'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated'

Quote by Mahatma Gandhi
"Animals have always played an important role in agriculture. Not only do they provide us with food and fiber, but they also help to recycle nutrients and add to soil fertility. Over recent decades, however, the farming of animals has become increasingly separated from its natural existence on the land." Read More...
More on helping farm animals: http://www.farmsanctuary.org/
 

Image taken from http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/

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Scrambled Eggs With Veggies

We purchase our eggs from local organic farms in Ontario. Organic free range chicken eggs come from happy chickens that are raised outdoors in healthy environments and are drug-free. Eggs contain protein, vitamin D and all 9 essential amino acids. For those few moments that we don't eat raw foods, we make sure to get enough enzymes to predigest our cooked foods. We used healthy organic coconut oil for frying our eggs and topped them off with plenty of veggies. Try out our simple breakfast recipe for 'Scrambled Eggs with Veggies'! This recipe is very tasty and energizing. Enjoy!

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Lemon Hemp Seed Cookies

Hemp seeds are very healthy and can be incorporated into baking. They contain many nutrients such as iron, calcium and vitamin D. Lemons have unique phytonutrient properties and are an excellent source of vitamin C. For our latest cookie recipe, we baked Lemon Hemp Seed Cookies that were made with a blend of pre-soaked gluten free flours. The cookies were tasty and slightly fluffy in the center - check out our simple recipe below. Enjoy!

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Butternut Squash Filled Cabbage Rolls

Butternut squash provides about one-third of the Daily Value of vitamin C in every cup. It's orange color indicates an abundance of nutrients known as carotenoids, that are shown to protect against heart disease.  
Red cabbage has an excellent source of antioxidants and has more nutritional benefits than green cabbage. We love the taste of oven baked red cabbage and fermented red cabbage! Our latest red cabbage recipe is Butternut Squash Filled Cabbage Rolls with a touch of spice. Check out our recipe below. If you love red cabbage, check out our delicious Red Cabbage Casserole recipe and our Live Curtido Salad recipe. Enjoy!

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Simple Vegetarian 'Meatloaf'

Until we decide to go on a grain free diet, we are pre-soaking our rice and lentils for 24 hours prior to cooking. Pre-soaking grains, seeds and nuts releases enzymes that are needed for digesting. Even though we still have grains in our diet we make sure to have a good portion of raw foods daily. Our recipes always consist of raw and cooked foods or simply raw! Our latest recipe is Vegetarian 'Meatloaf'. We cooked our gluten free brown rice and lentils with some vegetables and topped it off with a new tasty raw tomato sauce! The loaf is tender and flavorful. See recipe below. Enjoy!

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Spicy Kale and Mushroom 'Cannelloni'

For our brunch, we prepared a dairy free and  grain free 'cannelloni', made with free range happy chicken eggs instead of pasta. Cannelloni is another one of our favorite pastas. This new recipe is very tasty with a touch of spice! The egg cannelloni is stuffed with fried onions, garlic, oyster mushrooms, raw pumpkin seeds and raw kale*. We topped it off with a spicy raw tomato sauce. Raw foods contain enzymes needed for a healthy immune system! See recipe below. Enjoy!

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Raising Backyard Chickens

In January the city of Toronto ruled on banning the practice of raising chickens in your own backyard, on the basis that the chickens are a possible health risk and noisy! 

Does the city not pose a health risk due to toxins and pollution?! Is the city not noisy from people, cars and ongoing construction?! 

Hopefully the city will overturn their judgement on banning chickens in the city, based on more accurate information/facts that can be provided to them. Paul Hughes may be such a man - you can read about his story here. 

We want to live a sustainable life and one day raise our own chickens - for eggs. If you live outside the city, and are interested in raising backyard chickens, there is a website called Backyard Chickens.com that provides information on successfully raising your own healthy 'backyard chickens'. Here is one great article we came across. Enjoy!

Image by Brett Gundlock/national post

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Zucchini - 'Spaghetti' and Meatballs

Our latest zucchini pasta is 'spaghetti' and meatballs! We rarely eat meat, but when we found grass fed beef, we decided to buy some. We are still incorporating raw foods daily, so we combined raw zucchini with healthy and juicy meatballs (see recipe below.) This recipe is very tasty! You can feel energy from the raw zucchini. The meatballs were baked in the oven after marinating in an onion, spice and pepper mix for 20 minutes. It is a great choice for meat lovers who are on a grain free diet. Enjoy!

