As I sit down on Thanksgiving morning to write this post I’m forced to smile a little at the irony of my intended blog post subject. My plan, even before realizing the irony, was to comment on my inability to post in the last few weeks due to an extremely hectic work schedule. Well, I think I’ll turn that around, and note how thankful I am for the time and peace of mind to sit down and comment on my culinary exploits.
Not only has my busy schedule caused me to neglect my blog, but I haven’t really had the time to do a lot of experimentation lately, with a few minor exceptions. I’ve learned A LOT about sprouting, or attempting to, in the last few weeks. I’ve mastered sunflower seeds, developed a great system that works quite quickly, and miserably failed at chickpeas, and soybeans. The one constant I have found in sprouting is that there are no standards. You can read every how-to, from every ‘expert’ on the internet, and still find that their method doesn’t work perfectly for you. I’ve been led to believe that weather, humidity, elevation, etc. play a fairly large role in the process of sprouting, so experimentation and patience are necessary until you master the process that works best for you. I would assume that the variety and quality of the nuts or beans you have access to has an affect as well. Just like everything else in life, you have to find what works best for you. I’ll comment on my experiences in a later post or two.
The night before Thanksgiving
I started the day by heading to the farmer’s market with my sister. Thank whatever-you-choose-to-consider-a-higher -being we had short shopping lists, the farmer’s market was a zoo. I was a little lost as to what i was going to do for thanksgiving food prep, so i kinda randomly assembled ingredients to get me through the week. All of the brainstorming hit me when i got home. These ‘brainstorms’ necessitated a second trip to the store, but this time i cut it short and went to the local co-op natural food store to fill in the gaps in my recipes. Have i put you to sleep yet? Rest of my day went something like this:
The necessary
- Started sprouting 1 cup of sunflower seeds, not so exciting.
- Made a batch of curried kale, which is a staple i try to keep around as much as possible. It never gets old (on the palate) and it never gets old, quite literally, it lasts forever in the fridge.
- Juiced 2lbs of lemons by hand. That’s a labor of love for sure. I’ve found that its almost impossible to maintain a raw diet without lemon juice on hand at all times, i buy 2lbs a week under the assumption I’ll use it all, and I always do.
- Made spinach hummus.
The fun
I really wanted to make a raw/vegan stuffing. As with most experimentation’s i head over to goneraw.com to get an idea of what other people have done with the same idea. From there I take some combination of a few recipes i find, add a little of my own ‘flavor’ and fine tune the ingredients and quantities. Short story long, my first stop was goneraw.com when i decided to make raw/vegan stuffing. Due to the length of this blog post, and the lengthy process to create the stuffing, i have decided to dedicate an entire post to the stuffing.
Next stop, brown gravy. This turned out great, but i think i would add a little garlic next time, so i added it to the recipe below, although it was not added to my concoction.
- 1.5 cups crimini mushrooms
- 1 Tablespoon nama shoyu
- 3/4 stick of celery
- 2 green onions
- 1 Tablespoon nutritional yeast
- dash salt
- dash pepper
- 1 small clove of garlic
- add waluts to thicken as you blend all ingredients
This recipe doesn’t yield a whole lot, probably enough for two people depending on how you like your gravy ( i smother), so you may want to increase the recipe for events like Thanksgiving. AND!!! due to the primary ingredient being mushrooms, if you let this gravy sit it gets a dark brown layer on top, just like when ‘traditional’ gravy crusts over if left out, its brilliant!
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