Eat Naked Now » Cook Naked

Naked Holiday Recipe: Grain-free Sweet Potato Pie

Margaret Floyd — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:00:41 +0000

Photo taken from our kitchen! (What can I say, we're food people, not camera people. . . )

This holiday recipe is a little variation on the traditional pumpkin pie. For one, it’s made with sweet potatoes (well, officially they’re yams but many stores mistakenly label them as sweet potatoes and most of us think of them as such). For another, we’ve made this with a nut crust, rather than your typical pie crust. This solves the gluten problem and also makes the recipe a synch to make. It’s also got far less sugar than your average pie, and we’ve used maple syrup as our sweetener.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Ingredients

2 cups raw almonds (even better, soak and dehydrate them first)
2 cups raw pecans (again, even better: soak and dehydrate them first)
1 tablespoon plus ½ teaspoon butter
3 dates, pitted
1 ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups pre-cooked and peeled sweet potatoes/yams (we bake them in an oven at 375° for 30-35 minutes – this is something you can do a few days before while you’re making another meal that uses the oven)
1 egg
3 tablespoons grade B or C maple syrup
2 teaspoons cinnamon
¼ teaspoon allspice
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon sea salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°

Nut Pie Crust

2. Combine almonds, pecans, 1 tablespoon of the butter, dates, and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract in the food processor. Pulse several times until well combined.

3. Rub remaining ½ teaspoon of butter onto the pie pan to grease well. Spoon the dough into the pie pan (it will be crumbly – this is very different from working with your normal pie dough) and press into the bottom and sides of the pan using your hands. Cover the pan evenly with dough, keeping the thickness as even as possible. Wetting your fingers makes this much easier.

4. Combine the sweet potato, egg, maple syrup, remaining vanilla, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and sea salt into the food processor. Pulse until well blended. You may need to pause and scrape down the sides occasionally.

5. When nicely blended, spoon the sweet potato mixture into the pie crust, smoothing out the top with a spatula. Bake in the oven at 350° for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

It’s absolutely delicious served with some real whipped cream made from raw cream.

October Unprocessed: Easy Formula For Unprocessed Salad Dressing

Margaret Floyd — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:58:07 +0000

I’m so thrilled to be a contributor for the October Unprocessed challenge by food blogger, Andrew Wilder. Here’s a bit of my post:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Imagine this: You sit down to lunch over a big heaping bowl of salad. Every color in the rainbow is represented, all your favorite goodies from sun-dried tomatoes, some artichoke hearts, maybe an olive or two. Tender greens, fresh herbs, juicy tomatoes. Maybe some leftover wild salmon from last night’s dinner.

Your mouth is watering as you tuck into your delicious, unprocessed lunch and you reach for the bottle of salad dressing.

Just as you’re about to pour, you remember it’s October Unprocessed and maybe you better check out that ingredients. You’re pretty confident it’s got only the good stuff because after all, it’s screaming its health benefits from the label. Low fat! Low sodium! Organic!

What a disappointment to find the list filled with artificial crap you can’t pronounce.

It’s sad but true. I’ve seen many gorgeous, nutritious, absolutely amazing salads get destroyed by this stuff . . . Read the rest of my guest post here!

The Skinny on Saturated Fat: Six Important Roles for this Maligned Nutrient

Margaret Floyd — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:08:08 +0000

Let’s start with this: Saturated fat is good for you.

I know, I know, this isn’t what you’ve heard in the media or from many high profile health-types. The basic formula we’ve been taught is saturated fat = bad. This over-simplistic conclusion is based on the following logic: dietary consumption of saturated fat and the cholesterol that often comes with it leads to heart disease.

This argument is the essence of what’s called the Lipid Hypothesis, a theory proposed originally by Ancel Keys in the 1950s and eagerly adopted by nutritionists, the American Heart Association, and the medical community at large.

Trouble is, the theory was wrong. And has been proved wrong in study after study. How this incorrect theory gained such popularity and has been so difficult to shake is a story unto itself, which I’ll let Sally Fallon and Dr. Mary Enig explain in their excellent paper, The Oiling of America.

It turns out that saturated fat – yes, even saturated fat that comes from animal sources – plays many important roles in your body and health. For example:

It’s is a key component of your cell membranes, giving them structure. In fact, 50% of your cell membranes are made up of saturated fat.
It’s your heart’s preferred fuel, which is why the fat around your heart is highly saturated.
Certain types of saturated fats have antimicrobial and antiviral properties, and strengthen your immune system.
Saturated fat decreases lipoprotein (a), a factor strongly correlated to the risk of heart disease. This means saturated fat decreases your risk of heart disease.
Saturated fat protects your liver from damage due to medications and alcohol. Yes, that’s why after a debaucherous night the thought of a fatty meal is so appealing. Your body is protecting itself.
Saturated fats are very stable and thus protect highly unstable unsaturated fatty acids both outside your body (when cooking with heat) and inside your body. Further, saturated fats help your body make use of essential fatty acids.

Let’s not forget that fat makes food taste good, keeps you fuller longer, and is the source of that consistent energy we all want.

The important thing to consider when eating any type of fat, saturated or not, is its quality. Toxins accumulate in fat, so consume only those fats that come from healthy animals fed appropriate diets and living happily outdoors. Butter or meat from grass-fed cows and eggs from pastured chickens are two great examples.

To incorporate healthy saturated fats into your diet, use them for cooking. We use butter, ghee (clarified butter), coconut oil, and occasionally lard for all our cooking. Save the olive oil and the delicate nut/seed oils for salad dressings and sauces put on the food after it’s cooked.

And most of all, enjoy it! What fabulous news that something as tasty as butter isn’t the bane of your healthful existence, but an integral part of it.

If this subject piques your interest and you’re curious to learn more, here’s some further reading I highly recommend:

The Truth About Saturated Fat by Dr. Mercola

Know Your Fats by Dr. Mary Enig

The Coconut Oil Miracle by Bruce Fife

Naked Wraps: Using collard greens for your burritos and wraps

Margaret Floyd — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:14:34 +0000

Here’s one of the cooler food tricks I’ve learned from Chef James Barry: use a collard green leaf instead of a tortilla for your burritos, enchiladas, and wraps. This is a great solution for those of you who are gluten-sensitive, have a corn allergy, or are just wanting to reduce the amount of starchy carbs in your diet. And really, what’s more naked than a lightly steamed collard green leaf?

You can fill your wrap with just about anything. We’ve got a great recipe in the book Eat Naked, but get creative and try some different things out!

The wrapping technique is a little finicky, so here’s a quick video demonstrating how to do it. With a couple of practice runs you’ll be a pro in no time!

Easy Raw Cucumber Mint Soup

Margaret Floyd — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:00:57 +0000

With spring upon us the days are getting longer, the sun is getting warmer, and it’s a natural and appropriate time to incorporate more raw foods into our diets.

To explore the delights of preparing and enjoying raw foods, a group of us health-minded bloggers decided to get creative in the kitchen and put together a month of raw recipes.

This soup is incredibly easy and fast. It’s ideal for a warm afternoon, with the cooling properties of the mint and cucumber. Delicious!

Makes 2 servings

Ingredients

2 medium-sized cucumbers, peeled and rough chopped (approximately 2 cups)

1 avocado

juice of 2 large lime (approximately 1/4 cup)

2 packed tablespoons fresh mint

1 teaspoon green onion

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

pinch of chili powder

Directions

Combine cucumber, avocado, lime juice, mint, green onion, and sea salt in your blender, and purée well. Serve in chilled bowls, topped with a pinch of chili powder. Eat immediately, or refrigerate until ready to enjoy.

Knife Skillz: Avocados and Mangos

Margaret Floyd — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:00:30 +0000

This video will teach you how to work with two of my favorite foods: the avocado and the mango. Both are delicious naked foods and can be used in so many things – from guacamole, salads, smoothies, salsas, desserts. The thing with both of them is that they can be a real pain in the butt if you don’t know how to cut them properly. Here’s a quick video to get you up to speed if you’re not already an aficionado.

Naked Superfoods: Kale Arame Salad

Margaret Floyd — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:04:57 +0000

Superfoods are foods that pack a particular nutritional punch, either because they’re high in nutrients we typically don’t get enough of in our diets, or because they’re particularly nutritionally dense and confer some kind of health benefit. Today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite superfoods: sea vegetables.

Sea vegetables – yes, I’m talking about seaweed – are particularly high in vitamins, minerals (in particular iodine and calcium), fibre, and potent anti-oxidants. They make food taste good (add them to soups, stews, salads, even a pot of rice as its cooking instead of salt to add a natural salty flavor), they help make beans more digestible (add a stick of kombu to the pot when you’re cooking dried beans like garbanzos, pinto, black, etc), and their impressive nutritional profile will increase the nutritional density of any meal.

But most of us have no idea what to do with sea vegetables. It’s easy for me to say “add them to soup, stews, salads…” etc but what does that really mean?

Well, here’s a really simple and tasty salad that will give you a nice gentle introduction to using one of my favorites, arame. You’ll find arame in your local Asian market, or in the asian or macrobiotics section of your Whole Foods, health food store, or co-op.

Ingredients:

1 big bunch kale, washed, stemmed, and chopped
1/4 cup dried arame, soaked in a bowl of cold water for about 15 minutes, and drained
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
2 teaspoons tamari wheat free soy sauce
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1-2 teaspoon sesame seeds

Directions:

Put the arame in a big bowl of water and set aside to soak as you prepare the rest of the salad.

In a large frying pan, heat a small amount of water (about 1/2 cup) on the bottom over medium heat, and add the chopped kale. Cover, and let steam for 2-3 minutes, until bright green. Drain in a colander and set aside.

In a mixing bowl combine sesame oil, tamari, and lemon juice. Add the steamed kale and toss. Drain the arame, and add to the salad, mixing well. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

You can eat this salad while it’s still warm, or chill it in the refrigerator and eat cold.

Cook from your heart, not your head – Step 3

Chef James — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:33:56 +0000

For many people, cooking is the number of minutes food gets heated in the microwave. Others judge themselves so harshly in the kitchen that they feel paralyzed and refuse to try something different. Well, if you’ve joined us for step one (getting in touch with your naked self – your body’s innate wisdom) and step two (shopping naked), hopefully you’re feeling courageous enough to take the third step: cooking naked.

Step Three: Cook Naked

First things first: take a breath. You’re back in your kitchen. You’ve got some lovely fresh food with which to make a tasty meal. Whether you’re following a recipe or your instincts, take your critical judge’s hat off. Use your senses to explore and prepare your meal. You were extra conscious in buying produce that was colorful and visually appealing. Don’t stop now. Continue choosing foods for your meal that make you hungry.

Your plate is your canvas. It’s just you and this naked food. Smell it, tear it open with your hands (or if you must, a knife), and taste the natural goodness. Remember you’re in experiment mode. Let your mad scientist out. Start putting foods together from instinct.

Put all the fats on your counter that you own (or go out and buy different varieties): butter, ghee, extra-virgin olive oil, lard, avocado oil, walnut oil, flax seed oil, coconut oil. Put them all out and notice which one tugs at you. Not sure, then taste each one until your body provides the answer. Look at the food you bought then back at the fats. Which ones do your instincts tell you to use together?

Without hesitation, go with it, combine ingredients with fat. If you’re sautéing things, proceed. If you’re baking, go for it. Eating it raw, then make it so. Beyond remembering which oils can be heated (butter, ghee, coconut oil, lard) and which are better used cold (extra-virgin olive oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, flax seed oil, sesame seed oil), don’t think about it, just do it. You can’t go wrong when you’re experimenting since everything you do is a learning experience. So go wild, add ingredients together that your mind has never allowed you to mix, yet your primal voice is screaming for you now to do.

When you’re cooking with foods that are organic, the flavor is usually already built into the food. Keep any seasonings to a minimum so that the flavor of the produce can still be tasted. Maybe a little sea salt and pepper; a few fresh herbs. Keep it simple this first time as you focus on cooking naked.

When we cook from our hearts and not our head, it’s imperative that we use our senses as much as possible. Our sense of smell is just as important as our sense of taste when we’re cooking. Listen and watch your food as it cooks: it just might reveal to you how to plate and eat your food.

When the food is cooked and ready to be eaten, sit down and take a full minute to honor that beating heart of yours. Hold space for all the energy that contributed to providing this meal, whether from the sun or the farmer who planted and nurtured it; thank these synergies for creating this delicious, naked food.

Now taste this mad creation of yours. Savor the natural goodness. If something tastes particularly good or maybe even a little off, allow your instincts to reveal why. Maybe you’re inspired to add something else in the moment or maybe you just file the data away for another day. No matter the outcome, you’ll find when you release your inner judge, you quiet the noise around you and listen to the primal voice inside, you’ll find every aspect of food to be more enjoyable and far healthier.

Soak yer nuts. No, not those nuts, silly.

Margaret Floyd — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:00:32 +0000

Soaked nuts? Sounds kinky.

I hate to disappoint, but this has nothing to do with your nether regions. This is about proper preparation of one of my favorite power-packed snack foods: nuts.

Soaking??

It might seem odd to soak your nuts, but here’s a little background:

All nuts have phytic acid, a potent enzyme inhibitor, in their skins. The role of this enzyme inhibitor is to prevent premature breakdown of the nut until it’s in appropriate conditions (e.g., moist, dark, soil – to grow another plant). If we don’t neutralize these enzyme inhibitors, they make it difficult for our body to break down and absorb the nut. Also, they pull other minerals out of our system, so they are considered “anti-nutrients.”

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to neutralize phytic acid: soaking. Simply put raw nuts in a bowl and fill it with filtered water to completely cover the nuts plus about an inch. Leave them in the fridge to soak overnight. In the morning, drain and rinse them, and store them in the fridge.

Some nuts (like almonds) can be eaten just like this, still moist. They keep for about a week in the fridge.

Others (like cashews, pecans, walnuts) get a little slimy and are better dehydrated or slow-roasted. Once you’ve soaked the nuts, here’s what you can do with them:

Dehydrate them. Put them in a food dehydrator set at 105 degrees for about 10hrs.
No dehydrator? Roast them with minimal damage to the delicate oils. Spread them out on a cookie sheet and put them in your oven at its lowest setting. Leave in until slightly brown. This takes about 20 minutes depending on the size of the nut. Stay close and don’t let them overcook.
Add them to smoothies. Soaked nuts add some good protein and fat to smoothies, and when they’re soaked they’re easier to blend.
Make your own homemade nut butter. If you’ve got a high powered blender or food processor, you can make your own nut butter!
Make your own homemade nut milk. Throw them in that high powered blender along with some water and a couple of raw, pitted dates and you have nut milk! (I recommend straining it to remove any “bits”) If you’re making almond milk, you can pull the brown skins off the almonds easily once they’ve been soaked so that your milk is nice and white.
Thicken salad dressings and sauces. Soaked nuts are a great solution if you want to make a salad dressing creamy and a little thicker but aren’t doing dairy or soy (tofu in particular). Simply add them to the blender as you’re making the dressing or sauce.

Other uses for soaked nuts? Share them here! I’d love to expand my repertoire.

Drink your salad: my favorite green smoothie recipe

Margaret Floyd — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:11:20 +0000

Over the last few years, I have reluctantly become a smoothie girl. I’ve never liked them much, but that’s also because I was rather horrible at making them. Usually they were barely edible.

And then I got a VitaMix.

And if you have a VitaMix, you know there’s no longer any good excuse NOT to become a master of smoothies. I’m not one to bow to a gadget, but this blender changed my life. (Based on my informal research, this is a statement commonly uttered by VitaMix owners). Yes, it’s a spendy blender, but it’s worth every penny.

But I digress. I have experimented, I have played with recipes, I have been taught by a smoothie pro, and I have now come up with my own variation on the green smoothie. If you don’t have a VitaMix, a very good high-powered blender will do, but I’d replace the whole nuts with nut-butter.

Ingredients:

1 head romaine lettuce, stem removed
1 big handful parsley
1/2 avocado
handful of raw cashews, ideally soaked and dehydrated. (To learn why this is important – stay tuned. Post coming soon!)
juice of 1 lime
water and meat of one young green coconut (or, if you’re not able to find the coconut, 1-2 cups of coconut water will do)
1-2 tsp raw honey (can be omitted if you’re on a sugar-control program)

Combine all ingredients in your trusty VitaMix (or otherwise high-speed blender) and gradually bring up the speed from low to max. You’ll need to use the “wand” that comes with it to push the ingredients down into the blade. Mix thoroughly until nice and smooth.

This makes 2 servings.

Eat Naked Now » Cook Naked

Naked Holiday Recipe: Grain-free Sweet Potato Pie

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October Unprocessed: Easy Formula For Unprocessed Salad Dressing

The Skinny on Saturated Fat: Six Important Roles for this Maligned Nutrient

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Naked Wraps: Using collard greens for your burritos and wraps

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Easy Raw Cucumber Mint Soup

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Knife Skillz: Avocados and Mangos

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Naked Superfoods: Kale Arame Salad

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Directions:

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Cook from your heart, not your head – Step 3

Step Three: Cook Naked

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Soak yer nuts. No, not those nuts, silly.

Soaking??

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Drink your salad: my favorite green smoothie recipe