Kitchen Extravaganza! March 22, 2008

Cranberry Squash Rice (top left) & Save-the-Salmon patties with Holandaise sauce

Uncooking

Well, last night I went to the gym, swam laps, sat in the hot tub and the steam room.  I went home energized!  I made a couple of sushi/nori rolls, and let me tell you, they were delicious!  I found the recipe in one of my new Raw Uncooking books, “Real Food, Real World” by Matthew Kenney & Sarma Melngallis.  The pictures in this book alone were the reason for buying it – they look AMAZING!

I love sushi…really.  I can’t get enough of it.  They have a recipe in their book that uses jicama instead of rice, marinated shiitake mushrooms in place of raw salmon (I think – that’s what it tastes like to me), and loads of vegetables.  I changed the jicama rice recipe around a little, using the sushi vinegar in my fridge (which a Japanese exchange student last year used while teaching me how to roll sushi), then dehydrated it for about 2 hours.  For me personally, I think that I would dehydrate it for a little bit longer, but that could be because I was too lazy to squeeze the jicama between a towel before mixing it with the vinegar.  I did the mushrooms exactly as they said, and have decided that they will be a regular in my fridge for sushi and salads.  They have a pickled ginger recipe included, but I didn’t have enough time to make it, plus I’ve become addicted ginger in my berry juice (I’ll save that for another posting, and trust me, it will be here soon!).

Now, on this beautiful Friday morning, Good Friday I might add, I woke up and decided to make a loaf of bread.  But of course it didn’t stop there.  I made my bread (I’ll post about this later because I haven’t tried it yet, it just came out of the oven), then I decided to finally try making a couple of recipes from “Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen” by Ani Phyo.  I have been in love with this book since day one.  I have the majority of the ingredients and the recipes are fairly quick and easy (I don’t find them to take any longer then preparing a loaf of gluten-free bread -at the moment).  I am in love with her salads, in particularly the one that uses oranges and fennel as the salad dressing…um-um-um!

Today I made 2 different dishes.  The first one I made was Walnut Cranberry Squash Rice, which is a little misleading because I didn’t put any walnuts in – I cannot stand walnuts!  I haven’t thought of what nut to use instead, but I will.  Cumin was one of the spices used, and as much as I love cumin, I think that I added too much or maybe I didn’t have enough butternut squash.  I also made note of the onion portion.  For me, the onions were too big.  I like chunky food, but apparently not onion.  They definitely add some great flavour, but I would prefer to have them chopped much smaller than I did. 

To go along with this yummy rice (which tasted wonderful at first, and only got better after having sat for a while) I decided to make the Save-the-Salmon Patties with Holandaise Sauce.  WOW!  Again though, a lot more dill than I put in, and less garlic (I feel bad for the people who are meeting me to walk our dogs in the morning, my deepest regrets at not thinking that through!).  I forget that raw garlic is much more potent than roasted!  Oh well, live and learn.  Besides, they’re still delicious and again, the taste is only improving the longer they sit and blend.  A choice is given on dehydrating or not.  I chose to eat half as is and dehydrate the rest, so I’ll see how those taste.  The patties are good both with the holandaise sauce and without, but the sauce does give them that extra ooomf! that makes food so yummy.

Well, I am pooped now, and I still have to try my bread (which smells wonderful) and clean the kitchen – oh wait, my mom’s cleaning up for me, YEA!  I will be back with more on my kitchen extravaganza!

 Cheers!

I was just looking at the picture have to say that the food tastes 100x better than it looks.  I’ll have to make a point of working on presentation.  Oh well, as long as it tastes good…for now!

Jicama vs. Daikon February 24, 2008

 Today I finally cracked open the giant root that’s been sitting in my fridge for the past week – Jicama.  This was my first time eating jicama.  For the past couple of years I’ve been drooling over the white shredded garnish on the sashimi trays.  Even when I was sick and sushi/sashimi was all that I could eat (strange, according to my friends), I loved eating the white garnish.  I finally asked the sushi restaurant what it was.  It turns out that it was daikon.  So, I went out and bought daikon in the korean market one day, really excited about having my very own daikon and even more excited because it was organic – talk about a BONUS!  It tasted nothing like the shredded garnish that I had been enjoying in the sushi restaurants!  At first, I didn’t like it, but since I bought it I felt that I had to eat it, so I started putting it on top of my salad.  Well, that actually worked out quite well.  I told a friend that I was doing this, and he said, “are you sure it’s daikon and not jicama that the sushi restaurants use?”  Well then I was totally stumped.  I made it my mission to find jicama and taste it to see which one they were serving.  Well, I have now tasted both jicama and daikon, and I think that it’s safe to say, the sushi restaurants that I frequent are using daikon.In my opinion, both vegetables are delicious and great on salads.  I actually used daikon in my own vegetable nori rolls last summer, and tonight I used the jicama.  In way of nutrients, neither contain all that much except vitamin C.  This past week I also had daikon in a stir-fry that my mom made (it was garbage day, so she was cleaning the fridge out and decided to use everything up that was still good – hence the giant stir-fry when I got home from work).  I really liked the daikon in the stir-fry, but for me personally, I would put it in last, just before taking it off of the stove, so that it maintains its crunchy, crisp bite (there’s something about crunching into my vegetables – I love the sound).  Here are a few tidbits about jicama and daikon.

• Jicama is an edible root that is crispy and sweet.  Part of the legume (bean)      family, it is a popular staple in Latin America.  It is grown in Mexico and Central America and commonly used to replace water chestnuts in a recipe and tends to take on the flavours of the other ingredients when cooked.  Contains high amounts of vitamin and is a carbohydrate in the form of dietary fibre.  Interesting fact: the vine that grows above ground produces its own natural insecticide, allowing it to protect itself from pests.
•  Daikon is a giant white radish that is East Asian.  It is low in food energy, but it does contain the active enzyme myrosinase that helps with the digestion of food, especially starchy foods.  It can be eaten raw in salads (or as a garnish), pickled, or in stir-fries.