OM Granola by Joan

To create this recipe, I googled lots of granola recipes and then made it my way. There are so many great recipes for granola, you can't go wrong by following any one of them. Use them (including mine) and tweak as you like. As long as you don’t burn it, granola is very forgiving, delicious, and nutritious served with a non-GMO nut milk and 1/2 banana).

Pre-heat oven to 250F.

Step I  (everything organic, of course):

1 lb. rolled oats

1 cup slivered almonds

½ cup pumpkin seeds

½ cup sunflower seeds

¼ cup sesame seeds

1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes

Bake this for about 30 minutes in a warm (not hot) oven. About 250 degrees, top shelves. Stir every 10 or 15 minutes so it doesn’t burn. After 30 minutes, turn off oven and let the mixture sit for another 15 minutes.

Step II. Meanwhile, I mixed these together:

½ cup chopped pecans

½ cup currents
1/2 cup raisins

¼ cup cashews

¼ cup dried wild blueberries

2/3 cups goji berries

¼ cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup chopped dates

1/3 cup milled flax seeds
1/2 cup hemp seeds!

Step III. When the oat mixture is just starting to brown, take it out of the oven. Cool it and mix with the raisins and nuts. 

I also heated two tablespoons of No Bee Honee with two tablespoons of Maple Syrup and mixed it into the granola. Not necessary, but quite beautiful.

Voila!

Giving new meaning to OMG!

NB: This looks like a lot of work, but it is not. It makes a lot of granola, and it’s much less expensive than buying granola readymade.

Juno, Saki, MacGregor waiting for theirs. :-)

Mustard Greens With Kale & Artichokes on Red Quinoa

Yesterday, someone warned me about eating a plant-based diet:

“You can’t live that way for long if you want to live healthy.”

I responded, “I’ve never been so healthy in my life.”

She cautioned, “It’ll catch up with you one of these days.”

Mustard Greens With Kale & Artichokes on Red Quinoa

Cut up some Field Roast Italian “Sausage” and fry in a dab of oil. (Field Roast should give me a cut for all the advertising I do for them.)

Add:

a clove of garlic chopped

some leek sliced

green pepper

some kale

artichoke hearts (not the stuff in the jar or can), use frozen or fresh

some mustard greens (Mustard greens have a very distinct, biting flavor. They work beautifully with artichoke hearts, each complementing the other.)

(Actually, just use any vegetables you like.)

Stir fry until the kale is wilted.

Add two tomatoes freshly whirred in a food processor, or cheat with some organic sauce.

Serve piping hot on a bed of red quinoa.

Garbanzos & Veggies With A (Cumin) Kick

There are so many beautiful recipes for garbanzos (aka chickpeas) online, I don’t know where to start. So I sort of made my own recipe by borrowing other people's ideas and using whatever I had in the house. I even cheated by using canned chickpeas instead of the much better tasting real thing, which just underscores the fact that recipes are meant to expand and contract, turn corners and go around the bend. If it tastes delicious, doesn’t destroy animal life, and is healthful to the body, just do it.

So here’s today’s little concoction:

Gorgeous organic veggies 

 First sauté in olive oil:

About 2” of leek 

1 clove garlic

a nice fat slice ginger root

Add garbanzo beans (or cheat as I did with a can of them)

1 zucchini, cubed

½ red pepper, slivered (I would have used more, but that’s all I had)

1 big Roma tomato, chopped

artichokes (I had some already frozen; I wouldn’t used canned)

a few leaves kale (notice how kale always works its way into my meals)

a handful of spinach

a handful of parsley

A little vegetable broth (more cheating: I used a tsp of Better Than Bouillon + a splash of water)

1+ spoon cumin

1+ spoon coriander

black pepper

heat it; it’s done

You can even make it ahead of time and reheat.

Look at those colors!

Serve on brown rice or quinoa.

The taste is insanely beautiful.

I gilded the lily with olive oil. Wow.

