April » 2010 » Loving Superfoods

Not Your Mama’s Raw Mac N Cheese

This is not your mama’s mac n cheese. I tried. I scoured my raw recipe books and googled raw recipes for mac and cheese, and nothing I tried met my standards of tasting like a good quality version of the traditional cooked mac and cheese. Oh well.

The good news is, I combined several recipes and came up with something that tastes pretty darn yummy. I just prefer to call it Raw Cheesy Pasta so we don’t expect a flavor that’s just not there.

If you love mac n cheese, you might like this raw cheesy pasta as an upgrade option, just don’t expect it to taste exactly like the traditional cooked version. This raw recipe is of course way better for you.

Here’s how I did it:

Raw “Macaroni Noodles”

Summer squash spiralized with the thick noodle setting and cut into smaller pieces so they look a bit like macaroni size noodles. Coat the noodles in a little olive oil and salt and let marinate while you make the rest of the recipe.

Raw Cheese Sauce
1/2 Cup Cashews (soaked for 1/2 hour to 4 hours and rinsed)
1/2 Yellow Bell Pepper
1/2 tsp Sun Fire Salt
1/2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
1 tsp Turmeric
1/2 Tbsp Mellow White Miso (optional)

Blend all ingredients in high powered blender like the Vitamix or in a food processor. Blend until a creamy consistency. You shouldn’t need to add any water because the bell pepper is very watery.

When you’re ready to eat, put a spoonful of the cheese sauce on top of the noodles. This tastes best when the noodles and the cheese sauce are at room temperature.

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My Additional Tips For Extra-Yummyness

This recipe tastes especially good with a little Fiesta Mole Powder sprinkled on top (as in the picture)
You can make the cheese sauce a bit creamier by using some macadamia nuts and/or pine nuts in addition to the cashews. The recipes I pulled from used all macadamia nuts or all pine nuts, however I found that this was more expensive and didn’t taste any better than with the cashews.
Yellow Bell Pepper really works the best. Red or orange are too sweet.
You can also make the noodles out of zucchini or a mix of zucchini and summer squash. One recipe called for noodles out of yams, but they were very crunchy and the yam taste was overpowering.
You could experiment with dehydrating/warming the noodles mixed with cheese sauce for a little bit before eating. I haven’t tried this yet, so let me know if you like it.

Enjoy!

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Raw Mango Blueberry Cobbler

Oh My Goodness this is a good dessert! OK, so I don’t ever post icky desserts, but wow, this mango blueberry cobbler gets high praise! The recipe is a slight adaptation from Ani Phyo’s Mango Cobbler in her recipe book Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen.

Really, the only thing I did differently was to add blueberries into her recipe … I love mango and blueberries together. Here’s the recipe with my additional notes below on how I would improve or play with it even more:

Crust/Topping:
3 Cups Pecans (dry)
3/4 tsp Sun Fire Salt (or other high quality sea salt)
1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract (easier) or 1 Vanilla Bean (scraped insides only)
3/4 Cup Dates (pitted)
1/2 tsp Cinnamon
Process the pecans and salt in a food processor or dry container of your high-powered blender until a flour-like consistency is reached. Add in the dates, vanilla and cinnamon and process until mixed well and a dough-like consistency. Set crust aside while you make the syrup (no need to clean out the food processor).

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Syrup:
3/4 Dates (pitted)
3 Tbsp Coconut Oil
1/2 Tbsp Vanilla Extract (easier) or 1/2 Vanilla Bean (whole bean)
1/3-2/3 Cup Water, as needed
Food process or Blend all ingredients until a smooth, thick syrup consistency. Add more water only as needed in order to facilitate the blending process.
Tip: process the dates first into a paste before adding the liquid ingredients.

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Filling:
4 Mangoes (ripe Kent variety is best because they are the least stringy/fibrous)
3/4 Cup Blueberries (fresh or defrosted frozen variety)
Dice the mangoes into bite-size cubes. Put all filling ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Add the syrup and toss until all the fruit is well covered.

