Share the Love: 6/24/11

Thanks everyone for the congrats on our 4th wedding anniversary, it made me happy to read all of your comments. Four years goes by fast, that’s for sure! We’ve been doing fun things all week to celebrate, and we’re getting ourselves a wonderful new kitchen gadget as well … stayed tuned for more info.

It’s now that time again for Share the Love!

{Share the Love}

• Dairy Free Betty’s Instagram post: Jessica did an Instagram post the other day inspired by my Week in the Lens of Instagram series, and it was so fun I had to share it!
  Feel free to join us in our Instagram {or cell phone picture} fun! :)

• The Ultimate Strawberry Lemonade on Heather’s Dish: This lemonade looks so delicious and refreshing with fresh summer lemons and strawberries! I’m definitely going to need to try it. (Hint: my new anniversary kitchen gadget will be very useful in making this).

• Angela’s High Protein Quinoa Almond Berry Salad: Whenever I make Angela’s recipes, they always seem to be hits! I have yet to try one I haven’t made over and over again. This quinoa salad is so beautifully bright, and I plan on experiencing how delicious it is as well!

• Amber Shea’s “Almost Vegan”: CONGRATS to fellow Kansas City blogger Amber for her exciting news that she’s going to be getting published writing her first cookbook! Her recipes always look delicious, I’m sure her cookbook is going to be amazing!

And it’s time for another glorious summer weekend! What are your weekend plans?

Four Years Ago

I will now interrupt regular scheduled posting with this …

Today, June 23rd, marks Erik’s and my 4th year wedding anniversary!

I think it’s fun to look back over the past four years that have FLOWN by. Here’s some lovely sentimental commemoration pictures, ha, along with some marriage words of wisdom:

To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the
wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it;
whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash

Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they
blossom when we love the ones we marry.
Tom Mullen

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how
compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Leo Tolstoy

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through
every circumstance.
I Corinthians 13:7

I got gaps; you got gaps; we fill each other's gaps.
Rocky

(I had to include that last one … we like Rocky!)

What your favorite saying of relationship wisdom??

Raw Vegan Chocolate Milk

Allow me to just jump right into this post …

How to Eat the Rainbow Everyday {Part II}

Missed Part I?

I ended my last post telling you we got to make our own delicious raw “rainbow” to eat, so here’s how it was done!

A huge assortment of herbs, vegetables and fruit were all prepped and ready for us:

Everything we ate at Monday’s class (minus a few ingredients) was all local. Many of the herbs came from Home Contained Edible Yard & Landscaping, brought by owner Debbie Kaplan. Her home is made of shipping containers, and her yard is edible! All her herbs and edible flowers were delicious.

She’s apart of the tour this weekend at 5937 Charlotte in KC, MO. Erik already has a slight obsession with shipping container homes, so we’re excited to check it out.

We all got to grab a collard leaf, and pile it high with all the wonderful fresh, local, and delicious raw food. While we were assembling our greens, Heidi prepared a massaged kale salad, talked about making dressings, delicious salads, and “sunny milk”.

When they were all assembled, we added the dressing Heidi had just made, and dove right into our food.

Complete with spirulina tablets.

While eating, we had a chance to ask questions, and drink raw “sunny mylk”.

Heidi shared her basic raw “sunny mylk” recipe with us, encouraging us to experiment with the our own versions of mylk, dressings and combinations.

Thus far, Erik and I have had our own chocolate “milk” every morning since the class. It’s amazing! Here’s how we’ve been making it:

Raw Vegan Chocolate “Milk”

*recipe makes two giant glasses full
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
- 1 tsp mineral salt
- 1/4 cup agave nectar
- 4 cups water
- 2 small tablespoons raw cacao powder

Directions:
-- Blend everything together! Add more agave, water, or cacao power, to taste. Start off with a little water to get everything blended, that add the rest. Serve with ice.

The night ended with a massaged kale salad with fresh herbs and goji berries. It was delicious!

We had a lot of fun at this class, and definitely plan to go to more of Heidi’s classes in the future. Thanks, Heidi, and Urban Farms & Garden Tour!

How to eat the rainbow everyday

Erik and I are off to a good start in our 4th wedding anniversary week celebration!

