Romantic Sushi Dinner

Me and Roser are wild about sushi. Luckily for our finances, we also happen to be the best makers of vegan sushi in the whole city. We can’t find anyone to pay to make them better than us. I do like to blow my own horn don’t I?

 

Sushi isn’t a difficult proposition, though it’s time consuming and does need a little practise. These sushi are technically sushi maki, which means rolled sushi. I made a post a while back with non rolled sushi, which I don’t know the name for. Possibly onigiri but I think those are meant to have the filling inside them.

In essence, you can think of sushi as a way of turning rice into a sort of sandwich you can eat with either your hands or chopsticks. By sandwich I mean that it is designed to solve the same problem, that is combining a starch with some interesting flavours and additionally making it convenient to eat.

Sushi maki are prepared with sheets of nori seaweed which can be found at a reasonable price in any asian food store. You can use a bamboo roller to help you make the sushi but it’s by no means essential. Just spread rice* out on the sheets (you need a pretty thin layer) leaving a space of a few centimetres at one end of the sheet. At the other end of your sheet place the filling and roll it all up.

*About rice: there is such thing as special sushi rice but I’ve found equal results with normal brown rice. Just cook it soft and let it cool.

When you’ve nearly finished the roll moisten the empty space you’ve left. Moisture will let the seaweed stick to the rest of the roll and in this way you can seal it.

Congratulations! Now all you need to do is to cut your sushi. The sharper knife you have for this, the better. Cut using long strokes with very little downwards pressure. If you do this wrong the sushi will split, so be careful.

Vegan Sushi Fillings

The filling for your sushi is the fun part. You can really go wild with this. Here’s a breakdown of what we used in these ones:

SECOND PIC:

Avocado with clover sprouts

Mung bean paste*

*This was my attempt to imitate the red bean paste you sometimes get in rice balls. I cooked mung beans and mashed them up with dates for sweetness and a bit of lemon. It came out okay but excited me a lot less than I expected. Funnily enough it was Roser’s favourite.

THIRD PIC:

Cucumber with tahini spread on top (would have been inside them but it was an afterthought)

Steamed carrot

Steamed carrot and cucumber with tahini inside

Note: with cucumber it makes for a nice texture if you cut them in fine sticks like as pictured.

FOURTH PIC:

Asparagus

Just avocado

More cucumber, carrot and tahini sushi.

That’s all we made this time, but there are many more possibilities to try. The next time I want to give real red bean paste and shitake mushrooms both a try.

Serving Your Vegan Sushi

To make your sushi even more incredible, serve with soy sauce to dip in and, as you eat, place on top of each piece a bit of pickled ginger (or, well chopped fresh ginger is pretty much as good) and some wasabi. All of these things can be found in an Asian supermarket, so buy them along with the seaweed.

If you don’t know how to use chopsticks, learn! It makes things about 300% more fun.

Check out Andrew’s main blog at www.andrewgubb.com for useful and stimulating thoughts on life, spirituality, and saving the world.

Sweet and Sour Tofu

We had some fried tofu bits in the fridge that I felt like using.

The great thing about these is that they were ready battered and were crispy. Reminded me of a sweet and sour pork I used to have when I was still into eating animals. I really like that crispyness.

I fried up some spring onions, carrots and chopped ginger to soften them first.

Now, the sweet and sour effect depends on getting enough sweet, and enough sour into the recipe. Seems obvious, but really.

Pineapple is a great food that is already both sweet and sour. Yellow pepper is nice and sweet. These ingredients were chopped and added raw after the cooked ingredients were cooked.

Tomatoes give sourness, as does a generous squeeze of lemon. Finally for extra sweetness I added one smallish apple. All of these ingredients were blended together raw as the sauce for this dish.

Add the tofu and some noodles, and mix the sauce with the rest taking care that the raw ingredients don’t get cooked (this is for health most of all, but I also happen to like the taste more).

Check out Andrew’s main blog at www.andrewgubb.com for useful and stimulating thoughts on life, spirituality, and saving the world.

Falafels

We made falafels the other day. Falafels are a really tasty vegan food and they make a great substitute to scratch the itch which asks for something humburger-like with bread.

Cause me and Roser are both salt-free in our everyday cooking, this falafel didn’t even have salt. It was made of two ingredients: sprouted chickpeas and onion.

So the chickpeas were sprouted, which took about 1 1/2 days. I don’t sprout chickpeas much longer than this because they tend to go mouldy. Anyway doing this makes them way easier to cook and much healthier (especially because you need to cook less — less heat damage to the food!). The flavour becomes more gentle and slightly sweeter than that of normal chickpeas.

