Sprouted Lentil Burgers with Cashew and Pine Nut Pesto

I invented this recipe for myself. It has no gluten, onions, garlic, meat, dairy, sugar, salt, tomato or hot spices but the few people I've tried it out on reckon it tastes great.

• Sprout yourself a jarful of red or brown lentils, red if you can get whole red lentils. You'll need to sprout them 2-3 days until the rootlets start to appear. 
• Place in a blender with about a cup of cooked carrot and/or zucchini (you can vary what vegetable you add - sweet potato or pumpkin would work just as well).
• Add a large heaped tablespoon of chia seed and a similar amount or more of linseed. These two seeds are your glue and will hold the mixture together.
• Add plenty of cumin, tumeric, coriander, fennel etc to taste. I usually add a heaped teaspoon of each. These spices help to balance what Indian Ayurvedic doctors call the Vata element which I need to balance so those are the spices I often use. These spices also help with digestion. Tumeric, particularly is a good all purpose anti-inflammatory. Check out Web Md for all the details on why you might consider using more tumeric in your cooking. Not good for everyone though so check it out!
• Add about about a cup of water to the blender and mix. Add more water if the mixture "struggles" in the blender or if too sloppy add a little teff flour to thicken it once you've poured it into a mixing bowl. 
• Spoon large dollops into a pre-heated fry pan and brown both sides. 

While they cook make your pesto as follows:

Rinse your blender then add

• a cup of raw cashews
• half a cup of pine nuts - or whatever amount you can afford - they're quite expensive
• a good pinch of asafoetida Beware some asafoetida is mixed with wheat flour.
  
• a handful of fresh basil

blend

Put about two lentil burgers to a plate and pour a generous amount of pesto on top. Serve with any fresh edible flowers and leaves from your garden. For example marigold petals, mizuna, Italian parley, young kale - whatever is in season.

Gluten Free Vegan Scones

Pre heat oven to 220C
In a mixing bowl put
1 cup sweet sorghum flour
a table spoon of chia seeds
a table spoon of psyllium seeds
rub in about two tablespoons of coconut oil into the mixture
Add just enough water (usually only a tablespoon or so) to get a mixture you can knead in your hands. The mixture must be firm.

Shape into scone size amounts and put on a tray, greased with coconut oil and set aside for 5 minutes to allow the chia and psyllium to swell - this creates a semi-raised texture. They still won't rise as much as true scones but they are yummy and for non sugar eaters like me the sweet sorghum flour makes them taste quite sweet.
cook for 20 minutes
makes about 5-6 smallish "scones".
Blueberries or other flavourings can be added to the mixture to vary.

Zucchini, carrot, shallot and sorghum fritters

To make these I put one each of a zucchini (small), carrot and shallot (all three chopped up) into a blender with enough water for the blender to blend easily.  Then pour into a mixing bowl.  Add seasoning (I use a veggie stock).  Add a heaped tablespoon of chia seed (adds omega 3), add a heaped tablespoon of psyllium seed (improves texture and adds fibre) and then add enough sorghum flour to thicken the mixture.  Let the mixture rest for a minute as this gives time for the chia and psyllium to swell. Use a scoop or large spoon to take good sized dollops of the mixture and add to a fry pan that has been preheated and seasoned with coconut oil or rice bran oil (the latter cooks a little hotter so make sure it doesn't burn). When browned on one side flip over and do the other side, don't need a lot of cooking, just enough to hold them together.  Serve warm with fresh salad pickings from the garden ... eg some sliced cucumber, sliced tomato and fresh purslane ( a highly nutritious and tasty weed).

Sweet potato cakes.

I made these as a substitute for fish cakes.  Cook one sweet potato, drain and mash.  Add a little coconut and some finely chopped kale. Thicken with Teff flour.  Form into patties. Brown both sides in a frypan with a little coconut oil. Season with veggie salt. Serves two people.

Zucchini spaghetti

Use a spiralizer to grate a zucchini into long "spaghetti" strands. Stir fry with a little coconut oil.  Puree one to two  tomatoes in the blender and add puree to pan.  Add mixed herbs to taste.  Add two dessertspoons of teff flour to add iron and protein as well as thicken the mixture.  Cooked when zucchini is soft and mixture has thickened. Add vogel salt to taste. Serves one hungry vegan.

Vegan one year on - successes and lessons learnt.

Last March I started a six week experiment to see if going vegan would improve my rapidly deteriorating fingernails.  The fact that I'm vegan one year on is testimony to the fact it did work.  In the process I uncovered a dairy allergy. Gee its great to have a full sense of smell now I haven't got blocked sinuses. A December visit to the optometrist left both me and the optometrist surprised as my vision had improved and he wanted to know what I had done - the only think I could think of was the change in diet.

What I've learnt along the way.
While I had supreme health for nine months a bout of stress just before year's end and too much summer fruit made my chronic problem with candida flare up.  It didn't seem to want to respond to my normal strategies so I consulted my general practitioner who referred me on for advice.  It turned out too much fruit (including goji berries), sweeteners such as agave syrup and too much spice in the curries I'd been having had unbalanced my system and surprisingly olive oil and chamomile turned out to be a problem for me as well.