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Red Beet And Carrot Cookies

Juicing is healthy. After making some beet and carrot juice we decided to use the leftover pulp to make some cookies! We use a Breville juicer for our vegetables and save the pulp because it still contains about 20% of the juice after juicing. We followed most of our Beet Carrot Cacao Mini Muffins recipe but we added more beet and carrot and didn't add the cacao powder. The cookies are gluten free and dairy free so they are healthy and tasty! See recipe below. Enjoy!

TIP: Shape these cookies into hearts, using a heart shaped cookie cutter, for your love ones on Valentines Day!

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Zucchini 'Fettuccine Alfredo'

One of our favorite pasta dishes is Fettuccine Alfredo. We had some coconut cream available so we decided to create a dairy-free version of the Alfredo sauce and incorporate it with some zucchini pasta. Although it didn't taste like the Alfredo sauce we were used to, because coconut cream is sweeter as opposed to Parmesan being saltier, the results were still very tasty! It's worth trying out! (See recipe below.) The health benefits of coconuts include fiber, vitamins and minerals. Coconuts are used in modern medicine to kill viruses that cause influenza, herpes, measles, hepatitis C, SARS, AIDS, and to kill bacteria that cause ulcers, throat infections, urinary tract infections, gum disease and cavities, pneumonia and other diseases! Enjoy good healthy eating!

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Beet and Kale Cauliflower Crust Pizza

The super-nutrients found in kale include glucosinolates, which help to activate detoxifying enzymes in the liver that neutralize carcinogenic substances. It is an excellent source of vitamin K - a key nutrient for regulating the body's inflammatory process. Since we are incorporating raw foods daily, for our latest dairy free pizza recipe, we baked a cauliflower crust topped with raw kale and red onions that were oven dehydrated (at 130°) for 30 minutes. Oven dehydrating at a low temperature of 130° removes the water content, but keeps the enzymes, vitamins and minerals in place. The pizza crust and other ingredients were baked at a regular temperature (of 325°F) for about 15 minutes in total. We also had a side of raw avocado soup. See pizza recipe below. Enjoy!

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Gluten Free Coconut Donut Holes

Heating cooking oil changes its chemistry - oils that are healthy at room temperature can become unhealthy when heated above certain temperatures. However, Coconut oil is heat stable, so it is suitable for cooking at high temperatures. Coconut oil contains lauric acid which turns into monolaurin when digested. Monolaurin is an antibacterial and antiviral substance and has been used to fight viruses, bacteria, yeast and fungi. Coconut oil is predominantly medium-chain fatty acid (MCFA). The liver and gall bladder do not need to digest and emulsify MCFA, so consuming coconut oil results in energy, increased metabolic rate and increased circulation.
Our latest gluten free recipe is 'Coconut Donut Holes' made with coconut oil, coconut flour, shredded coconut and coconut palm powder/nectar. We pan fried the donut holes with organic coconut oil so they are healthy to eat! See recipe below. We also made a 'hard chocolate sauce' using cacao and coconut oil instead of butter. Very healthy and tasty!

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Happy Egg Pancakes

We love eggs! Our eggs come from happy free range, drug free chickens, at a local Ontario farm. We cook our eggs in different ways, but we recently learned that there are benefits to eating raw eggs, specially the yolk. According to the Food Chemistry journal, the yolk has twice as many antioxidant properties as an apple! They are rich in carotenoid antioxidant compounds, which is why their color is yellow. We created an egg pancake recipe that we topped off with a raw egg yolk (see recipe below). If you buy your eggs from local organic farms, you should give it a try!

Below: Egg pancake topped with a raw yolk for antioxidants and a refreshing bowl of watermelon (drizzled with a little honey) for additional antioxidants and nutrients! Eat watermelon 20 minutes prior to eating egg pancakes.

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Beet Carrot Cacao Mini Muffins

For a while now, we've been wanting to bake something with the left over pulp from our carrot and beet juices. We always save the left over shredded coconut and frequently use it for baking so we thought it was about time we do the same when we juice beets and carrots. We have a generic muffin recipe that we created to use when we make muffins. The recipe is similar to our 'Apple Cinnamon Oats Muffins' recipe except instead of using shredded coconut, we replaced it with the beet and carrot pulp, and instead of cinnamon we added cacao (see recipe below). We also don't bake with raw honey any more but instead drizzle it on our baked goods once they have been baked and cooled off, this way we get the nutrients and enzymes that honey provides. Enjoy!

