The tail of the chocolate orange

Our dear furry friends,
not wanting to leave you too long without inspiration, here is a recipe from the famous Charlotte Mabon cake library we would like to share with you.

It happened one afternoon before a birthday celebration for which we had promised a Berry-Nice-Cheesecake.

Horror and spite! the little elves cried. Vital red, black and blue fruity berry ingredients were missing and worse still, the essential spring-form cake tin was nowhere to be seen…

Before we burned our frocks and threw ourselves in the river, we scratched our heads and ruffled our brows and came up with something new, and it worked out rather spectacularly.

Get ready for
Sticky-bottom chocolate and orange cheesecake surprise!

Base

1 cup almonds

¼ cup dates

¼ cup desiccated coconut

1 tbs oat milk, nut milk or just water (to make oat or nut milk, blend 1/4 cup soaked oat groats/ nuts with 1 cup water and strain )

1 tbs maple syrup or other liquid sweetener of choice

¼ tsp salt

Grind the nuts til you have a breadcrumb like mix ingredients in a food processor. Add the coconut and dates. Blend some more then add the maple syrup and water. We had to make a base that would stand up on its own so adding the liquid ingredients made it sticky and pliable so you can easily sculpt the base sides.

Orange Cream

1 cup orange juice

¾ cup cashew nuts

2 tbs coconut oil

6 soft dates

¼ tsp salt

Combine in a blender til you have a silky cream. We were planning to leave it there as an orange cheese cake but it felt a bit one-dimensional. Enter the chocolate cream… Heavens!

Chocolate cream

½ cup cashews

1 ½ tbs coconut oil

1 cup oat milk / nut milk

3 dates

½ tsp vanilla

2 tbs cacao butter

¼ cup ground cacao beans (or cacao powder)

1 tbs cocoa powder

1 tbs maple syrup

Combine in a blender as you did the orange cream.

To marble the cake, pour the two creams in alternating stripes into your sculpted base. With a chopstick, draw lines across the cake at right angles to the stripes. When you’ve got it looking good STOP! To much messing and you’ll end up with a yellow-brown sludge – remember primary school art class…?

It’s a delicately light yet deliciously rich combination and the sharp refreshing bite of the thick orange wedges on top balances the whole affair resulting in a crowd-melting chocgazmatronic hero of a cake. Looks alright too…

Chok on little elves.. til the next time.

Wilder still

Wild garlic pesto

Are you familiar with Ramsons; aka wild garlic? Fortifying and super tasty, you’ll find it in the woodlands or on the waysides, as abundant as the grass. You can eat the leaves, the flowers and the bulbs. This recipe for pesto is quick as an Italian kiss, easy as pesto-pie and universally popular.

2 cups packed wild garlic leaves

2 cups cashew nuts, soaked 4 hrs

¾ cup olive oil

3 tbs lemon juice

4 tbs nutritional yeast flakes

1 ½ tsp salt (or to taste)

Chuck all the ingredients in a food processor and blend until the cashews are in little pesto-sized chunks. That’s it. It’ll last for 3 weeks or more in the fridge if you can manage to keep your hands off it.

Gorse flower brazil nut milk

Here by the coast near St Davids we’re surrounded by the constant sunrise of gorse bushes in flower, shrouded in their sweet, coconutty fragrance and bursting with anti-oxidants. I love the look of consternation on the sheep’s faces when we stop to eat them on the moors.

Primroses would be delicious or any other edible flower with a sweet subtle perfume. When you’re picking remember to leave 3/4 or more of the flowers for the bees.

First make brazil nut milk. 1/2 cup brazil nuts (soaked if possible) to 2 cups of water. Whizz in the blender for a good minute or two until all the milk is out of the nuts, then strain off the pulp through a nut milk bag, muslin cloth or fine mesh sieve.

Add a pinch of salt (and a date or two if you want the extra sweetness) then add the gorse flowers – we put in two big fistful’s but even a small handful would give you the amazing colour and a lovely bouquet. Blend til smooth.

You get a ‘head’ of gorse fibre on top which you can skim off (or eat it if you’re a well-seasoned gorse-hound like Charlotte).

Drink. It’s sublime. The perfume wafts up through your head like a mist and any negative ideas drift off in a silent pooff, like dandelion seeds in the breeze, leaving nothing but a soft yellow glow like spring sunshine…

Oink #2: Wild

"She was fine when we left home"

Eat wild, become wild.

It works..
You might not believe it until you try it, but the sheer act of wandering out in the morning, snuffling among the hedgerows, and picking these little humble leaves and flowers makes me a bit.. sparky.

I’m stuck in a virtuous cycle. I was all schnoozy when i got back, feeling kind of… old. I forced myself back into the habit of going out and picking for breakfast because I knew the greens were what I needed. It took about 3 days on green smoothies before i was jumping again. Now I’m singing to the little blighters with gratitude. I’m making contact with nature in a new way; I’ve got new friends. Call me crazy or call me wild. I don’t care. They’re free, they’re strong medicine, I can have as much as I want, and I want more and more. I feel less cold. I crave less sweet. My organs are humming…

From left to right: plantain, (something (?!)-wort, cleavers, comfrey

From top left - clockwise: dock, strawberry leaves, dandelion leaves and flowers, nettle tips, clover, primrose flowers, daisies

Clockwise from left: gorse flowers, navelwort, chickweed

In herbal medicine, all these plants are attributed strong healing properties. There are many  good books to guide you for specific conditions, or if you just want to feel more vital and WILD, take my elephant gun approach – eat as much of all of them as you can (being very careful only to eat the ones you recognise please.)

Directions:

1. Nut/seed milk. Blend half a cup of nuts or seeds that have been soaked overnight (and drained) with 2 cups of pure water. Using a muslin cloth or nut milk bag strain the milk from the pulp and set aside. If you like you smoothies thick and super filling then don’t bother with the straining part.

2. Add Fruit. 2 pieces of fruit into your blender will do – apples, pears, bananas, handful of berries – whatever takes your fancy. For extra sweetness add a small handful of dry fruit soaked overnight, with their soak water.

3. Superfoods. We love maca (nice and malty) and spirulina (PROTEIN) at about 1 heaped tsp per person. Also try carob for a chocolatey mood, barley grass powder, lucuma for a bit of butterscotch; pinch a salt or splash of umeboshi plum seasoning (can work wonders), soaked nuts or seeds (these will make it smoother, thicker and pacify the green).

4. Enter the Wild GREENS!

Load up the rest of the blender with as many greens as you and it can handle. If you don’t have a powerful blender then add the greens bit by bit and/ or chop them up first. Whizz and voila!

For beauty, serve in a bowl with a handful of chopped up fruit, and/or sprouts, some whole soaked nuts, seeds, grains (buckwheat’s a favorite), torn up leaves and edible spring flowers (primroses, dandelion, gorse flowers). Go nuts, go  w  i  l  d  …

If you find it too bitter or just plain green, add more fruits. Don’t be put off. It won’t take long before you crave that bitter edge.

These ‘weeds’ were among the herbs cultivated in medicinal gardens at monasteries around the British Isles 1000 years ago and more. Our medicine is in our own hands, close to the ground, at the borders.

Side effects: wildness..

Oink #1

3 and a half months in India and not a single blog post… we had so many plans but as they say, if you want to hear God laugh, tell her your plans…

ha ha ho ho ho..

I ordered a really cool little toy camera before we left which, err, got intercepted by indian customs and they never gave it back, 150 phone calls notwithstanding. Result: photo-less-Mark. My bottom lip quivereth still… but you just have to take what she dishes out, that India, that big, buxom, wild mother…

Charlotte’s camera started not taking pictures quite soon too – taking them sometimes and not others, as if it were possessed with its own will. It can be a teeny bit frustrating, standing before the epic, the majestic, vainly pushing the index finger as the moment passes… The fact that i didn’t end up throwing it in the river makes me feel like my spiritual practice is actually paying off.

There are some scanty tid-bits, here below. Sorry dear readers, not to offer more…

We’re both such devotees of Indian food that we never even tried to maintain a raw lifestyle there. I had absolutely no intention of holding back – it may be the last chance I get, so I lapped up everything she had to offer with true, wonton abandon – samosas and all (Charlotte of course was a bit more restrained!).

There are millions of healthy, vital (and some enlightened) Indian’s who live on mostly daal and rice, but my trip was not so aescetic.. Constant eating in restaurants and cafes, poor quality oil and generally rich, complex meals in the end left me feeling sluggish, and looking forward to having our own kitchen again (but it was just gorgeous fun while it lasted!).

We did a lot (a LOT) of hard research into Dosas. Have you heard of a Dosa? The crowning achievement of thousands of years of South Indian devotion to food. Eaten daily by millions for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the balance of simple elements creates a sublime meal.

Often the cheapest meal on the street, my favorite of the trip was in a little cafe in Mangalore, Sri Ganesh Prasad, for a confounding 17 rupees (23 pence). It’s also a good representation of our food journey because it’s a combination of raw, fermented and cooked foods.  See the end of the post for some recipes.

We kept breakfast raw. Easy as there’s so much amazing fruit and easy access to markets. We’ve been worshipping at the Papaya temple almost every day since we left. Huge, juicy whoppers that we’d mix with any greens we could find, fresh nuts, yoghurt sometimes and some superfoods we bought with us (barleygrass, spirulina, pollen and maca).

