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Posts Tagged ‘fruit’

Honey Coconut Citrus Salad

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »

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Happy 2013, everyone! I hope you had a great holiday season. I know I promised you cookies and such during December but I sort of fell off the radar. I spent most of December crafting my brains out. I think I mentioned that I decided to make most of my Christmas gifts this year?

yeah…I bit off a little more then I could chew and I’m still working on Christmas gifts! I’m in the home stretch though and I’m excited to get back to normal.

The month of December was by far the worst month I’ve had since going vegan over a year ago. I fell off the wagon…a lot. I like, fell off the wagon and then clung on by my finger tips as the wagon sped off going full speed and I was dragged along.

You totally get me, right? Right.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure this was 100% due to the fact I rarely cooked. I did a lot of delievery and take-out food. Pair that will the almost endless supply of cookies I had and my nightly drink of Lake Champlain Mountain Mint Hot chocolate (this is delicious!) with mint chocolate baileys aaaand eating healthy was quickly thrown out the window.

But that’s life and no one is perfect and it’s the beginning of a new year! So let’s kick it off with some super yummy food.

Let’s start things off on a good note, eh? Save the chocolate stuff for later in the week? Pretend for 4 whole days that we have made some sort of resolution about eating healthy and that we’re sticking to it? Cool? Cool.

This citrus salad came about for two reasons: 1. I, like every single person in Boston, have been sick on and off with a cold. Nothing serious. Nothing that gets me out of work. Just kinda blah. Stuffy nose, sore throat, sporadic coughing and sneezing fits and just an overall sense of feeling under the weather. (My friend, Melissa,who is one of those weird people that knows grammar rules, probably just fell into an uncontrollable amount of twitching with all those incomplete sentences! ha!) I wanted something that packed some nutritional punch. Hence, the vitamin C mother-load. And 2. I’ve been eating so much sugar lately that I was actually craving something healthy and light for breakfast.

This salad is a win/win

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Honey Coconut Citrus Salad
mash up of Whole Living and Edible Perspective
serves 1-3

  • 1 Red Grapefruit (peeled and sliced, I sliced mine into wedges)
  • 1 Cara Cara Orange (or any orange if you can’t find Cara Cara. Peeled and sliced into wedges)
  • 2 clementines
  • Seeds from 1/2 a pomegranate
  • drizzle of honey or agave nectar (optional. If your grapefruit is super sweet, you may find the sweetener unnecessary.)
  • sprinkling of coconut (sweetened or unsweetened, both work)
  • zest from half a lime and juice from half a lime

Toss the grapefruit, orange, clementines and pom seeds together. Top with honey/agave nectar, lime zest, lime juice and coconut and toss. Eat and feel awesome!

You could also top with toasted coconut or a cinnamon-y granola. I did both and they were delicious. Edible perspective put a scoop of this on yogurt and topped with pistachios which seems super interesting and I may have to try next!

This makes approximately 3 cups of salad. I found most mornings I could eat this over the period of an hour or so. It may be too much to just sit down and eat, though.

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I have to say, this definitely has hit the spot this winter. I have been all about the comfort food so it’s nice to start my morning with something bright and refreshing. So yummy!

PS. I totally bought the Whole Living magazine this recipe is featured in for the vegan chocolate truffles on the cover, not the citrus salad. oh yeah! Hopefully, I’ll be making those soon.

PPS. What is your New Year’s resolution? Leave me a comment below. I still haven’t really figured mine out yet

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Fruit and Chocolate Dessert Pizza

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , , , , on April 10, 2012| 6 Comments »

This is my answer to the chocolate overdose I was suffering from last week. After making those cookie dough peanut butter cups (which I’m dying to make again with different flavors!) AND a vegan version of Reeses Peanut Butter eggs (which were ok,  but not great, which is why I didn’t post them here), I was so over chocolate. That’s apparently what happens when you make excuses to have peanut butter eggs for breakfast (I’ll just have a peanut butter egg instead of peanut butter on my toast. Same thing!). Infact, the thought of making something heavy for Easter dessert made me want to cry. But backing out of making a dessert wasn’t optional. If I didn’t bring anything then I wouldn’t have a vegan dessert and a holiday isn’t a holiday without a dessert…or five!

So I decided a light, fruity dessert would be perfect. It would be a nice change from heavy cakes, cheesecakes and chocolate that usually show up for our holiday parties. The one I made had a thin, chewy snickerdoodle cookie crust, a layer of creamy chocolate pudding (pudding technically isn’t a chocolate. It’s way too light for that!), and a layer of fresh fruit. Yes, please!

 

Snickerdoodle Cookie Crust
from Wicked Vegan

  • 1/2 cup vegan butter, at room temperature ( used Earth Balance)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 Ener-G “egg”
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 2 tablespoons milk replacer (I used unsweetened soy milk)

Preheat oven to 375.

