‘Duh’ recipe: Little Heaps of Harmony

Hello lovelies! How have you been this Self-love Sunday? I hope you have been giving yourself the attention you deserve :) My day has been spent yoga-ing, breakfasting, best-friending, preparing for a ball I’m attending this Friday (you’ll see more on this!) and last but not least, blending up some scrumptious goods! All Delicious, Uncomplicated and Healthy of course (previous duh recipes, here, here and here).

First up I made Teresa Cutter’s (aka The Healthy Chef) banana-coconut bread. I was basically looking for recipes to use the last of my coconut flour, and was drawn to this baby instantly. Due to my gluten sensitivities I hadn’t had banana bread literally in years. Biting into this made me ridiculously happy.

While that was baking I got experimenting. My hypothesis – “If I blend some nuts and dates with whatever ingredients I’m feeling, I’ll produce something pretty damn tasty.” My experiment was a total success. I created two types of balls – the first Green Goddess offers a more earthy veg flavour, and the second one has chocolate, cos’ how could I not make one without chocolate. I experimented further by adding some orange essence I found. Hello Jaffa balls! They actually taste exactly like the Emma & Tom’s bars you can get in the supermarket. But better because they’re cheaper.

Little Heaps of Harmony

Base:

1/4 cup almonds
1/2 cup soaked dates

Green Goddess:

1 TBSP spirulina powder
1 TBSP hemp seeds

Jaffa Joy:

1 TBSP raw cacao powder
1/4 tsp orange essence

1. In a food processor, blend the almonds until a crumbly consistency.

2. Add dates to the processor. If making the Green Goddess, add the spiruina, or if making the Jaffa Joy, add the cacao and orange essence. Blend until all ingredients are combined and formed into a big ball of ‘dough’.

3. Using a teaspoon of the mixture, roll mixture into six balls. If making the Green Goddess, roll balls in hemp seeds to coat.

4. Refrigerate!

It’s as easy as that. I called these Little Heaps of Harmony because they are just that – each flavour works in harmony with one another, and each Heap works in harmony with your body as it agrees completely with its wants and needs.

Giving your body what it wants and needs? That’s totally something worth doing on Self-love Sunday.

xx

Recipe: The ultimate bowl of nourishment

Feeling a bit ew? Is your body screaming “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE SHOW ME SOME TL-FRICKEN-C”? Well, tell that bod of yours to scream no more, because I have the perfect meal for you.

Mung bean soup, or dahl, is highly popular in the Ayurvedic health system. Considered highly detoxifying, it is often consumed when cleansing – making it very ideal if you haven’t exactly been treating yourself all that well. According to the well-known Ayurveda practitioner Sebastian Pole, mung beans clean the tissues, strengthens the eyes, tonifies the heart, drains dampness and clears toxic heat from the body. I used whole mung beans for my dahl, soaking them overnight, in order to reap more of its benefits. All other ingredients in this dish also provide mass amounts of nutritional goodness, and make for a truly satisfying feed. I grabbed my recipe below from Vogue UK, here. It made about 7 servings, some of which I have frozen and the rest of which will be consumed for an easy lunch all week.

Mung beans, soaked overnight to provide AMGAP (As Much Goodness As Possible, obviously)

The veg component

Spice, spice and all things nice

Mung dahl

500g mung beans (soaked overnight in double the amount of water and covered)

1.5L chicken stock

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon ground turmeric

2 teaspoons ground coriander

6 cardamom pods, bashed up

1-2 tablespoons coconut oil

4 large onions, sliced

1 x 2 inch piece of ginger, grated

6 cloves of garlic, minced

4 carrots, chopped

2 large celery sticks, chopped

3 handfuls of coriander, stems chopped finely

1 tablespoon Tamari and 2 pinches of Himalayan salt

Spinach to serve

1. In a large pot, bring the stock to the boil. Drain and rinse the soaked mung beans and add to the stock. Simmer with the lid on (you will add to this in 20 minutes).

2. While that’s simmering away, dry fry the spices in a deep pan for 1 minute. Keep stirring so they don’t burn! Meanwhile, smell those delightful aromas.

