Recipe: Stuffed 8 Ball Zucchini

Ingredients
1 cup quinoa
1.5-2 cups chicken stock
2-3 cloves garlic, minced or finely chopped
1 bunch spinach or Warrigal Greens
1 big fistful of cherry tomatoes
4 x 8 Ball Zucchini
butter or oil for frying
Salt & pepper to taste
Squeeze of lemon

Method
Heat oven to 180 degrees celcius.
Cook quinoa with chicken stock for around 20 minutes until tender. The stock should all absorb into the quinoa. Add water if necessary.
Cut a lid off the zucchini and scoop out the flesh into a bowl (a melon baller is apparently good for this but a spoon will do). Add halved cherry tomatoes and chopped spinach.
Heat butter or oil in a frypan and add minced/chopped garlic.

Add zucchini mix and sautee for several minutes until the flesh reduces. Add quinoa and mix flavours together. Cook until the liquid disappears. Add seasoning.

Stuff zucchini and place into oven for around 40 minutes or until cooked.

The best home made chocolate in the history of home made chocolate

That's possibly an overstatement, but here at ChocolateObsessed.com, we reckon we've tried and tested enough chocolate to know what's good and what goes straight in the wheelie bin.

This uses our raw vegan chocolate recipe as the base, but then simply adds a cup of chopped/ground almonds (whizzed in a food processor, but not too long, keep some chunks in there) and 1/2 cup sultanas or dates. 

That recipe again is:

1/2 cup coconut oil, melted on low heat on the stove
1 1/3 cups raw cacao, sifted and stirred into the melted coconut oil
4-6 tablespoons organic raw coconut nectar/syrup

Add the nuts and fried fruit; spread onto a baking tray; freeze for 5-10 minutes, cut into squares; freeze again for about 20 minutes or until hard. Pop into a container and keep in the fridge or freezer.

Fresh from the Snowy

Snowy Mountains Fresh

During the period when the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme was being built, an engineer identified that the base of the Blowering Dam would be an excellent site for a trout farm.  As the ice from the Snowy Mountains melts over summer, the dam releases huge volumes of water which are released into nearby trout farms.  

The water is pristine, clear and clean.  The key with excellent trout is the quality of the water: if the water is excellent, so are the trout. 

James from Snowy Mountains Fresh is a man from Snowy River himself.  Many members of his family, including the uncle he was named after, worked on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, so he has spent a lot of quality time in the area sourcing the very best trout. His trout is from a trout farm in Tumut and is hot wood smoked, the traditional way - which means that it is a subtle smoked flavour which keeps the fish incredibly moist.

If you haven't yet tried his smoked trout products - two words: YOU MUST!  His smoked trout dip, tomato based pasta sauce, whole smoked trout and deboned fillets are off the hook.  They're so good in fact that he keeps selling out at the markets, so get in early!

Snowy Moutains Fresh comes to the Bondi Junction Village Markets every Thursday 9am-1.30pm; and the Lane Cove Public School Food & Farmers' Markets every Sunday, 9am-1.30pm.

[Image source tastespotting.com]

George Bush Snr was wrong

Before you change channels, the only political thing about this blog post will be contained in the statement that George Bush Snr did a massive disservice to humble broccoli.

He doesn't like it.  And proudly announced to the world media many years ago that he doesn't like it, he wouldn't eat it and that was that.

Millions of kids probably cheered around the world. And parents, nutritionists and vegetable-lovers were deflated.

Most of us were fairly confident of broccoli's super-health powers, however recent research published in the American Journal of Hypertension has added even more punch to broccoli's clout.

A compound produced in broccoli (and some other cruciferous veggies like cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts, rocket and horseradish) called sulforaphane significantly improves blood pressure and kidney function.  This compound is highest in broccoli sprouts!

Sulphoraphane has also been shown to have antidiabetic and antimicrobial properties. But most impressive and perhaps even awe-inspiring, is that it kills cancer stem cells and slows tumour growth. Researchers believe that eliminating cancer stem cells may be the key to controlling cancer. 

How cool is that?  More evidence to suggest that a diet high in green veggies will help protect you from many Western diseases.  Hippocrates wasn't wrong when he said "Let food by thy medicine and medicine your food." At least one world leader had it right!

Rita's Farm Produce sells broccoli and broccolini (when in season) at Bondi Junction Village Markets every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and at Lane Cove Public School Food & Farmers' Markets every Sunday.