From the south we made our way up to Rishikesh to find our music teachers. I went to Gokarna and did a two week intensive with my old teacher Tai Chi Tony, and Charlotte spent a couple of weeks introducing herself to Indian classical music with Indu the Hindu in Cochin.

Where the plains of the north meet the foothills of the Himalayas you find Haridwar and Rishikesh, ancient pilgrim points steeped in spiritual history and now swamped with hoards of travellers and even more Indian tourists. Mayhem. Beautiful, noisy, fragrant Indian chaos.

Here the great Ganga flows crystal clear from the mountains. It’s traditional to make an offering…

In Rishikesh we found a sweet little cottage in an ashram in the hills near Ram Jhula and stopped. Found ourselves a  music school and started the practice of Naad Yoga – the yoga of sound. We had a blissful 6 weeks living in the simple style of an Indian music devotee; up at 5am every day to chant in the dawn and then hours of music practice throughout the day with little else but meals in between.

JAI GANGA MA!
DOSA!

So now we’re re-kindling the spark of south India in our new home in Pembrokeshire. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the dosa, it’s a pancake made from fermented rice and daal batter served with a thin spicy soup called sambar and a big splodge of raw coconut chutney. Finger eating is a must – you use hunks of the dosa to mop up the delicious condiments. Messy’s good.

We made the Dosa pancake mix with brown rice and have started experimenting with raw chutneys. We didn’t have curry leaves, fresh neem leaves or fresh coconuts but our version came out pukka nonetheless.

For the sambar you need to first make the spice mix. This recipe makes enough for a big jar that will last for many meals. I thoroughly recommend taking the 15 minutes required to do this. What you get is a jar of heaven that you can’t buy in the shops and creates that awesome, authentic tasting Indian flavour in anything you add it to.

1/2 cup coriander seed
1/4 cup cumin seed
1/4 cup yellow split peas (chana dhal)
1/4 cup moong dhal
1/4 cup fenugreek seeds
1/4 cup black peppercorns
1/4 cup dried red chilli flakes
1/4 cup desiccated coconut
1/4 cup mustard seeds
2 tbs turmeric
2 tbs asafoetida

On a medium heat dry roast all the spices except the turmeric and asafoetida in the biggest frying pan you’ve got until they’re well browned – about 10 minutes. Stir or toss them constantly to stop them burning. Take the mix off the heat and add the turmeric and asafoetida. Fine grind in a blender, hand mill or coffee grinder.

Making the Sambar:

1 cup yellow split peas, soaked 1 hour or more
2 cups water
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp coconut oil

1 heaped tsp tamarind dissolved in 1 cup water
1 tsp coconut oil
5 small dry red chilies (or to taste)
1 medium onion
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1/4 tsp asafoetida (optional)
1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 large tomato
2 tablespoons sambar powder (see above)
1/4 cup chopped coriander
1 cup of a vegetable of your choice – we used squash and green beans.

1) Boil the yellow split peas with the turmeric and oil til they’re soft, then mash them up.
2) In a separate pan, saute the chilies, mustard seeds and fenugreek for a couple of minutes then add the onions. Saute til they’re brown then add the tamarind water and bring to boil for a couple of minutes.
3) Add the onion mix and remaining ingredients to the dhal and simmer til the veg is soft, adding a bit more hot water if it’s getting thick; the Sambar is designed as a thin soup. Garnish with the coriander.

Coconut chutney:

desiccated coconut is always a let-down after being in India where the coconuts are fresh. This is the first of our experiments which came out really creamy.

1/2 cup desiccated coconut, soaked 2 hours
1 handful fresh mint leaves
2 tbs sunflower seeds, soaked 4 hours +
1 tbs coconut oil
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp tamarind paste
1/2 tsp lemon juice

2 tbs moong dhal
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp coconut oil

First fry the dry moong dhal and mustard seeds in the oil til the seeds start to pop.
Add all the ingredients to a blender or food processor and combine.

Dosa:

1 cup moong dhal (urad dhal is traditional but we didn’t have any – moong worked fine)
3 cups raw rice (Indian’s use white. We tried brown short grain which seemed to do the same job)
8 cup water

Soak the dhal and rice in the water in a warm place overnight. Grind in a powerful blender so you’ve got a white smooth batter mix. It should have a slightly sour smell. We put our batter mix back into the airing cupboard for another few hours. By the time we came to use it, it had completely separated and looked like a freakish volcanic dough eruption. Once stirred, it made a uniform batter.
Use the batter to make dosas like you would pancakes. We used an incy bit of coconut oil to prevent sticking. It was a big hit.. the experiments will continue.