I’m excited! Look what arrived on the last day of September/Vegan MoFo 2014!
My motto for a long time has been “greens at every meal” so this recipe book? This is one that I can recommend a kerjillion times over.
About Leigh Drew’s Greenilicious
If you’re the type of person who can’t follow a recipe to save themselves and find yourself forever tweaking and adjusting – adding more greens and vegetables, reducing oil, replacing this or that – then this is the cookbook for you, too. I was looking at the green crêpes(!) recipe with a nut cream filling and thinking, I wonder if I could replace that with white beans because I eat enough nuts in raw food dishes as it is, and lo, there’s a little hint box at the side of the page suggesting I do exactly that if I want to, and that I should also leave out the water… That’s the sort of thing I want to know, and, in this case, exactly the thing I want to know!
So you won’t find yourself rewriting this cookbook because it’s damn good exactly the way it is… even if it seems like it’s reading your mind and might be possessed… DEVIL COOKBOOK. All glory to Leigh!
But, to be fair, I do have one criticism… There’s a recipe containing bitter melons… hell no. Been there, never eating that thing again. Good god, Lemon.
EXPECTO PATRONUM.
Luckily, bitter melon aside, there are still around 6,999 edible plants in the world left for me to choose from! Vegan eating: so many ways to jump on it…
If you want to grab a copy check out Facebook or Twitter or Arbon Publishing for further info. Leigh’s previous cookbook Veganissimo! is also rather smashing, especially the infamous smoked paprika and roasted garlic cashew cheese, glargh – there’s even a song dedicated to it. Check out the profile I did on Leigh some years back.
Also, you can get a free giveaway copy of this brand spanking new cookbook AND Veganissimo! by posting your worst foodie photo on Instagram! Check out the competition details.
Disclaimer: Leigh is a long-time Twitter friend and we met at Green Fest in Brisbane, Australia some years back where she was doing a cooking demo, and she is awesome, so it follows that her books are also awesome. Awesome? Awesome. And I tested a few recipes during the editing phase and they were awesomely delicious. … is that how disclaimers are supposed to go? Eh, that’ll do… cough, awesome, cough. I also tested a few of the recipes in the book during the editing phase… Dumplings, you guys! Gyoza! Anywho…
My Foodlosophy
After almost 10 years of tweaking my vegan food consumption, these days my diet is pretty srsly wholefood-based, largely made up of vegetables, greens, fruits, beans, wholegrains, nuts and seeds, and some home-cooked flour products. More and more often condiments are homemade these days, too. I often significantly reduce or entirely omit oil from cooking except where it is vital for flavour or texture – and even then I reduce it or look for a way to replace most or all of it: even cold-pressed oils are highly refined, calorie-dense foods that are practically devoid of micronutrients and take up relatively very little stomach space. If I’m looking for higher calorie ingredients in addition to fruits and vegetables, I’d rather stack my plate sky-high with more satiating, nutrient-dense, fibre-packed/gut-friendly beans and grains, nuts and seeds… Calorie for calorie, you get a LOT more food and nutrients in that way: eat more good food, not less! And get enough sleep, exercise (daily workout + movement throughout the day), and water… and keep watching Dr Greger’s videos for the latest and best in nutrition science! (Current: eat more turmeric for improved brain health and reversing dementia/Alzheimer’s symptoms.)
I usually have 5-6 small meals a day and mostly raw/living food until dinner. In addition to raw smoothies, soups, salads, gourmet desserts and mains, I’m a rice-focused kinda girl for the most part, because it’s such a cheap, healthful, satiating, and easy meal-base for dahls or sweet potato and spinach curries, tossed tempeh salads, tofu stir-fries, sushi, as well as the occasional mushroom burger or bean burrito… and occasionally I replace some of my favourite grain with “root rice” (finely chopped root vegetables) like daikon or turnip… or oil-free baked potatoes. I throw buckwheat, amaranth, oats, quinoa, besan and beans into the mix a lot as well… so while rice is my most regular go-to, it’s not a daily feature. (I can’t stomach corn so I avoid that but it’s another excellent filling staple if you like it, and I’d eat more wheat if it didn’t make me and my IBD-diagnosed husband bloat up like hostile puffer fishes.)
So Greenilicious is the sort of thing that’s going to help expand that part of my diet beyond the south-to-east Asian focus I’ve had in recent times, with gluten-free mini quiches, the aforementioned green crêpes, patés, salads, more smoothies, polenta and cauliflower-base pizzas, greens-laden desserts and cakes(!), and more herbs, breakfasts, and creative baked dishes than you can shake a stick at… I’ll do a big review of Greenilicious with some foodie pics in another post…
But like BiteSizeVegan says in one of her videos, the best diet is whatever vegan diet is sustainable for you, be it a wholefood mostly-raw super-green diet like mine, a high carb fruit diet or a low carb deep-fried diet… Any way you do it, vegan food is going to do you, the planet, and the animals a lot of good… Plants! This is how we do it!… ahem. Moving on.
Vegan MoFo, 2014! And keeping busy with childerbeasts…
Reading the blog posts from MoFo 2014 has been a blast, although a struggle to keep up, and I did have to scan/scroll quickly through a good deal of them, but gosh, there’s tonnes of fabulous vegan food photography around! Glargh.
This year is a busy one for me, between general parenting, my eldest really getting stuck into her education, home renovation (does it ever end?), getting some written work done, and studying organic and bio- chemistry and physics – because I really got into the whole pre-med thing after studying the nutrition/medicine course through Cornell/T Colin Campbell Foundation last year…
And it pretty much boils down to, do I get exercise and have a (tiny tiny) bit of a social life with my family and get a bit of work done, or do I blog? And most days, well, the blog – or even seeing what other people are posting – doesn’t cross my mind. It’s still on my list of things I want to do, but at the moment it’s too far down to get a look in… and I’m definitely grateful that my wants to-do list is long enough that I don’t get to do everything! Of course, my list of rubbish things I have to do, like cleaning and washing clothes, also interfere. One day, I’ll be more organised and my children will require less of my time… then, no doubt, I’ll be blogging about how I long for the days when I didn’t have time to blog…
But over the past few weeks I did take some photos! That I didn’t get around to blogging. And I will put up some more photos and comments about Greenilicious recipes in a few weeks… because: exciting food! Excited! But first, on with the unposted fotes!
Sorghum scones with jam & whipped cream…
… aka trying out Soyatoo.
Snacks at a Vegan Parents Australia meet-up:
Gold Coast edition
Banana bread & apple muffins with blueberries on top
based on Blueberry-Banana Bread from Fat-Free Vegan
Hot & Sour Rice Noodles
+ Amaranth Tahini Salad
Buckwheat Oat Pancakes
Pumpkin Soup is love
‘Shroom Burrito!
Lunch Noodles
Early morning snugglecat
Fuji Wuji Snowflake lying next to me
5yo’s milk teeth are falling out
Way to make the world feel old, kid.
So, MoFo is at a close, following along has been great even if I didn’t make it to the party. Now, sadly, we have to wait until September 2015 before we again face the very serious potential threat that is breaking the internet with an inundation of glorious vegan foodie pics. Nerds.
Apologies for the links to appallingly daggy vids in this post! But please forgive me and stay tuned for more photos of glorious green recipes from Greenilicious that I’ll put up as soon as I get a chance to whip some up… but first, 3-year-old #selfie:
