Chocolate Brownies!!! #vegan #Kosher #GlutenFree #Delicious

CHOCOLATE BROWNIES!!!

 Anybody out there like chocolate? How about putting something relatively healthy on the dessert table? These do have nuts but no added oil, egg, milk, butter or processed sugar. There is no complicated preparation. I just pureed everything in our blender, baked it for 35 minutes, left it in the fridge over night then cut it into squares. It came out way, way better than I ever expected. They have a deeply satisfying flavor and texture but none of the guilt.

BROWNIE RECIPE

1.5 cups of water

2 cups of raw cashews

1/2 cup of hemp hearts

1 banana

1/4 cup milled flax seeds

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup cocoa

1/2 cup cacao ($9.34/LBS AT THIS LINK!!)

6 TBS Agave nectar

1 1/4 cups raisins

Preheat your oven to 325. Add everything to your blender (20% off at this link!!) or food processor and puree it thoroughly. If it's getting too thick, add a little water. There's nothing in there that you can't eat raw, so you can add more Agave nectar, cocoa, cacao or raisins until its just the way you want it.

Line a 10 x 10 inch pan with parchment paper. Bake it for 30 to 35 minutes until its firm but you still want it chewy.

Cover it with plastic wrap while it's still warm to make the top look glossy and put it in the fridge over night. Cut away the edges to get rid of (or eat) the drier, outer margin and slice the rest into squares. 

Hint:

You can also get a little adventurous and add some fresh mint or chili pepper for extra flavor.

Enjoy!!!

THE BIG "V"

Sweet Potato Torte #vegan #kosher #nutfree #glutenfree

Sweet Potato Torte

I found this recipe in a New York Times article for a Sweet Potato Torte and modified it to make it as low in oil, nut free and gluten free as I could. It came out pretty good! My Cousin Rhonda loved it and called me to tell me the piece I gave her became her entire dinner. I'm going to work on it again because it was a little dry, but the taste is pretty great!

SWEET POTATO TORTE   

3 sweet potatoes

2 cups cooked red or green lentils

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup hemp seed hearts (or ground nuts)

1 cup cooked brown rice

1 15.5 oz can of chickpeas

2 teaspoons ground Mediterranean style sea salt

1 teaspoon garlic powder

2 tablespoons lite soy sauce

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon tahini (peanut butter also works)

1 6 oz can of tomato paste

1/3 cup vegetable broth

     Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cook the lentils in salt water with a 2.5 to 1 ratio of water to lentils. Cover and let them cool. Add extra water if needed to make them soft enough to mold.

Cook the brown rice in the same way, cover and let it cool.  Use the tahini to lightly grease a 10 inch springform pan and line the pan with a circle of lightly greased parchment paper. Peel the sweet potatoes. Soften them by wrapping them in a moist paper towel and partially cooking them in the microwave on high for about 5 minutes. Let them cool enough to handle then cut them into slices, 1/4 inch or less in thickness and arrange them in an overlapping fan to cover the bottom of the pan.  Add the cooked lentils to form a layer over the sweet potatoes and pack them down.  

     Put the rolled oats and hemp hearts in a blender and pulse into a coarse textured meal. Put it in a large mixing bowl and set aside. Add the tahini and all the remaining ingredients to the blender and puree until smooth and spreadable. Add this to the bowl with the oats and hemp hearts. Mix it all together adding a little more vegetable broth as needed to keep it spreadable. Add it over the lentils to make an even layer.  Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake for 40 minutes then uncover and bake an additional 15 minutes. Remove it from the oven and allow it to cool enough to handle. Flip it over on an oven proof dish and remove the springform pan. Put it under the broiler for 5 minutes to caramelize the sweet potatoes a little. Serve it hot.

Next time I want to cut the slices of sweet potato much thinner and make the lentils more moldable than I did this round. The above directions take this into account and have been adapted to improve on my first try. That has nothing to do with the flavor. It was delicious. Would Cousin Rhonda tell a fib? 

Enjoy!!!!

     

I 💘 Quinoa.Thanksgiving Side Dish! Oil Free, Gluten Free, Nut Free, Kosher

Please calm down! Ten or more people  just today asked me what I'm going to eat Thanksgiving.  While I appreciate the concern, it's ironic that not 1 person ever asked me that when I used to stuff myself with all the foods that were keeping me so fat and threatening my health!
There's a long list of side dishes that are delightful, healthy and filling.

Here's an example:

Quinoa

Simple Side Dish

1 cup dry Quinoa

1 small onion chopped

3 cloves garlic chopped

1 Roma tomato

3 sweet peppers chopped (red, orange, yellow)

2.5 cups water

Salt and Pepper to taste.

Plant perfect

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 20 minutes 

Total time: 30 minutes

Serves 4

Add salt, pepper, tomato and vegetables to the water. Bring it to a boil. Let it cool for 5 minutes covered. Add the Quinoa. Bring it back to a boil then reduce the heat to a simmering boil. Cover and let simmer for 15 minutes. Keep covered and let it sit for 5 minutes. Stir and serve hot.