Sorbello Tomatoes also sell seasonal broccolini at the Lane Cove Public School Food & Farmers' Markets every Sunday.

Raw vegan chocolate

Okay I'm going to say it. Twitter is great, when you make it work for you.

I can't remember how I first stumbled on this raw, vegan chocolate recipe, or that such a beast even existed, but the ultimate result is that after following some fabulous raw foodies on Twitter, I found myself ogling this raw, vegan chocolate recipe and busting to try it.

Now: a note to self (that is, yourself): this might take you several attempts to perfect the recipe.  I think I'm up to version #10, but I've finally found a recipe that works for me that I'm happy with. Let me tell you, trialling 10 batches of chocolate is tough work, but someone's gotta do it :-)

The issue in perfecting this chocolate really lies in the type of sweetener you use and how much you use of it.  What I found is that as soon as the sweetener is added, the mixture thickens considerably, sometimes making it hard to work with and a bit too stiff to easily pour into the moulds.  And when you pop the set chocolates out of the moulds when they're set, they're not shiny happy chockies either.

I am sure there is a lot of science around chocolate making. In fact, I KNOW there is a lot of science around chocolate: there is tampering and working it and blah blah blah.  This recipe is not designed for the serious chocolate aficionado.  This is just for someone like me with a sweet tooth that wants to eat the healthier version of a wicked treat.

So how is it healthier, I hear you ask?  Raw cacao is the least processed version of cocoa and therefore still retains all of its lovely nutrients.  Recent studies have shown that raw cacao contain very high levels of antioxidants, magnesium and Vitamin C.  

Coconut oil is one of my favourite all time foods/remedies on the planet and could have its own blog post, hell it could have it's own book, it's so good.  I lather it all over my body.  I make home-made deodorant with it (yes, its true and most of the time I smell like lemon cheescake and I feel like licking my armpits).  But I digress.  Coconut oil improves heart health, increases metabolism and boosts the immune system.

These 2 ingredient alone are reason enough to eat chocolate. But we all know that raw cacao or cocoa aren't sweet, so we need to sweeten the mixture. This is where the health benefits get tricky, because if you chow down on too many of these chocolates, you'll still be consuming a lot of sugar. The trick is to just have one or two a day.  The good news is that this chocolate is quite rich, so you may find it more difficult to pig out and eat the whole batch in one go (and if you do: sheesh..... slow down!)

So let's talk about stevia, a natural sugar replacement that doesn't spike insulin levels.  I don't like it. Not one little bit.  When I added it to my lovely, chocolatey, velvety liquid it turned it all  thick and gritty and made me pull at cat's bum face.   There is no room for a cat's bum face where my cooking is concerned. But if you like it, go crazy and add it.  I decided on a half-half addition of raw organic agave and raw organic coconut syrup (which will give the chocolate a slight chewy consistency).

The original recipe made only half the amount of chocolate, but my family (ahem, me) all devour it so quickly that I always double the recipe. Sometimes I use half the mixture for chocolate in moulds and pour the other half over goji berries and organic dessicated coconut on a metal tray. Mmmm.

Ingredients
1/2 cup coconut oil
1 1/3 cup raw cacao, sifted
3-4 tablespoons organic dark agave syrup
3-4 tablespoons organic coconut syrup
Peppermint oil/orange oil if you like

Method
Gently melt coconut oil over a low heat until just melted and turn off heat immediately. Stir in sifted cacao and mix well.  Add sweeteners and stir. The mixture will thicken but should still be liquid enough to pour into the silicon moulds with a couple of teaspoons.

Pour into silicon chocolate moulds. 

Freeze for around 20 minutes.  Pop out of moulds whilst still frozen and return to freezer or fridge.

And here is the chocolate with goji berries and coconut:

Make sure you keep it in the fridge because in warm weather the coconut oil will become just that: oil and your chocolate will be a mere puddle of its former self. Enjoy - and if you find any excellent natural sweeteners in your travels, let me know.

Oh, and yey for Twitter, the internet, blogs and all that stuff.

[P.S. I forgot to mention the reason this chocolate is "raw" is because the raw vegan community regards raw food as that which has not been heated beyond 46 degrees celcius (115F). As the coconut oil is only gently melted this doesn't take it over 46 degrees.]