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Press half of the crust into the bottom of your serving bowl. I first used a 1 quart casserole for a thick cobbler. In this photo I’m putting all the crust on top in a lasagna-style pan.

Pour the mixed filling/syrup on top of the crust. Crumble the remaining crust/topping across the top of the filling. Your dessert is now ready to enjoy immediately or refrigerate for a couple of days of enjoyment.

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Here are a couple of suggestions for ways you might play with this recipe:

Add a little cinnamon to the syrup for additional “baked” flavor
Make the filling with peaches instead of mangoes.
Make a filling of all berries or sweet apples
For a larger pan, like a lasagna-style pan, put the filling/syrup directly into the pan and put all of the crust/topping on top. This makes it even easier to get the dessert out of the pan.
Add finely ground pecans or other favorite nuts on top for a crunchy topping
Use Blackberries instead of Blueberries … even more delicious!!!!
Use Walnuts instead of Pecans in the crust for a less sweet crust and more Omega 3 Essential Fatty Acids

Enjoy!

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A Day In The Life Part 4: What Tools of the Trade Do You Start With?

This is a continuation of our Day in the Life Story of what we eat … this time talking about the kitchen tools we use to make especially yummy raw foods.

What Tools of the Trade Do You Start With?

Blend, Blend, BLEND! So much of the raw food diet is facilitated by blending. It breaks down the cell walls of foods so it’s easier to digest, enhances flavors, enables you to eat more fruits and veggies in less time, and is all-around an awesome way of eating/drinking/slurping food.

When we found raw foods, we already had a Vitamix in the house and if we didn’t we’d be getting one soon. You can make a lot of raw foods, including our beloved Chocolate Bliss with a regular blender, but you can do so much more with a Vitamix or other high-powered blender.

We also have a small Hamilton Beach blender we got for traveling with our Bliss.

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A Day In The Life Part 3: How Do You Transition To More Raw Foods?

This is a continuation of our Day in the Life Story of what we eat with suggestions on how you can easily transition to more and more raw foods in your diet…

How Do You Transition To More Raw Foods?

The first week we discovered Chocolate Bliss and the whole line of Sun Fire Super Foods, we jumped in feet first and ate almost 100% raw superfoods for the first week. It was awesome. You can watch our short video about transitioning to raw where we talk more about what we ate in that first week, why it was so great, and the differences we noticed from being raw.

Since then I’ve read that it’s not always recommended to go raw that quickly because you can have more detox reactions. I didn’t. I felt great. That might be because the Sun Fire Super Foods are designed to help you detox more gradually, or because I didn’t have major health issues (I was just a bit overweight), or just because (the answer to any persistent 2 year old).

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How fast should you go raw? However fast you feel like it. And here’s some more support:

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A Day In The Life Part 2: Cooked Stuff and Cooked/Raw Combinations We eat

This is a continuation of our Day in the Life Story of what we eat … talking now about the cooked stuff too. To the often-asked raw foodie question “what percentage raw are you?” I think I prefer the answer “I am not a label”. I eat cooked food and I eat raw food in varying amounts, depending on the day, the weather, my cravings, or whatever. Here are some details on the cooked stuff we eat…

Cooked Stuff and Cooked/Raw Combinations

We still eat cooked food. Most often in the evening. Sometimes during the day (I still crave eggs now and then). We’ve found some great ways of upgrading standard cooked food into better ingredient options and even combinations of cooked and raw foods that work great for us. Here’s what we most often gravitate to when we crave cooked stuff:

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Not Your Mama’s Raw Mac N Cheese

Raw Mango Blueberry Cobbler

A Day In The Life Part 4: What Tools of the Trade Do You Start With?

A Day In The Life Part 3: How Do You Transition To More Raw Foods?

A Day In The Life Part 2: Cooked Stuff and Cooked/Raw Combinations We eat

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