3. Heat the coconut oil in the same pan and add the sliced onion. Cook on medium for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. (I added a bit more coconut oil halfway through as there was a lil bit of burning starting to happen. Just use your instinct).

4. Add the garlic and ginger and fry for a further 5 minutes, regularly stirring.

5. After the mung beans have been cooking for about 20 minutes, add to the pot the diced carrot and celery, the contents of the fry pan, Tamari, salt and chopped coriander stalks. Combine, put the lid on and let simmer on medium for another 15 minutes. Stir once or twice and add stock if needed, to prevent from sticking to the bottom of the pot (like mine did a bit, oops).

6. To serve, stir in lots of baby spinach and garnish with coriander leaves.

7. Eat it. Sit back and listen to your body say ever so gently, “thank you”.

This will be thoroughly enjoyed after escaping my desk to do a yoga session tomorrow. It’s safe to say that I’m certainly looking forward to lunch time!

xx

‘Duh’ recipes: Clean protein snacks!

Welcome to my most recent Delicious, Uncomplicated & Healthy recipes (previous DUH recipe here and here) which are what my afternoon tea and dessert has entailed for the past week. I introduce to you – Apple cinnamon protein bars and Chocolate peanut butter biscuits. Both well easy to make, yummy, high in protein and really good for you!

The apple & cinnamon protein bars are great. I actually made them over two weeks ago but keep them in the freezer; they’re sooo good defrosted, warmed in the microwave and served with cottage cheese or a dollop of yoghurt! They were made word for word from the original recipe here by the amazing fitness model Jamie Eason. She posts recipes on bodybuilding.com, and this is the first one I’ve tried. I look forward to trying more!

The chocolate peanut butter biscuits are even better. Like I LOVE THESE. They go perfectly with my cup of chamomile each night. My recipe was based on The Gracious Pantry’s chocolate peanut butter no-bake cookies. I just made a few small tweaks – including taking away the ‘no baking’ part.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscuits

– 1/2 cup agave nectar

– 2 teaspoons vanilla essence

-1/3 cup NATURAL peanut butter

– 1/4 cup psyllium husks

– 2 tablespoons chia seeds

– 1 cup whole rolled oats

– 1.5 tablespoons cocoa powder

1. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl (tip with the peanut butter – as it is natural, you will want to give it a good stir before including it in the mix as it is likely that the natural oil may have slightly separated)

2. Spoon balls of mixture onto a tray lined with baking paper. I got 17 balls out of my mixture. Trust me, you don’t need these too big as all the nutrients makes them really quite filling.

3. Place tray into a pre-heated 180°C oven and bake for about 15 minutes. Remove them from the oven and allow to cool on a cooling rack – they might be soft when leaving the oven, but the outside will become wonderfully crispy during the cooling process while the insides remain nice and soft.

4. ENJOY! Well I hope you do as much as I do anyway :)

xx

Nutritional Info of chocolate PB biscuits based on Spark Recipes:

17 Servings
Amount Per Serving
Calories		103.1
Total Fat		3.3 g
	Saturated Fat	0.5 g
	Polyunsaturated Fat	0.0 g
	Monounsaturated Fat	0.0 g
Cholesterol		0.0 mg
Sodium		19.5 mg
Potassium		7.3 mg
Total Carbohydrate		16.6 g
	Dietary Fiber	2.9 g
	Sugars	7.7 g
Protein		2.9 g

 

 

Me this month

June

(source)

Travelling to Uluru and North Queensland!!!! I can’t believe it’s so close. In under two weeks I will be on a plane to the ‘Red Centre’ of Australia and embark on a three day camping trip making my way to the wonder that is Uluru. I’m so excited to learn more about the Aboriginal cultural heritage along the way; I think it’s something every Australian should experience and I’m expecting the insight will allow me to look at my country very differently. Next up I will travel to North Queensland basically in the hope that it will be warm enough to spend every day at the beach. I’m also going to visit the beautiful Daintree Forest. But what’s the most exciting part of it all? Read on to find out ;)

Eating protein snacks that are clean, packed with nutrients and just soooo darn easy to make. Most recently I made apple cinnamon protein bars and chocolate peanut butter biscuits. Drooling yet? I’m posting the recipes in the next few days.