Cream vegan butter and sugar with an electric mixer until smooth. Add “egg” and vanilla, mixing well until combine, about 2 minutes. Stir in flour, baking powder, salt, and 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Mix until dough comes together. Dough will most likely be crumbly at this point. Add in milk 1 TBS at a time until the dough comes together. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, spread dough onto a round pizza pan. The dough will be thin. Cook between 10-15 minutes. Mine took about 12 1/2 minutes.

Let cookie cool 100%. Melt about 2 TBSP of vegan chocolate with  1/2 tsp of vegan shortening in the microwave. Spread a very thin layer of the chocolate onto the cooled cookie and let dry. This will prevent the pudding from making the cookie soggy.

Vegan Chocolate Pudding
 from epicdialogue.com

  • 1box (1.4oz) jell-o instant chocolate pudding mix*
  • 1 package (12.3oz) silken tofu, chilled
  • 1/2-3/4cup almond milk (I used 3/4 cup)

In a food processor, puree the tofu with the almond milk until smooth. Add the pudding mix and blend to a creamy texture. Put in fridge to set for about an hour. Spread on the cookie. I had about half the mixture left over.

*jell-o instant pudding is dairy-free but it has a few chemicals and weird ingredients that I wasn’t thrilled with but I couldn’t find an organic, more healthful instant pudding. I found the cook and serve kind but not instant. I wasn’t sure how the cook and serve would work so I opted for jell-o. If anyone finds a better instant pudding product or tries the cook and serve in this recipe, let me know how it turns out!

Toppings

  • strawberries
  • kiwi
  • banana
  • blueberries
  • raspberries

Slice up your fruit and layer as desired. Really, you could use any fruit you wanted, including mandarin oranges, apples or pineapple. Or you could use shredded coconut, slivered or sliced almonds or other nuts. I haven’t tried those but I bet they’d be great!

mmm…I want some of this right now. After all, if I can justify a knock-off Reeses egg for breakfast,  I should have no problem doing that with a fruit covered cookie!

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Mixed Berry Protein Breakfast Cakes

Posted in Recipes, tagged , , , , , on January 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Alright everyone, I love you but let us keep this short and sweet. I’m exactly half way through Catching Fire, book 2 in the Hunger Games trilogy, and every second I take writing this is time I could be using to read about Katniss and the oh-so-perfect Peeta. (even though I already know what happens!!)

One of the things I have really strived for since going vegan and revamping my diet is getting rid of cereal. I was majorly addicted to the convenience of cereal and would often have it for breakfast and occasionally dinner. yeah…sort of missing out on a few food groups when you do that!

So I’ve had to find new breakfast foods, which I find a lot harder then new lunches or dinners. Second only to the green monstah (which I’m still uber addicted to!), I think this has been my favorite new breakfast. It’s one of those unfortunate recipes that has a lot of really odd ingredients but it comes together pretty easily once you have everything.

Though, all I can think of as I post this is, I had a lot of people scoff at the Green Monstah smoothie (Major kudos to Aubrey for giving it a shot and letting me know she enjoyed it!! ), I can’t even imagine how people are going to react to hemp protein powder…

Mixed Berry Protein Breakfast Cake Parfaits
adapted from Healthful Pursuit
serving: 1 cake

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup Egg Replacer egg whites
  • 2 tbsp hemp protein powder
  • 1 tbsp coconut flour
  • 1 tsp melted coconut oil (you can also use 1 TBSP of coconut butter but I couldn’t find it anywhere)
  • 1 tbsp apple sauce
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 5-10 drops liquid  stevia – I used 10
  • 1/4 cup frozen berries (you can also use fresh but I used frozen in the cake and fresh on the side)
  • 1/2 container of vanilla non-dairy yogurt (I used So Delicious Vanilla Coconut Milk yogurt. super yummy)
  • handful of fresh mixed berries

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 375F.
  2. Combine all ingredients but berries in a small bowl and mix until fully incorporated.
  3. Stir in berries.
  4. Put mixture into one cup of a muffin tin.
  5. Place in the preheated oven and bake for 25-28 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
  6. Serve with the yogurt and fresh berries (I like to crumble up the cake and mix it in with the yogurt and the berries to form a mushy bowl of deliciousness)
So, this recipe doesn’t originally suggest serving it with yogurt and berries but I found the cake really hard to eat alone. It just has a very unusual flavor with the hemp protein powder and the stevia that I wasn’t used to. It also wasn’t terribly filling on its own. When I mixed it with the yogurt though it became a sweet, hearty breakfast that would last me all morning. When I make this, I will make 5 cakes at once so I have breakfast for the week.
I’ll admit, the first time I made this, I felt like a huge crunchy-granola hippie. Hemp protein powder?? Come on! Who actually uses that?! BUT the results were yummy. hmm…Maybe those hippies are onto something. Who knows…maybe I’ll start rocking some major bellbottoms and fringed vests. Right on, man…
NOW BACK TO HUNGER GAMES!!


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