Naraya Cooking Health Recipe

I have made a lot of smoothies. I drink at least one, usually two, and often three, everyday and I have been doing that for years. I plan to continue doin' it for the rest of my life. I have written an entire cookbook on smoothies (it's coming out in December and you can pre-order it here). Let's just say I know a thing or two about them; including making their textures, flavours and colours the most appealing possible.



So - in my opinion anyways - I think there is some significance of my calling a smoothie "my favourite," because I have never really had a favourite one before. I make a different smoothie everyday because I am always excited to move onto the next recipe idea, enjoy it, and keep on with that delicious, diverse cycle. However, after I made this smoothie for the first time a few days ago, I have been making it everyday since. It just seems like THE PERFECT SMOOTHIE. I cannot imagine it being improved upon. And so due to my deep and ever-growing adoration of this drink, I thought it wise and practical to share with you. Please make the recipe and let me know your thoughts.

Basically what we have got is apple/ginger/kale JUICE blended with frozen bananas, resulting in a creamy, cool, sexy green beverage that is basically irresistible to all humans (and probably many other species). Yeah, we are using fresh green juice for the liquid instead of water or nut milk! CUZ WE'RE CRAZY LIKE THAT. It's almost like a green juice milkshake. Note: to some of you that might make it a huge turn off but personally the thought of a green juice milkshake gets my mouth wet. The benefits of greens are hopefully known to you, they are nature's #1 super food in terms of nutrient density. Juicing them improves their absorption and wickets the nutrient assimilation process. Apple juice is just the bomb and apparently keeps  cancer away. And when you blend anything with frozen bananas, you find heaven. What you are making is a potent, yummalicious, beautiful masterpiece that will let you live to be like 123 years old AND enjoy doing it because you get to drink THIS every morning. Seriously, I want you all to make this smoothie just so I can hear about how much you like it. Also: I love you.


GREEN SMOOTHIE with APPLE-KALE JUICE + BANANAS

4 apples
4 cups kale leaves (or other dark leafy greens) 
1 tablespoon chunk ginger root
3 frozen bananas

Juice the apples, ginger and greens then pour that juice into a blender container with the bananas. Blend everything until smooth, green, thick and frothy. YES. 

Note: I recommend cleaning your juicer and blender right after you use them so you don't have to deal with that once you have your drink ready. The last thing I wanna do when I have just poured a glass full of delicious smoothie is remember I have to clean; it makes it less enjoyable. Maybe that's just me though. 

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Exciting news! Vegan Cuts is doing a cookbook and vegan snack box giveaway, and you have the chance to win! You can either win my best-selling raw, vegan, gluten-free desserts cookbook, Rawsome Vegan Baking, or a few other amazing ones from other bloggers I love: The Blender Girl, Thug Kitchen and The Vegan Zombie. The prizes for this giveaway are four snack boxes paired with four cookbooks, so there will be four winners who each win a snack box and - you guessed it - a cookbook!

Enter the giveaway here for you chance to win!





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Come to the rawsome vegan side, we have t-shirts.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I am so stoked to announce I will now be selling custom-designed t-shirts for my blog! (There is also a hoodie option available.) I have partnered with a neato company called Teespring, and we have developed some amazing tees for you guys to wear with plant-based pride! I think they all reflect the clean, fun and positive attitude that my blog has become known for. Nothing extreme, just simple, fun pictures of happy fruits and vegetables celebrating the rawsome vegan life. I have to admit I did not design them myself, but I'm just gonna see how you guys like this first one and if there is demand for others, and/or some designed by me I am happy to do make more designs available! Let me know. For now I am more than pleased with this first t-shirt. The drawings are done by a children's book illustrator!

You can buy the t-shirt here.



Although there are three different designs I love, I'm just gonna start off by selling one in order to gauge how popular it and others might be. If a whack load of people buy this one, I will definitely start selling the other two, and probably more. I wanna make you happy, after all.

Right now we I've got one design available that reads "I HEART THIS RAWSOME VEGAN LIFE", where the heart is a juicy red strawberry. I absolutely love this and can't wait to wear it all over the place. It represents what I try to promote on my blog: that healthiness is happiness, and that simplicity is beautiful.

So that was really tacky and incredibly lame of me but sometimes ya just gotta write love prose to your fave dessert. Right, guys? ... GUYS? In all seriousness though I do adore raw vegan tarts. They're easier and quicker to make than cakes, and most of the time they come out looking like super stars. You make the crust which is usually just a mix of dates and nuts, press that into a tart pan, and then you make your filling which is normally a simple blending up of bananas, coconut or nuts with  a healthy sweetener, and finally you decorate it with something pretty like fruit. Done. You now have a gorgeous, delicious, uber-good-for-you treat to impress everyone with. This is why I love raw vegan desserts.

I made this recipe a few months ago and am posting it now to remind me of the wonderful berry harvests of the summer. I will miss the sun dearly for the next couple seasons. We basically get straight rain for the next five months here in British Columbia. The only way I survive is by daydreaming about the vibrant berries we had the pleasure of eating in the previous warmer months. Until the next fertile epoch I will be consuming a lot of frozen fruit, apples, greens, carrots and potatoes. I am trying to eat more food that is grown locally, and as I have said before: it's easy to do that when you have TWO winter farmers markets in your city. Yep, we locavore Vancouverites are spoiled.