General Tso's Sauce

Fun Fact: General Tso’s is not native to China. It was invented by an ex-pat Chinese chef and then brought back to China—at least, that what I read. I’ll let the battle begin between those who claim it was first created in NYC and those rooting for its creation in Taiwan, because I’m more concerned about avoiding processed sugar. Every recipe I’ve found is loaded with sugar, and the few that aren’t don’t have that nice kick I’ve become accustomed to. So I turned to my friend, brown rice syrup. 

Here’s what I came up with:

Combine and mix:

5 TBS brown rice vinegar

6 TBS Port wine

2 TBS sesame oil

½ cup soy sauce

½ cup brown rice syrup

a piece of ginger root (chopped)

a garlic clove (chopped)

add hot oil to taste (a few teaspoons?)

Heat this on low and keep stirring until it’s hot.  

Mix maybe a TBS or two of organic cornstarch mixed with a little water (to eliminate lumps).  Add to sauce until you like the thickness.

Sauté pieces of tofu in a little sesame oil, garlic, & ginger until the tofu is brown.

Set aside & sauté your vegetables.

In the dish pictured, I used kale, spinach, parsley, red pepper, leek, carrot. Then, I added the tofu and a little sauce and heated until everything was gloriously piping hot (a minute or so).

Serve on a bed of quinoa or brown rice. Too beautiful for words. 

Kale and Field Roast Un-Sausage with Quinoa (or good pasta)

There are so many health benefits to eating kale—antioxidants, vitamins A, C, K, calcium, to name but a few. Ah, but the taste! (From Middle English "cawul." Who knew?)

Field Roast, Leek, Garlic, Kale, Spinach, Tomatoes

Since 1969, the wheat you buy in the USA is a hybrid of real wheat—the wheat I ate as a child, the wheat our parents and parents’ parents ate. Could that be why pasta tastes better in Europe than it does here? Could that be one reason so many people have bad reactions to wheat products? 

If I do eat pasta, I spend the money on organic pasta from Italy or from Eden Foods (one of the few companies to label their products “non-GMO.”  Fortunately, I love Quinoa. It’s easy to make, relatively inexpensive, and it’s beautiful in place of pasta or rice.

Here’s an easy and delicious dinner:

One Field Roast Italian [UN] Sausage: chop it into bits and fry in a good pan with a little olive oil:

Sauté

a nice piece of chopped leek

a clove of garlic

a few pine nuts

Add:

chopped Kale

chopped Spinach

and cover until the kale is cooked

Chop a few tomatoes or run them through the food processor until they make a sauce:

Pour over kale mixture, stir, and serve over a bed of Quinoa.

PS: This is insanely delicious. (If you have a red pepper on hand, use that, too.)
PPS: I added no salt because there's enough in the field roast un-sausage to give it a kick.

Nirvana Bits

Sesame seeds have been used, well, forever in human terms. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word comes from the Assyrian shamash-shammu, meaning oil seed. They are full of all sorts of wonderful disease-discouraging nutrients. 

Joan's Bits of Nirvana

Today, I have two sweet ideas to share. It all started when I bought three very expensive “Hindi Treats” at Natural Blends in Babylon, NY.  Hmmmmm. I know, Hindi is a language, not a religion or place, so I’m sure the creator of these treats is not Indian. However, they were very tasty and easy to replicate for a lot less money.

For my trial run (which was just fine), I used the following organic (and Fair Trade) ingredients:

½ cup blanched almonds (because they’re softer than unblanched)

½ cup currents

about 3 TBS cocoa

a splash of water

Whir these in a food processor

Roll them into balls

Roll the balls in sesame seeds

Voilá! Beautiful.

You can play around with this, adding more cocoa perhaps, or fewer currents. You could even throw in a little coconut. Or roll them in

I dubbed my variation on this “Nirvana Bits”; unfortunately, I didn’t measure anything, but if you’re visiting this site, you probably don’t need measurements.

Two handfuls of walnuts

One handful of raisins

About a TBS of peanut butter

About ¼ cup cocoa

a splash of water

Whir these in a food processor.

Roll them into balls.

Flatten each ball in sesame seeds.

To chill or not to chill. Eat without guilt. Give away.