Drinking hot water with lemon and honey every morning because BOO I have tummy issues but also YAY because it’s reminded me just how good drinking this every morning makes me feel! I’m sure you’ve probably heard the benefits before but here are some anyway – it’s cleansing, alkalizing,  energy boosting and most beneficial in my case right now, it aids digestion. Be gone bad toxins.

Watching bands play live! The highlights of my past two weekends have consisted of having a few brewskies (albeit probably too many) and heading to see an awesome band play a just as awesome set. Last weekend was Jinja Safari and this weekend I saw San Cisco (they’re from my home town Freo and are only like, 16 years old and just SO talented. Kinda makes me question what the hell I’m doing with my life haha). Seriously listen to both bands though, their music make me so happy I feel a need to dance whenever I hear them. Sweet, sweet vibes.

San Cisco

Shopping  for a Sky Diving experience. Ohhh yeah buddy. It was a new years resolution and I thought that if I’m going to do it, I have to do it in an absolutely stunning location. So when I decided to travel to North Queensland there was no stopping me. SO PUMPED! I’ll be sure to get a sweet video.

Listening – to my favourite songs from the past 20 years, thanks to the best radio station in the world aka Triple J. Every year they run the ‘Hottest 100’ which counts down the best songs of the previous year based on the publics votes. It’s a massive thing here in Aus. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the hottest 100, they’re counting down the top 100 songs of the past 20 years. To vote I had to compile a list of my 20 favourites. It was so hard yet so rewarding!! Searching through all the songs just brought back so many great, hilarious memories. My number 1 song was Kasabian’s “L.S.F.” pretty much cos they’re the best band in the world. Ever. Also in the mix was Bon Iver, Green Day, System of a Down, Blink 182, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds…. and many more!

Reading…. I must admit, nothing (besides uni stuff but that doesn’t count). I just simply haven’t had time. But now that I’m going on holiday I’ll definitely need a good read or three – do you have any suggestions? :)

Have a fantastic June xx

‘Slice of heaven’ cake (clean & gluten-free)

Excuse me while I DIE AND GO TO DESSERT HEAVEN where I’m sure there are angels singing praise for this cake. And everyone’s really happy there because well, it’s heaven, but also because they can eat this baby without feeling too guilty due to its clean ingredients and pleasing quantity-to-satisfaction ratio. Habitants of dessert hell (they would eat what Cadbury passes as ‘chocolate’) would be really jealous of its wonderful flavours and moisture (I hate that word but it has to be said).

Confession: before making this, I don’t remember the last time I ate chocolate cake. Or any cake for that matter. Alas, my gluten intolerance and healthy stance on food has steered me clear of such things. So imagine my joy when I stumbled across this recipe! I suppose you could say I was ‘singing to the heavens’. Ahem.

Coconut is being used so much in healthy cooking nowadays and I’ve been using coconut butter/oil for my grilling for quite a while now. The difference to normal oils? Well how it was first explained to me was that when you heat other oils to a certain point their nutrients are depleted. Coconut oil however has a higher resistance to heat and retains all its goodness. It has healthy saturated fats, which are  converted into energy rather than being stored as fat. It is also said to be a great booster to metabolism. On the flour front, not only is it gluten-free, but it is also high in fiber and protein. The addition to both of these coconut ingredients in this dish gives it a taste that reminds me of one of my favourite traditional Aussie desserts – Lamingtons :)

Okay so, the recipe… I can’t give you. Well, I COULD, but it would totally go against what I believe is fair when it comes to copyright. So instead I’ll simply lead you to the original owner of the recipe below and offer you an insight into its process by way of photographs.

Dry ingredients

Plus wet ingredients

Plus a 15 minute stint in the oven

Equals happy food time.

Go here to view the full recipe for these slices of heaven xx