Raw Vegan Wraps.

Healthy wraps for lunch today made with collard greens and zucchini slices as wrappers and two different nut spreads and an assortment of fresh veggies. The spread on the left is the black pepper cashew cheeze (cashews, lemon juice, miso, water, black pepper) from Ani Phyo's raw book. I added yellow miso for some saltiness. The one on the right is the Sun-dried tomato pâté from "You Won't Believe It's Vegan". I didn't have enough sun-dried tomatoes so it's not as red in color but it's got good stuff in it: almonds, sunflower seeds, walnuts, olive oil, parsley, garlic, lemon juice and black olives.

Saturday Taco Lunch, Stir-Fry and Carrot-Nut Muffins.

Had a delicious lunch with my mom and her best friend yesterday. Mom helped make this delicious spread of food. Tacos with sauteed tofu, veggie ground, fresh salsa and guacamole and potato salad. The tomato salad was fresh from Gelson's.

Stir fry using Tofurky sausages flavored with vegetarian stir fry sauce (kinda like oyster sauce) and sweet chili sauce.

Ok, so this was my attempt at making a raw vegan carrot cake with carrots, dates and nuts. All I can say is...FAIL.

So I transformed it into a cooked carrot cake. I just dumped 1 cup of carrot/nut mixture into kittee's vanilla cake recipe (halfing the cake recipe). I saved the rest of the raw cake mixture in the freezer for future use.

Oatmeal & Buckwheat Healthy Cookies

I was in a baking mood last night at 8pm and made these on the fly. I wanted a somewhat healthy, hearty cookie and decided to use up the buckwheat flour that was hanging out in the fridge. I basically took a vegan oatmeal raisin cookie recipe and switched out the white flour for buckwheat. I definitely need to tweak this recipe because the cookies were very fragile and tended to fall apart if you pick them up. I added a bunch of healthy stuff like walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds, cranberries, sultanas and dark raisins. They're tasty but need work.

Salad with Walnut-Cashew Pâté.

I felt like being healthier at dinnertime because for lunch I went out with my husband and had a veggie burger and fries at Johnny Rockets. All that junky diner stuff made me crave something fresh, like a salad. I like to prep my salads in a big tupperware that I can serve myself from during the week. My salad today consisted of romaine, green leaf, red bell peppers, cucumber and celery. I add the tomato before serving. I also made the "Ricotta Cheeze" recipe from Ani's Raw Food Kitchen to put on top. It's not really a cheese, more like a pâté I think. Her recipe requires walnuts and pine nuts. I didn't have pine nuts today so I subbed cashews. It was really good with the salad, especially eaten with the tomatoes because I hate raw tomatoes on their own.

Soup and Salad.

I'm trying to be good and eat soups and salads through out the week. It keeps things light and easy on my schedule as well as my stomach. I try to save the more indulgent foods for the weekend. I whipped up my favorite red lentil soup (sephardic recipe from 'Olive Trees and Honey') and a half recipe of "black pepper cheeze" from 'Ani's Raw Food Kitchen'. It's the easiest raw cheese recipe I think, just raw cashews, garlic, black pepper, lemon juice and water. I used the soft cheeze as a spread on top of fresh tomatoes and persian cucumbers. If you want, you can drizzle olive oil and balsamic or cider vinegar over it. That would be very tasty indeed.

Walnut & Pine Nut Cheese

I'd just like to say before anything, Miso I Love You! This walnut/pine nut cheese is the "Ricotta Cheeze" recipe from Ani Phyo's cookbook. I unfortunately only had unsalted walnuts that were not raw so this recipe is only partially raw! So it's got walnuts, pine nuts, garlic, lemon juice, miso paste and water. I can't say enough how much I love miso paste. I put it in a lot of my cooking and the flavor of this cheese is ridiculously good because of it. (I used red miso by the way.) I also added some dried parsley, dill, black pepper and a no-salt all purpose seasoning. Creamy and delicious on crackers, or raw celery sticks, even german rye bread I imagine. It has a really nice salty, cheesy flavor. I don't think it tastes anything like ricotta cheese but that really doesn't matter. The flavor of this is incredible.



For dinner I made this delicious tomato salad. Now, I usually hate tomato salads but this one was divine with the walnut cheese. I added a drizzle of olive oil and cider vinegar, cilantro, salt and pepper.

Black Pepper Cheeze

Another raw recipe from Ani's Raw Food Kitchen. I loved the sunflower paté so much (it's all gone now.) that I had to try another delightful spread from this book. I chose the black pepper "cheeze" recipe because I had everything for it (cashews, garlic, lemon juice, black pepper) and it was easy to whip up in my blender. I also sprinkled some crushed red pepper and dried parsley into the cheeze for some color. This stuff is really really thick and creamy and tasted very cheese like. The cashews give it a very rich flavor. I really don't know how else to eat it besides spreading it on stuff. I didn't have any crackers so I put some on cucumber slices and topped them with olives. I really wish I had crackers because it was difficult to spread this on the cucumber. It was sliding off from all the moisture. So if you decide to ever make this, bring out the crackers!