I love recipes like this! Take a list of base ingredients, plus what you need to stick them all together, and then play around with the flavours. Ok, so that’s not exactly what it says in the recipe, but that’s essentially what you can do… similar to the granola recipe.
Here, oats, toasted walnuts, oat bran (I didn’t have any so used sunflower and pumpkin seeds), and brown rice cereal make up the base. For flavour the recipe calls for cranberries and crystallized ginger, but I’m not a fan of crystallized ginger so I added some raisins instead. All of these ingredients are held together by a mix of brown rice syrup and sugar mixed with vanilla and some salt. Easy! Took me about 10 minutes to make. The bars are pretty sticky, but they are very tasty and would definitely settle a grumbling stomach. Will definitely do again… maybe with apricots and almonds? I nearly threw in some chocolate chips this time around, but decided to save that for another go – maybe along with some banana chips? Lots of options!
Here is a delicious, flavourful and warming soup. We enjoyed it for dinner last night and I’m looking forward to the lunch leftovers today. You can’t go wrong with coconut milk paired with a squeeze of lime and the sweet potato croutons and wild rice make this a hearty, healthy soup.
The wild rice is simmered with onion, shallot and red curry paste (I’ll use more curry paste next time) and for the first time I finally cooked the wild rice long enough so that it wasn’t a jaw workout to eat. Heidi advises to cook the rice for 40 minutes or “until the rice starts to soften, split and show its fluffy insides.” That was a great tip since even after 40 minutes it felt a bit tough to me and finally started to split after around 55 minutes.
While the rice is simmering I made the sweet potato croutons. They turned out well, but I wasn’t too thrilled with pan frying the 1/4″ chopped pieces until crispy. Next time I might try baking them and tossing every 10 minutes or so. Simple and delicious ingredients though: chopped sweet potato, coconut oil and salt.
Once the rice is done a few more flavourings are added (mmm turmeric) as well as a can of coconut milk. Lime juice is squeezed in and the soup is served, topped with the croutons. Delicious!
There’s been a bag of shelled edamame in my freezer for what feels like forever and getting back into making recipes for this blog seemed like a good opportunity to use it. The ingredients in this salad are pretty high on the list of “power foods” – edamame, soybeans, hijiki (a sea vegetable), miso, unpasteurized honey and spinach – lots of antioxidants, minerals and other essential nutrients.
I had a bag of dulse in the cupboard and so I used that instead of the hijiki, and next time I would increase the amount. The salad came together easily and the dressing too. I will definitely make the creamy miso dressing again for other salads.
I really like recipes that call for “handfuls” of greens since I tend to always try to sneak in more veggies than specifically called for. I used a whole clamshell of baby spinach and could still have gotten away with more. The recipe makes plenty of dressing so no need to skimp on any of the salad components. I’d never bought daikon before and standing in front of the bin full of various sizes in the grocery store looking for the 1/2 daikon that the recipe calls for was a bit tricky, but here, to a certain degree, size doesn’t matter. The daikon and a carrot are shredded and then sliced into matchsticks (a step I skipped) so add as much as you like.
All in all, a pretty tasty and healthy recipe. Definitely a do-again!