This lead to a serious rethink on the recipe front. My beloved sprouts are still a big part of my diet.  Especially mung beans, broccoli, alfalfa, germinated brown rice and quinoa. As I needed probiotics to rebalance the system  I've come up with a barley sprout powder, probiotic powder and fibre (inulin) drink that I have twice a day and as I rather like the drink its a bright part of the day.  Green leafy vegetables are another big part of the diet, especially for the work's lunch box and I'm worried about the increased pesticide intake. I did a first aid course once with a lady who worked on one of those farms that grows greens for supermarkets and she told me about all the chemicals they use.  As the local organic shops don't keep a big range of greens I've been busy expanding the current veggie patch and my partner is going to build me a bigger purpose made area attached to the house - to grow things like margoram, oregano, sorrel, rocket, perilla, chicories and japanese parsley - so I can just walk out the kitchen door and pick what I want.  Now root vegetables, not being fruit, have attracted my renewed interest of late.  I highly recommend getting a julienne peeler - these allow you to thinly shred root vegetables - great for quick stir fries or eating raw and much easier to clean than graters, especiallly if your only preparing food for yourself.  Parsnips, turnips, swedes and radishes all get chucked into my meals.  At the moment I go easy on the the carrots, beets and sweet potatoes due to their high sugar content . While tomatoes and cucumbers are technically fruit they seem to be ok so I'm having a few.  I've replaced my favourite spicy tofu with plain organic. For nuts my favourites are macadamia's, walnuts and hazelnuts but I use quite a few other nuts and seeds as well, especially as added texture and flavour in salads. For drinks I'm sticking to white tea (a type of green tea), nettle tea and our gorgeous water that comes straight out of the ground in the hills above our property. While some say you don't need to, and my blood levels are good, I'm nonetheless choosing to supplement with B12, kelp, organic derived iron and vitamin D. I'm also having bitters before meals and trying to incorporate a few bitter greens in my meals.  This is just what seems to suit me and wouldn't necessarily work for everyone - although it should me noted that on the whole the western diet is too sweet and doesn't incorporate all the diverse flavours you'd normally find in more asian cuisines. I was tired for a couple of weeks while I cut the sugar down but now I'm well again and feeling great.

I got a magazine on Friday with a write up of an interview with a David Wolfe and it was interesting to hear that he favours a raw diet but not too many of the very sweet fruits and said to go easy on the nuts. He likes to browse the wild foods in what ever area he's visiting.  Another useful thing he said was if you are travelling try to find where the farmers markets and organic shops are.  Cucumbers also keep quite well if you are travelling around and need something to snack on.  He recommends putting together a bit of a snack pack.

Flaxseed, Quinoa and Maca Vegan porridge

Its that bone-chilling time you get at the end of winter and I haven't been feeling like raw apple and amaranth sprouts for breakfast so experimented until I came up with the following porridge:

Grind about two tablespoons of flax seeds in a coffee grinder, add a heaped spoon of Maca, about two heaped tablespoons of quinoa or amaranth flakes. Mix together then poor on boiling water and stir some more until it thickens.  Put some no sugar jam on top or some frozen berries.  If you still need sweetener add agave syrup to taste.

Sprouts for breakfast

Going vegan a few months ago meant that I needed to make sure I was getting a wide variety of fresh and nutritious food into my diet.  My initial interest was in growing Amaranth and Quinoa given their high levels of protein and minerals. Both tend to be bitter in their unsprouted state due to Sapoins.  Having had mixed experiences years ago with muslin cloth and rubber band covered jars I decided instead on getter some jars with the specially designed lids.  These have been great: easy to clean the lids between use and easy to rinse the sprouts - there is no nasty bacteria build up on cloth or rubber bands. Impressed with my first sprouts I ventured into trying mung beans and the much talked about broccoli sprouts.  The broccoli sprouts are nice to add to a summer salad as an added seasoning but you mightn't want to eat too many on their own as the taste is quite strong and the price is very high for even a small packet of the seeds for sprouting. I'm growing some broccoli plants now and will save the seed from them. The mung beans though sprout nearly as quickly as the amaranth and quinoa. I'm not a  fancy cook so I use my sprouts in fairly simple ways:

Breakfast sprouts:
Rinse some mixed amaranth and quinoa sprouts in cold water (to remove any residual bitter taste that builds up quite quickly)
Take a heaped spoon of the sprouts and add to a breakfast bowl with chopped up apple.  Top with no-sugar blue berry or cherry jam (or berries in season) and flaked almonds.

Stir fry mung beans
prepare a small frypan with olive oil and a little madras curry powder and or some cumin seeds and brown just enough to mix the spices into the oil
chop up and add one onion or if you prefer a milder flavour use two shallots
put a 1/3 of a sprout jar of sprouted mung beans into a fry pan
chop up a 1/4 of a sweet capsicum and add
stir fry until the onion is just cooked.
makes a very quick one person serving and is great if you've just come home and you're hungry.

I tried sprouting flax seeds which was a total failure - they just formed a gooey gluey mess.

A more recent success though has been sunflower seed sprouts which are lovely and crunchy and great to sprinkle on a salad or a tofu sandwich.  Whole sunflower seeds are actually quite hard to find in my part of the world.  I ended up getting mine from an agricultural supplies vendor very cheaply if you buy by the kilo bag.

Lastly, I know from Chinese medicine that I'm supposed to eat plenty of those little red adzuki beans but have avoided them in the past because I can't digest them to well.  Sprouted I find them quite digestible, especially if I cook them with a little bit of shredded nori. For a simple winter dish cook sprouted adzuki with some brown rice and then add to a stir fry of pumpkin, nori and shallots or onions.  This makes quite a tasty filling feed.