I cooked the two ingredients – chickpeas and about 1/4 of the volume of chickpeas again in terms of onion – by steaming, which I have to admit is almost to show off in health terms, but I thought what the heck. The great thing about steaming, see, is it’s a lower temperature cooking method, which means less damage to the food.

When they were soft I blended the result to a dough. This didn’t need any additions, but if it’s too watery you’ll need to add some breadcrumbs or flour to get a workable consistency.

I rolled the dough into long sausages and then sliced off nice round patties from them. The patties were fried to give them a crispyness and then served with homemade flat bread (pictured), salad, and mashed avocado.

Check out Andrew’s main blog at www.andrewgubb.com for useful and stimulating thoughts on life, spirituality, and saving the world.

Raw Birthday Cake

Me and my friends made a raw cake for Tiago’s birthday. Everyone loved it.

Raw Vegan Birthday Cake with pears, dates, and hazelnuts

This raw vegan birthday cake was very easy to make, though a little time consuming. First we grabbed a bowl which would make a good mould for the cake – not too big unless you want to spend hours preparing dates. Then we filled it with alternate layers of dates, sliced pears, and  chopped hazelnuts.

We pitted the dates and then chopped them into rough cubes about 1/2 cm to a side. We ended up needing about 1 KG of dates for this cake.

The hazelnuts we smashed up in a coffee grinder until they were broken up but not quite flour – still crunchy and nice to bite into.

We sliced the pears quite thinly and arranged them so that they fitted together nicely in their layers. We also added a generous squeeze of lime juice so the pears wouldn’t oxidize (go brown) and also mint leaves and chopped lime zest.

We pressed the whole thing down well and when the bowl was full, we just turned it over and gave it a tap – it came out perfectly.

Finally, we adorned the birthday cake with raw walnut halves and mint leaves. Yum

Check out Andrew’s main blog at www.andrewgubb.com for useful and stimulating thoughts on life, spirituality, and saving the world.

Raw Vegan Pudding

I’ve eaten this twice in the space of two days, so I guess it’s time to put a recipe up.

This Raw Vegan Pudding is pretty simple. I actually wanted a way of eating some raisins with cinnamon, so I added mashed pear to make a sauce and BAM! Someone smashed my door down. Also the pudding was tasty.

Serves one right.

I mean serves one.

Raw Vegan Pudding Ingredients:

Raisins

1 Soft Pear

Cinnamon

Cayenne Pepper (optional)

A Squeeze of Lemon

Raw Vegan Pudding Recipe

Mash about a 3rd of the pear with a fork or for a smoother more attractive consistency, blend it. You actually don’t need much for this recipe, as the effect is basically just to moisten the raisins.

Mix the pear with a dash of cinnamon and a hint of cayenne pepper if you desire. Give it a generous squeeze of lemon juice. Now, add your raisins into the bowl and mix.

Enjoy!

And get your door fixed!

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Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.

Raw Food Diet Avocado Soup

This soup is summery and fresh, perfect both for people who adhere to the raw food diet and for people who just want an avocado soup that tastes great to cool them off and nourish them on a summer’s day. The recipe was given to me by my beloved Joy Lynn. I tweaked it just a little because I don’t have a blender X)

Ingredients for Raw Food Diet Avocado Soup

Serves one.

1 Avocado

1 small cucumber

1 head of celery

Juice of 1 lemon

Salt, olive oil and provençal herbs to taste (if you don’t have provençal herbs, a mix of oregano and thyme will do well)

A bit of briefly soaked raw wakame seaweed

More avocado and carrot to garnish

How to make Raw Food Diet Avocado Soup

Joy’s recipe was simple: blend all of the ingredients together in a blender and then garnish with extra cubes of avocado and grated carrot.

I don’t have a blender so what I did was put the celery and cucumber through my juice machine and then with a minipime blend the avocado and other things into that.

Joy says, by the way, that the salt and oil are optional because the avocado already makes it creamy and the celery already makes it salty. This is a slightly healthier version for extra points.

Raw food diet

If you just came here for an avocado soup recipe, then let me take a moment to tell you what the raw food diet is about.

Also known as the living foods diet, the raw food diet is based around foods that are edible raw. Raw foods have a higher content of enzymes and nutrients, and don’t have the toxins created by application of heat. The great thing is you can feel it! Notice how much healthier and more energetic you feel after eating a raw avocado soup compared to a heavier meal.

On this site you can find lots more raw and semi-raw recipes, as well as other recipes made with optimum health in mind.

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Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.

Raw pasta

Hi guys!

