So while I've been away, I've made a few recipes I wanted to share with you all. They're not going to be exact recipes (you should know by now that's not really how I roll), but I trust you guys to use your taste buds and make some yummy food!
To start with, we have some delicious zucchini pesto pasta! This stuff was so yummy and so easy to make. To get the really fine zucchini noodles you'll need a spiral slicer of some sort, but you can also just use a vegetable peeler to make broad noodles. The sauce is a spinach pesto I made in a food processor. All you do is use something along the lines of 4 cups of spinach, 1 cup of walnuts, fresh garlic to taste (maybe 2 or 3 cloves), 1/4 cup olive oil, the juice of 1/2 lemon, and salt and pepper to taste. Make your noodles (I used 2 zucchinis and felt like I could have used a little more for the amount of sauce I had), blend all the sauce ingredients together in the food processor and mix the sauce through the noodles. On top, I have some white mushrooms I marinated for a little bit in vinegar, agave nectar, tons of pepper, and maybe some seasonings (Again, sorry. I don't recall for sure), and some sliced tomato. The vinegary mushrooms made a really nice contrast to the richer, earthy taste of the pesto. This is one of my favorite raw food dishes I've made, although I am a HUGE pesto fan.
Next is another zucchini dish (yes I know I use zucchini a lot, but it's delicious). This is vastly different from the pesto recipe, however. It is much less of an entree and more of a side salad or picnic item. I used a spiral slicer, but you can cut it up however you want, to make little ribbons of zucchini and carrot. Then I diced red onion, mushrooms, and some kind of nut and mixed that in. To make a sauce, all I did was take one whole avocado and mash it with my hands through the whole thing. Add a tablespoon or so of lemon juice and/or apple cider vinegar. If you use the vinegar, start with less and add more to taste, as it goes a long way. Continue with salt, pepper, dill, garlic or onion powder, or any seasonings you want, really. This was such a light, fresh, zesty, crunchy and tasty salad. I definitely recommend it. Plus it covers your bases of healthy fats and natural, plant-based proteins.
Last, but not least, we have dessert. Some of you may recognize this from my facebook profile. This is the simplest, most amazing thing ever. Seriously, just pit 6 avocados and empty the meat into a food processor. The original recipe called for 1/2 cup each of raw cacao powder and raw carob powder. I tried that and would recommend maybe 1/3 cup of each, or start with 1/4 and add to taste. For sweetener use 1/2 cup agave nectar. Blend. Simple as that. It's very rich, almost like frosting, and it's delicious served chilled.
I hope you all try some of these out. They are really good and pretty easy to make. I don't think they're too pricey either. I'm going to try to do another blog post this weekend with a couple snack/treat recommendations, and also one on superfoods/nutrient-rich foods. Let me know if you have anything else you'd like to see addressed.
As always, much love!
Devan
