considered in my head, but then you’d just see me as a bipolar mess of a child. Literally, it expands from culinary school in France (to learn and embrace the emotional aspect of dinning/eating – which I think is SO important in our over-all health) to furthering my education in Natural Health – Like I said, two opposite ends of the spectrum. Pretty much, if you could jump inside my head, you’d beg to get out – as everyday it’s seems to become more and more a cluster f**k of ideas. Creativity truly is a blessing and a curse
In the meantime though, I’ll stick to the undecided route – i.e. cooking (or, playing) with healthy food!
Yesterday’s playtime included squash (told ya you’d be seeing a lot of this) and cookie cutters… Which I heart, because cookie cutters equal perfect shapes and perfect shapes make this perfectionist, perfectly happy.
At first I thought, “ravioli!” Which was then immediately followed by, “boring!” So instead, I went for a mix between lasagna and ravioli – A ravioli stack. Easy, but elegant. What more could a girl want!?
Photography Golubka
For this recipe, you might end up with some extra filling, which is still very good by itself, with a green salad or crackers. Knowing my family’s appetite, I made a double portion of the crust “dough”, and used it for a variety of tart sizes, making individual ones for Paloma. She now eats entirely on her own and enjoys being in charge of her meals, not letting anyone interfere with her spoon. Having a quiche all to herself made her one happy girl, and there may have been a few second helpings involved.
As predicted, I didn’t regret making the extra quiches, as all of them were gone in no time.
The quiche is particularly good when combined with a simple watercress and pea salad, my newfound culinary delight. I’ve tried watercress many times before, and always believed it to be too strong and tangy for me to enjoy. Well, I’ve recently realized that that’s not always the case. If you try it in a right combination of flavours that balance the tang just right, it’s quite refreshing and delicious.
We’ve been enjoying milder weather, which is always exciting after months of lazy summer heat. Consequently, our farmers market has opened for a new season, and the lengthy wait for the freshest local produce is over. We’re happy.
Monkie : Golubka
Sections: Full Recipe List, Recipes / Main Courses, Recipes / Raw
Monkie : Aria Alpert
Sections: Bite This, Breads, Full Recipe List, Recipes / Main Courses, Recipes / Vegan
Monkie : V Ol Blak
Sections: Biking Monkie Style