How to Eat the Rainbow Everyday {part 1}

Monday night, as a part of the 2011 Urban Farms & Garden Tour events, we went to a raw food class at one of our favorite KC restaurants (that I talk about all the time), FUD. We covered so much I’m going to break this recap into two separate posts … so here goes the first one!

The theme of the class was “How to Eat the Rainbow Everyday”, taught by owner & chef of FUD, Heidi Belle.

It focused on incorporating every color of the rainbow into meals through raw foods, as each color delivers amino acids and phytonutrients for different parts of the body.

Our evening started out with a delicious cold brewed green tea, and then we got to business!

The premise was to make a tasty, complete raw meal you need the following categories of raw fruits, seeds, nuts & vegetables:

1. Fats -- avocados, nuts, seeds and raw oils like virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil, flax oil and hemp oil.
2. Acids -- lemons, oranges, tomatoes, bell peppers, sour cherries, sour berries, raw vinegars, fermented foods
3. Sweets -- bananas, dates, goji berries, raisins, grapes, mangoes, apples, pineapples, oranges
4. Savory -- all vegetables and sprouts
5. Salty -- natural unheated mineral/sea salt, celery, Swiss chard, dulse flakes (sea weed)
6. Aromatic -- herbs and spices

The class covered the following tips in making delicious raw foods:

• When keeping these six categories in mind when shopping, it will be much easier to prepare a fast “rainbow” snack.
• To make a completely satisfying meal, use the “savory” category (all vegetables and sprouts) as your foundation to build upon.
• Prepare a dressing with all the categories in mind for a more delicious and nutritious meal.
  • Sample dressing would be to blend together: garlic cloves, peeled lemon, natural mineral salt, peeled orange, virgin olive oil, cashew and water
• Chop enough produce in advance so that you can easily make a quick snack
• Grow “aromatic” herbs in pots in your home for easy, inexpensive flavor enhancing and beneficial medicinal qualities. If you don’t have your own herbs, buy from local farmers to help promote a healthy community.
• Use sweet fruits for breakfast or as an accent to a savory meal.
• Buy the best salt on the market. A bad salt means hardening of the soft tissues in the circulatory system.

And for dinner, we got to build our own “rainbow”:

More info on where the ingredients to this delicious “rainbow” came from, how we made it, what else we ate, and a lot more pictures!

Stay tuned for Part II!

Jackfruit, Take II

I hope everyone had a great weekend!! I love summer weekends, so much more to do, and so nice to be outside!

Flew the Coup

I’m happy to report the little birdies on our deck have officially flown the coup! Here they are on one of their last days in the nest. As you can see, the four of them were all definitely getting too big for their little nest, ha.

One of the little guys is still in our backyard. He can’t seem to get over the fence yet. His mom is still bringing him food, and I suspect he’ll be able to fly out eventually. As you can see from the below picture, he can fly for little increments, but just hasn’t gotten over the fence. We’re rooting for him!!

Thankfully, Bubba’s pretty old and doesn’t seem to have any interest in the bird walking around his territory that is the back yard.

Jackfruit Success

As you may remember from last week, we bought a jackfruit and it ended up being too ripe. This time, we opted for canned green jackfruit, and it worked MUCH better!

It looks much lighter in color than our actual jackfruit, and it confirms our suspicion that the last one was just too ripe for a meat substitute.

It pulled apart with very little effort. We decided to try to make a “tuna” salad, inspired by the TuneRahh Sandwich at FUD (also made with jackfruit). Doesn’t it look like tuna?

We discovered soy-free Vegenaise recently and used it in our “tuna” jackfruit salad to make this a fully vegan meal.

And the final product, alongside a fresh salad dressed with Erik's awesome homemade salad dressing:

I mixed together the pulled jackfruit with the soy-free Vegenaise, chopped celery, onion, and an assortment of spices. We were pretty happy with the results.

This canned jackfruit opens a whole new world of jackfruit “meat” opportunities! I’m excited to try more, and this jackfruit is very easy to work with.

Monday night we’re going to a raw food class at FUD that I’m very excited for. Pictures and recap will certainly follow!

Our 4th wedding anniversary is on Thursday so we figure it’s just part of our anniversary week celebration!