Blueberry & Banana Pudding

I made this for my flatmates last night to eat while we watched a movie. It’s really easy if you keep chopped frozen bananas in the freezer and have a jar of buckwheaties on hand. It probably took 10 minutes to whip up.

Ingredients

2 frozen bananas (chopped)
1 cup frozen blueberries
1 small avocado
1 tbsp honey, agave or a couple of dates (whichever you prefer)
1/2 cup dried coconut
1/2 cup buckwheaties

Method

Pudding:

Place the chopped frozen banana, avocado, blueberries and your sweetener of choice into a food processor or high speed blender and blend until smooth.
Spoon into bowls and sprinkle with coconut and buckwheaties for a bit of crunch!

Buckwheaties:

Soak whole buckwheat groats in water for about 8hrs.
Use a sieve to drain and thoroughly rinse the buckwheat.
Spread the buckwheat over mesh dehydrator tray and dehydrate 8-12hrs or until fully dry and crunchy.
Another optional extra is to add cinnamon and honey, maple syrup or agave nectar before dehydrating.

Green Smoothie Lecture Notes

I went along to Victoria and Valya Boutenko’s talk in Wellington last night. Although I knew their story well from reading Green for Life it was great to hear Victoria tell it in person. She talked about a lot of things I am going to try and implement in my own life.

Here are a few points I took away from the lecture:

1. You should try to get in 1-2 litres of green smoothie per day.
2. The best time to drink your smoothie is from 6am-noon as that is when your body can assimilate the nutrients most effectively.
3. You should try to sip away at your smoothie rather than gulping it all down at once.
4. Green Smoothie will keep for up to 3 days in the refrigerator whereas juice needs to be consumed right away or else it oxidises.
5. You should rotate your greens, don’t just stick to one or two.
6. You should get in 2 big bunches of greens a day. (A bunch would be something like a head of lettuce or a bunch of silverbeet)
7. If you blend your greens you can assimilate more of the nutrients, so you don’t need as many as when you eat them whole.
8. If you’re new to green smoothies you might like to start off with a 70/30 ratio of fruit to greens and gradually move to a 30/70 ratio as you get used to the greens.
9. You should use greens that are able to be rolled around in your fingers. Things like broccoli or cabbage are too starchy and will create gas when combined with fruits.
10. Greens are in a separate category to vegetables.
11. Don’t mix in supplements with your green smoothie, it causes your body to concentrate on those rather than the minerals in the greens. Save your supplements for another smoothie.
12. The best time to pick your greens is before they have flowers or have gone to seed. Once this happens the plant sends all the nutrients into the flower and then into the seed.
13. Diabetes and Candida are not caused by too much sugar. You don’t need to cut out sugar. It’s actually caused by too much fat. What happens when you eat sugar is the pancreas send out some insulin to bind with the sugar in your bloodstream. If you have too much fat in your blood both the sugar and insulin are coated with fat and can’t bind together which is where the problems are caused. Dr Doug Graham has similar research on this. She said that you can cut out all fat for one week and you should see an improvement. After that you’ll also find that your body doesn’t want so much fat anymore.

If you were at the lecture as well please comment below about what you learned!

You can read more about Victoria Boutenko and her family here.

Green Smoothie Revolution!

I’ve had a few requests recently to post up some green smoothie recipes so I thought it would coincide nicely leading up to the Green Smoothie Revolution talks around New Zealand right now. If you’re already into raw food you’ll no doubt know all about the green smoothie but for those of you who don’t here’s the lowdown.

The basic green smoothie recipe is so easy your kids could and should make it. Take some green leafy veges and blend with fruit and water. That’s it. You’ll eventually come up with your own favourite combinations and it’s best to use what is growing seasonally and locally.

Here’s a few of my favourite blends.

Kale, Banana, Tangelo, Spring Water

Kale, Banana, Yellow Plums, Spring Water, topped with goji berries (as shown above)

Spinach, Strawberry, Mint, Banana, Spring Water

Banana, Swiss Chard, Blueberries, Goji Berries, Coconut, Spirulina, Bee Pollen, Spring Water

Savoury: Spinach, Avocado, Red Capsicum, Tomato, Unpasteurised Miso Paste, Alfalfa Sprouts, Zucchini, Cucumber, Lemon Juice, Tamari, Spring Water. You can eat this version in a bowl like a soup with chunks of tomato and avocado. So good on a hot day.

Greens are so vital for our health, they provide so many nutrients and minerals that we should try to get them in wherever we can. So that’s why the green smoothie is so great. Kids love them too. It’s a good way to hide the greens if you aren’t that into the flavour. The taste of the fruit cancels out the chlorophyll taste of the greens. If you’re just starting out, I recommend a nice mildly flavoured green like spinach which is really high in protein. Ditch the multivitamins and try drinking a 500ml glass or more of green smoothie a day and see how great you feel after a week.

Here’s a great demonstration from the lovely Karen Knowler

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFm9_6BTCHM&hl=en&fs=1]

If you’re in Wellington or Christchurch you’re in luck! The green smoothie queen herself is doing a tour of Australasia during February. Victoria Boutenko and her daughter Valya are doing a series of talks all about green smoothies and all things raw vegan. You can get more info about the Boutenko family here.

February 26th:
Wellington, New Zealand
When: Thurs 26 Feb. 6.30pm – 9.30pm
Where: Wellington Central Baptist Church, 46 Boulcott Street, Wellington Central
(free parking at the Tournament Car park building opposite)
Cost: $30 reduced to $25 if paid by 20 Feb.
For bookings & enquires: www.purewellbeing.com or phone Wgtn 04-384 7070
or email health@purewellbeing.com

Feb. 28th Christchurch, New Zealand
When: Sat. 28 Feb. 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Where: Christchurch Netball Centre
Hagley Park, central Christchurch
Cost: $25 (registration essential)
For bookings & enquiries: email on kaz@xtra.co.nz or by
texting or calling 027 339 0051.
Messages can also be left on 03 343 2022.

Atsumi detox in Thailand

I’m on my fourth and final day of fasting at Atsumi on Phuket in Thailand. It’s been amazing and one of the highlights of my trip. I completely recommend it. Most people do at least a week but four days was all I had time for. You can do an all raw fast or a juice fast or the full fast, which is what I did.

The daily schedule consists of morning yoga and your choice of massage (Thai, reflexology, oil, thaiatsu) sometime during the day. There’s also a beach trip each day and an activity at night like meditation, kickboxing, salsa dancing which all helps to keep you busy. Or you can just do your own thing. We also alternate arise and shine herbs and chompa to help that mucoid plaque out with psyllium and bentonite clay shakes. And to get all of those dirty toxins out we do two colemas a day. So after all that there’s not much time to be thinking of food.

They have plenty of additional therapies like rebirthing, hypnotherapy and acupuncture. Yesterday I had the most amazing therapy though. It was part reiki and energy work and part card reading with a medium. She told me about every part of my life now and for the future. Things that only I could have known, it was incredible.

As far as the physical detox goes, the first three days were tough, I was pretty weak for the most part but this morning I woke up feeling better than ever. Best trip ever. Everyone should do it.

Find out more about Atsumi here.

The Yoga Room

A Massage Hut

Gardens at Atsumi

Atsumi healing centre

Today I leave Hanoi to go back to Thailand. As interesting as Vietnam has been I am really looking toward to the warm beaches of Thailand again. I’ve booked into Atsumi Healing Centre on Phuket for a few days of fasting, yoga, meditation, colonics and massage. For the first time in well over a year I caught a little cold and I’ve been feeling a little run down. And I can tell you exactly why. While fruit and juice and smoothies are easy to order from the menu in south east Asia, fresh raw greens aren’t all that common. They’re mostly served cooked. So my diet has dropped to around 50% raw lately. I’ve still kept it strictly vegan and free of processed junk but I’m not getting anywhere near the amount of greens I am used to other than some green powder I bought along for the trip.. My travelling companions are neither raw nor vegan so we’ve been out at restaurants a lot rather than the markets. All poor excuses I know, but you make compromises where you have to for such a great trip. So more to come on how things go at Atsumi in the coming days.

Rasayana

I’ve just finished a colonic session at Rasayana, an inner city detox centre and raw food restaurant. It was pretty hard to find, I took a taxifrpm banglamphu and gave the driver a map that Rasayana had faxed to my hotel. It still took a good 3/4 hr to get there with my two phrase Thai vocabulary and the taxi drivers bad English but we got there in the end for 300baht. Well it was all worth it. The food was amazing, I could have ordered the whole menu had I not just had the colonic. I was sitting there wishing I could be more hungry. So I settled on a green juice and a thai coconut noodle salad which was just divine. It had coconut and zucchini strips with a spicy Thai tomato sauce and peppers and semi dried baby tomatoes on a bed of lettuce. Bring the raw glutton that I am I ordered some nori rolls to take home for later and a selection of little raw snacks from the counter. The carrot crackers were really delicious and crunchy. They were made from carrot, sprouted almonds and cashews, thyme, flaxseed and love my other favourite were the carob macadamia crackers. They tasted more like banana though. They were a crispy blend of banana, coconut, sesame, carob, macadamia and love (they write that on all the ingredients!) I would love to go back there and try everything but we are off out of Bangkok tomorow so I’ll just have to ration my snacks as best I can.

Ethos

I’m sitting on the floor of a great little restaurant called ethos in banglamphu, Bangkok. I’ve just downed an amazing mango shake and I’m making my way through a fruit platter with freshly cut pineapple, mango, papaya, watermelon, banana and apple. There’s kirtan playing on the radio and a warm breeze. Ethos is on a small side street near Khao San Road littered with vegetarian restaurants. It’s my second trip here, I came last night for dinner and had the papaya salad, which is a Thai speciality. Down the road is May Kaidees, another vegetarian restaurant where you can also take vegan cooking classes. This is a great street to escape from the madness that is Khao San Road and they have free wifi too.

DIY Miniature Greenhouse

A few weeks ago we got some unfortunate news. Our landlords were moving back to New Zealand and they wanted their house back. So after five long years in this wonderful house and just as the planting season is starting to kick in I suddenly had nowhere to plant my seedlings! I had just ordered all these heirloom seeds and had prepped the vege patch, so what was I to do? I had to give these seeds a temporary home before we found a new house to make our new vege garden at.

This makeshift miniature greenhouse that I made was like a tropical heaven for my seeds. They sprouted up in less than a week and in the picture above they’ve been growing for maybe two weeks. All I did was place my seed raising tray inside one of those thick plastic bags that your new duvet cover or sheet set comes in. It’s a good boxy shape to fit the tray in and it creates a super warm and cosy home for your wee babies. If you want to provide a little extra encouragement in the colder weather you can sit the whole thing on top of a hot water bottle and just change the water once or twice a day.

We found a new place with a big back yard so I’ll be roping in a few extra hands for a working bee to make a new vege garden. I’ll try to take lots of pictures as it all grows!