I decided not to make “The Spiritual Vegan” a professional path like with my lightworker’s site www.lightworkersconnection.com but I do enjoy putting up recipes from time to time.

Currently I’m on the raw food diet. My ultimate goal is to go breatharian, which is as it sounds. Most people freak out when I tell them this, but I assure you that so long as I consistently lose weight on a no-food diet, I will take that as a sign I can’t live off air yet, so I won’t push myself.

Today’s raw recipe was inspired by my lovely friend Joy, who is as she sounds.

How to make raw pasta

Raw pasta is easy: you get out a peeler and attack a cucumber with it. (Zucchini work too I hear). You can get the long pasta like strips as seen in the picture this way.

I made the raw pasta sauce by liquidizing three or four tomatoes with a minipime. I added spring onions and some green pepper to this, plus salt, olive oil and provençal herbs (you can use oregano or your choice of herbs if you can’t find this delicious ingredient). All blitzed together.

This was topped, as you can see, with my beloved alfalfa sprouts. <3

Liquized tomatoes make a great base for many “sauce” type recipes. Try blending in curry paste too, maybe with some coconut.

<3

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Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.

Vitamin B12

Recently I’ve been getting nudges from my divine guidance (or so I believe) to look again at the B12 thing.

My partner-in-crime Kate of Unrefined wrote about how her boyfriend had come up deficient in B12 in a recent test. I’ve always been a bit gung-ho about veganism – I think in part out of rebellion against the guys who’d have you eat meat out of fear of getting sick – and wrote before in my blog that I don’t think you have to worry about it too much. So when I read that it was a bit of a wake up call to the fact that I have to be a bit responsible about what I write. Let alone what I do with myself… a sick vegan isn’t a great advocate of the cause as I’ve heard it said around the internet.

I actually have a mortal fear and intense hatred of doctors and the modern medical system in general due to them torturing me for years and coming close to killing me several times. (Yes, they did, and I hate people who try to convert me to their point of view on the matter too). A LOT of issues to work through there. Anyway bottom line is, I can’t go get a blood test; at least, I choose not to for now.

But from what I’ve been reading recently, I feel like it’s worth it to get a B12 supplement to be sure, especially since B12 absorption is often compromised by my current condition, Crohn’s disease. Interestingly on the highly comprehensive fact sheet I’ve been reading, most people (95%) with B12 deficiencies are meat-eaters, and it’s recommended by some agencies that ALL people over the age of 50 supplement.

Food for thought.

Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.

Vegan sushi

Today and yesterday I’ve been making sushi.

Day 1. Avocado, fried carrot slices with garlic, cucumber, black olive paté with spring onions, baby corn sliced lengthwise, capers with roasted red pepper (you buy it in jars ready cooked and peeled here).

Day 2. Asparagus, fried shitake mushroom with garlic, avocado.

Avocado was by far the most popular

This is an inspiration recipe more than anything, as there’s really nothing to it as I’ve been making it. I could have done more elaborate sushi, but I didn’t have nori sheets on hand.

You need to buy special sushi rice at an oriental food shop. To prepare, you wash it thoroughly before cooking with 1 and a half parts water to every part of rice. You leave it to cool and then mould the rice with your hands into bite- or at least chopstick- sized balls. Have a bowl of water on hand as you do this and wash your hands after every creation as the rice’ll stick to you otherwise.

Serve with wasabi sauce, soy sauce, and pickled ginger which you can all find in oriental food stores. And learn to use chopsticks if you can, it makes it more fun!

Enjoy!

Andrew

Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.

Simple but perfect rice dish with broccoli

I’ve mentioned in one of those articles around there that I have a simple favourite – rice with broccoli and soy sauce. There is something magical about this combo. I made some slight additions to this basic principle and this recipe was born.

For two people:

1 cup brown rice
3 cups water -
of which about 1/6 of a cup has been replaced with soy sauce
1 1/2 handfuls of broccoli florets (you can save the stalks to use in a different dish – I think they are better for stir-fries, for instance)
1 1/2 handfuls fresh shitake mushrooms
a touch of fresh ginger
1/2 clove of garlic
Extra soy sauce to add at the table, to taste.

You boil the rice with the liquid until about 3/4 of the water is absorbed, then add the broccoli, garlic and ginger, and 5 minutes later the shitake. When all the water is absorbed, serve! Add soy sauce to taste at the table (if you enjoy this ritual you can even avoid putting any in the rice while boiling).

Check out Andrew’s other site, Lightworkers‘ Connection, if you consider yourself to be a highly conscious individual. You know there is more to life than meets the eye. You are not alone.