Busy Holiday Weekend!! Lots of Yummies

What a busy holiday weekend.  I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. 

Instead of barbequing, we had a nice raw dinner on the front patio.   Pesto with zucchini pasta and garlic toasts. 

Click on the link above for the garlic toast recipe.  The picture above is a pretty sad picture with just one toast ... we'd nearly finished them off before I thought to take the picture.  These toasts are made in the dehydrator and are a bit like bruschetta.   Here's a picture of the left overs that I put in the refridgerator.  They'd been in the dehydrator a bit longer (perhaps too long) so the edges were curled up.  The "toast" is made out of jicama:

For desert we had cherry vanilla ice cream.  I used the vanilla ice cream recipe in this Raw Food Talk post and added fresh cherries.   Unfortunately, it didn't freeze very solid in the ice cream maker.  I think this might have been because my dehydrator was running and it was heating my kitchen a bit.   Here's how it looked the first night - delicious, but really more like a thick shake or very loose soft serve:

I put the left-overs in the freezer and it looked a lot more like ice cream when we had it for desert to finish off the pesto-pasta meal.  Next time, I am thinking I might just try to make the ice cream the night before I plan to eat it and just freeze it so it is more solid. 

All that said, the ice cream was delicious!!!  The recipe uses the seeds of two vanilla beans. I got organic ones at Whole Foods and they were nearly $14.  So this ice cream had a lot to live up to - since it cost so much money to make!!  I'm happy to say, it lived up to every penny I spent on it.  AND, I also promptly ordered some more vanilla beans online.   I ordered from http://www.beanilla.com/ and spent just about twice what I spent at Whole Foods and instead of just two beans, I'll be getting a full half pound of vanilla beans!  Once my vanilla beans arrive I'll definitely be making this recipe again.

I also dehydrated some figs and made some watermelon candy.  Here's a photo of the watermelon candy:

The watermelon candy is just about the easiest thing in the world to make and it reminds me a bit of Laffy Taffy and those watermelon Jolly Ranchers from my childhood - but a whole lot healthier!   I am thinking it'd be fun to get some cute cookie cutters and cut the watermelon into fun shapes to dehydrate, but even square, they taste delicious.

I also made the Kaia kale crackers again.  This time I was tracking the ingredients so I could post the quantities for you, but I don't think I've quite got it right yet so I may need a few more attempts before I post the recipe. That said, they did turn out pretty tasty.   This time I made not just the barbeque flavor, but I also made some cheesy ones:

And, if all that wasn't enough, after dinner we walked to the edge of town to watch the Macy's fireworks display. It was probably a 3 mile walk round trip, so a great opportunity to work off some of that ice cream!

Ice Cream!!!

I went to visit with some friends this afternoon and we had a fabulous feast.

We had nori rolls, "pasta" with pesto sauce, onion bread, sunflower cheese, stuffed baby peppers (with the sunflower cheese), salad, and for dessert we had puchased raw gourmet truffles, home made raw brownie bites and ICE CREAM!!!

It's getting late and I have work tomorrow so I'll focus tonight's post on my favorite part of the day ... the ice cream.

I haven't made ice cream since I was a little kid.  I remember it was such an ordeal we really didn't do it all that often, but I remember sitting outside with my dad where we had an old time ice cream maker (yikes, might have even been one you had to crank ...).  It required rock salt and ice in order to turn the milky mixture into ice cream and it seemed to take forever.

A couple weeks ago, I purchased the Cuisinart Ice Cream maker.  I had been a bit busy on the weekends so I never got around to tackling the ice cream.  I decided I wanted to make this mint chocolate ice cream for my first attempt. 

I followed the recipe to the letter except we used cashews instead of brazil nuts.  I've had cashew ice cream before at Pure Food and Wine and loved it so I figured that was the safest bet.  Maybe next time I'll try Brazil nuts.

I mixed all the ingredients in the Vita-Mix, including mint from my own garden.

Here we are pouring the ice cream mix into the ice cream maker:

It says it makes ice cream in less than 20 minutes and it really does!! I think I blinked and it turned into a super thick ice cream mixture.  We added some cacao nibs at the end to make "mint chip" ice cream.

Here is the ice cream in the maker as it was finishing up:

The ice cream was a huge hit!!  I had my bowl topped off with one of the gourmet truffles:

If you've been pondering the idea of making raw ice cream but thought maybe it was too difficult or time consuming, let me put those fears to rest.  It was super simple!!!  It was as simple as making a smoothie.  The ice cream maker literally does all the work, and it doesn't take that long.

I'm looking for ideas for my next ice cream adventure. 

Any ideas or favorite recipes?