Another bonus to buying local - in addition to being more connected to your food system, minimizing your carbon foot print, and supporting ethical, environmentally-concious farmers in your area - is the quality of the produce you are getting. Yes, it can be more expensive and usually is (though sometimes you can actually SAVE money at farmers markets) the flavour, colour and texture of locally grown organic food versus internationally shipped stuff from the grocery store is incomparable. What I do now is buy "the dirty dozen"(i.e. the ones most contaminated by pesticides, etc.) if they are available at the farmers market, or at least organically-grown kinds from the grocery store. That way I find a happy balance for my wallet AND still support the local farmers and enjoy amazing produce. Is buying organic important to you? Is buying local important to you? Why or why not? Let me know in the comment section! Have a great day, beautiful people, and try making the tart! x


WHIPPED COCO CREAM TART with FRESH BERRIES

Crust:
1 cup pecans
1/3 cup hemp seeds
1 1/2 cups dates
Pinch Himalayan salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Coconut cream:
Follow this recipe.

Fruit:
3 cups fresh berries
2 bananas
1 tablespoon coconut nectar (optional)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

To make the crust: pulse the pecans and hemp seeds into powder in a food processor, then add the rest of the ingredients and process until it all begins to stick together. Press into a lined tart tin and put in the fridge for a couple hours.

To prepare the fruit: wash and slice the berries and bananas then coat with the coconut nectar (if using) and vanilla and put in the dehydrator for 30-60 minutes, this softens and sweetens them.

Assembly: spread your coconut cream into the crust and top off with your berries. MMM.

It doesn't get much simpler than this when you wanna prepare a wholesome, easy, delicious recipe for yourself. We've got oven-baked sweet potatoes, potatoes, eggplant and garlic paired with a spinach salad, all topped off with tomatoes, sunflower seeds and bell peppers. This meal is also pretty cheap to make because it's mostly sweet potatoes and potatoes (I can get these for $1.00/lb at the grocery store and farmer's market). In case you didn't already know this magical fact, I will let you in on it now: when garlic is baked it basically turns into garlic butter. Praise the heavens and all that is good. The cloves hidden under their skin transform into creamy, flavourful pockets of garlic spread that you can cover your meal in. It's fabulous to the maximum.

I will ACTUALLY be posting more and more savoury recipes for you all to enjoy, because meals like this are what my dinner looks like every night now. For awhile there, I didn't wanna share my dinners because they didn't have much colour. I was eating a lot of rice, potatoes and cauliflower. Healthy? Yes. Vibrant-looking? Not so much. But Instagram has inspired me! I kept seeing all these gorgeous lunch and dinner pics and realized: where's the colour in my meals!? So I have added it back in with salads, sweet potatoes, yams, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, pumpkin seeds, and more. Once I found grocery stores that sold sweet potatoes for a dollar per pound, I rejoiced. I absolutely adore sweet potatoes (especially since Jack's grandma showed me the light of baking them whole in the oven) and they are one of the most nutritious foods on the planet! Some tribes and civilizations historically have lived mainly off sweet potatoes or yams! Firstly because they have trouble hunting/gathering enough other food but they also ARE ABLE to live off mostly sweet potatoes or yams because they have so much of what you need! Calories, carbs, nutrients, vitamins, hurrah! It's like nature decided to throw one nearly perfect meal into a singular root vegetable for our convenience! Evolution doesn't work like that at all but still, you get where I'm comin' from. Besides, that orange colour is such a winner. Buying organic sweet potatoes and yams is certainly better than buying conventional ones, but around here that usually means at least double the price. Since they are a staple of my diet, and also one of the least contaminated conventionally grown foods, I am okay purchasing non-organic ones, but I do like to treat myself sometimes. I always buy my potatoes organic because we can get amazing ones here for good prices from the farmers market, so I can't pass that up. Support local!

ROASTED VEGGIES with BUTTERY GARLIC + SPINACH SALAD

Veggies:
1 sweet potato or yam
1 cup baby potatoes
3 small eggplants (mine were super tiny)
1 head of garlic
1 teaspoon coconut oil

Salad:
3 cups spinach leaves
Juice of a lime
1 teaspoon maple syrup
2 chopped heirloom tomatoes
1 chopped red bell pepper
1 tablespoon sunflower seeds
Black pepper and sea salt (optional) 

To prepare the veggies: preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Wash your root veggies and dry them. Poke some holes in the sweet potato/yam. Slice the eggplants and rub them in a little coconut oil. Bake everything on a parchment paper lined pans and bake for 30 minutes, then see how it's all doing. My little potatoes, eggplant, head of garlic and sweet potato were all soft by this point so I took everything out, but if you have a large sweet potato/yam it will take longer to cook. (And yes, I did simply throw a head of garlic into the oven and it ended up perfect. You just have to peel off the skin to get at the goodness once it's done baking.)

To make the salad: mix the greens with lime juice, maple syrup, black pepper and salt (if using). Throw on the tomatoes and pepper, and sprinkle with sunflower seeds. Pair this with all your baked treasures and enjoy! 

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