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Live Vegetables With Rice

Raw yolks help eliminate toxins from your body! Since we are trying to incorporate more raw foods in our diet, we created a meal of raw veggies and egg yolk on a bed of pre-soaked cooked brown rice. The eggs we purchase are organic free range chicken eggs, so they come from happy healthy chickens. This meal is easy to do and will benefit your body (see recipe for details). Cauliflower provides us with antioxidants and is an excellent source of vitamin C, and a very good source of manganese. Enjoy!

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Double Dose Of Oats

In earlier posts we mentioned the importance of pre-soaking grains, seeds, nuts and even flour! When you pre-soak grains, nuts and seeds, you are releasing nutrients and enzymes that allow you to digest food more easily. We pre-soaked some oats for 24 hours and created a new recipe for muffins, using coconut flour. Unlike other flours, coconut flour does not need to be soaked because it is neither a grain or nut. We were inspired by BakerStreet to create 'Apple Cinnamon Crumb Muffins'. We don't use most of the ingredients the recipe called for so we had to do our own rendition with coconut flour (see recipe below). We also baked a new version of our Oats and Shredded Coconut Cookies made with pre-soaked brown rice flour (recipe coming soon). Enjoy!

Below: NEW Oats and Shredded Coconut Cookies and Apple Cinnamon Oats Muffins'.

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Poached Eggs In Avocado Bowls

The Food Chemistry journal publicized that one raw egg, its yolk in particular, contains at least twice as many antioxidant properties as an apple! Previous research has been conducted to reveal that stomach enzymes actually break down egg proteins and produce peptides - which lower high blood pressure. However, eating too many egg whites can cause a biotin deficiency. Eating the yolks only, or the biotin rich yolks with the whites will prevent this problem.

Avocados are good for your heart and blood vessels. The vitamin B6 and folic acid in avocados provide healthy regulation of homocysteine levels. The higher the homocysteine levels, the greater the risk of a fatal heart attack. We came across a couple of posts for 'Egg and Avocados' and were inspired to do a raw version. We want to incorporate more raw foods in our diet and we'll be writing about this in an upcoming post.
Below: Organic raw avocado with poached yolks (at 108 degrees). See recipe for details- enjoy!

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Crêpes Two Ways

Pre-soaking flour overnight is important in order to break down enzyme inhibitors so nutrients can become available for us to have, making it easier to digest. This applies to gluten free flour as well. We decided to put this into practice and pre-soaked some flour for 24 hours. We chose to make two types of crêpes - fruit and vegetable. For the fruit crêpes, we added strawberries, honey and pre-soaked nuts after baking the crêpes. For the vegetable recipe, we decided to make red onion, garlic and zucchini crêpes that we baked in the oven with the ingredients. Two different flavors and both very tasty! (see recipe for plain crêpes below)

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Simple Red Cabbage Casserole - Vegetarian

Red cabbage is an excellent source of antioxidants and has more nutritional benefits than green cabbage. Tomatoes are also an excellent source of antioxidants and provide a good amount of vitamin C and beta carotene. Asparagus provides a wide variety of antioxidant nutrients, including vitamin C, beta-carotene, vitamin E, and the minerals zinc, manganese, and selenium.

Below: Vegetarian red cabbage casserole with homemade spicy tomato sauce (see recipe for details)

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Dairy Free Mushroom and Beets Pizza

We enjoy making our own tomato sauce from scratch - our main ingredients are tomatoes and carrots. We find that the sweetness of the carrots give the acidity of the tomatoes a good balance in flavor. For Friday's dinner, we wanted to make another thin crust pizza but didn't have any carrots for the tomato sauce. We used red beets instead of carrots and also added some hot peppers for spice. The results were amazing! Very tasty! Red beets are healthy - they provide antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and detoxification support.

Below: Gluten free thin crust pizza made with brown rice and green pea flour! Our toppings were spicy homemade tomato sauce, leeks, garlic, spinach, shiitake mushrooms, sliced red beets and 2 happy chicken eggs! (click here for pizza crust recipe).

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