Enjoy! 

22 Months a Vegan. Before and After pictures.

Plant based whole foods diet

Western "eat anything" diet

After 22 months of doing this I'm living proof that a person can live well without animal products.
I think it's working.  When that 1st picture was taken I was working hard just moving around without even realizing it.



The definition of Work:
Work = Force x Distance

That means every time I moved from point A to point B,
I was carrying at least an extra 90 lbs over a distance. I walk on average 5000 steps a day. Each step is about 3 feet. So in addition to my current body weight, I was working hard to move an excess       90 lbs a distance of 15000 feet!  That's exhausting to even imagine.
Force is also an agent of change. My force was intrinsic in that I wanted to live longer, healthier and free of medication. I think those are reasonable goals. Eating a whole foods plant based diet is a proven way to reach those goals without medication, surgery or strenuous activity.

It seems cliche to say: "If I can do this, anyone can." but it's also true.
I had to unlearn to eat what I thought was a healthy combination of foods. That required a little reading, attending a few lectures and watching a movie. It was completely painless.
Anyone truly can do this, but they have to choose to.
Stop saying "I can't do it" and take ownership of the fact that you choose not to do it.
The choice will always be yours. Choose health!

22 Months A Vegan!

Me 11/2/2015

That's me hanging out at the office today after going whole foods plant based for 22 months. I don't remember ever feeling better in my life. According to the scale, I haven't lost or gained any weight in the past month (still down over 90 lbs.) but my waist got smaller and my shirt size is now a Medium; down from an XXL 22 months ago.

     This is all without any workout regimen, pills, shots or "cleanses".  Please believe me, when all you eat is plants with little or no oil, the cleansing takes care of itself. Your colon will thank you.
     I still eat 3 to 4 lbs of food a day (one large apple is about 1/2 pound), but everything is high in fiber which is not digestible and very filling. Fruits are mostly water; 84 to 87% by weight. Vegetables are 91 to 95% water by weight. The recommended number of fruit and vegetable servings in a 2000 calorie per day diet is 9 to 13. So you can easily eat 5 or 6 times a day, include 2 or more servings in each meal and satisfy 20% of your daily water requirement at the same time without taking a drink.
    While we're on the subject, I may as well throw in a bit of information about protein. Don't be confused by the tricky wording you will see when you try to look this up. We are not trying to measure how many grams of protein per 100 GRAMS of a given food. We want to know how many grams of the food will give us 100 CALORIES. When measured by weight, lean beef contains 6.4 grams of protein per 100 calories. Broccoli contains 11.1 grams of protein per 100 calories.

 

100 calories of lean beef and 100 calories of broccoli

    Don't like broccoli? There are lots of other choices. 3 Examples:

100 calories of cucumber, carrots or romaine lettuce

Which of the above 5 choices do you think would make you feel full? 

     My tummy has gone from fat to flat by eating more food more often. I'm almost never hungry because I always have plant based choices at hand. The range of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, seasonings, spices and combinations thereof is virtually infinite!
     As an omnivore I weighed 274 lbs and was out of control. Now, maintaining a plant based whole foods lifestyle, I weigh 180 lbs.
     Seriously. Choose health! Your family will worry less and you'll feel great about yourself!! Get started. What do YOU have to lose?

My latest article got PUBLISHED!!!

Read my latest article at 

PBNSG.org

Start Your Own Journey Toward Better Health

Stuffed Pumpkin. Harvest time fun! #Vegan #FallFood

It's harvest time and one of those "Look what I can do!!" kind of days. I stopped by the local supermarket and, wonder of wonders, found Pie Pumpkins on sale 10 for $10. I thought to myself: " What kind of plant based whole foods mess can I make out of this if I don't feel like pie?" I tried to buy 3.14 of them. Instead I bought 2 pie pumpkins and some corn on the cob. This is what I did with it: 

Plant Perfect.

Serves 2

Ingredients: 

One pie pumpkin

One ear of sweet corn

One inch of fresh ginger minced

1/2 tsp Kosher salt

One TBSP cinnamon

1/8 tsp nutmeg

1/8 tsp allspice

Stuffed Pumpkin

Cook the pumpkin in the microwave on high for 10 minutes. Cook one ear of sweet corn in the microwave on high for 2 minutes. 

Open the pumpkin like you would for carving. Scoop out the seeds and separate them from the stringy stuff. Save both separately. Scrape the corn off the cob.

Put the pumpkin back in the microwave and cook it for 5 more minutes until it gets soft. Let it cool enough to handle and scrape the inner fruit out taking care to not break through the skin. Put the stringy stuff, inner fruit and corn in a pot with 2 cups of water. Add the other ingredients, bring it to a boil then turn down the heat and simmer covered for 20 minutes. Strain it, saving the broth, stuff the solids back in the pumpkin shell and cook it for another 5 minutes in the microwave.  Let it cool 5 minutes then serve.

I roasted the pumpkin seeds as well and saved the broth for soup stock.

Self Pumpkin Portrait