Red Potato Salad

I loooove this potato salad from allrecipes.com.  It is my all-time favorite potato salad recipe.  It has fairly simple ingredients but it does take a while because you have to boil everything and then chill it in the fridge, not to mention peeling the eggs!

Sonny’s Bibimbap

When I was in Colorado Springs recently, my friend Sonny made this delicious, traditional Korean dinner just for me.  It’s what I always order when we go out for Korean food.  Yes, I know it’s cooked and it has rice, thus breaking the rules, but it was delicious nonetheless!

I don’t have the exact recipe she used for the bibimbap, but it was brown rice with poached egg, julienned carrots and cucumber, and spinach sauteed with garlic.  I topped it off with tamari.  Delish.

She also made a fantastic raw cold Korean cucumber soup with an apple cider vinegar broth filled with thin cucumber and green onion slices.  Raw and refreshing!

Maybe one day when I figure out how to have guest authors on this blog, Sonny can post the actual recipes for me.  🙂

Overall, a big 4/5 happy monkeys for this lovely meal.

Black Bean Burgers

We grilled out for the Fourth of July and made fantastic black bean burgers.  I based this on FatFreeVegan’s recipe, but then amended it quite a bit.

Ingredients:

1 can black beans (about 16 ounces), drained and rinsed
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup frozen pepper strips (red, yellow, green)
1/2 cup spinach
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1.5 cup cooked wild rice
1.5 tsp penzey’s chile con carne seasoning (or chili powder and cumin)
2 tbsp ground flax seed
1 egg
3 tbsp garbanzo bean flour
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Start by sautéing the pepper, spinach and onion in a tablespoon of water, just until they start to soften. Mash the black beans and chickpeas. Add the peppers and onions and the other ingredients; mix well.

Flour your hands with chickpea flour and form into patties. Place on a hot outdoor charcoal grill. Grill until well-browned on each side, turning until done.

This makes about 6 medium-sized burgers.  We ate these with sliced tomato, onion and lettuce and they were delish! I give them 4/5 happy monkeys.

Next time: I would like to try to make these grain-free and vegan.  So no rice or egg.  Unfortunately, these are what help hold these together, which you really need if you make them on an outdoor grill.  It might work if we make them on a griddle though.

Berry Crumble Muffins (Grain & Dairy Free)

I was inspired by the Nourishing Gourmet’s Red, White and Blue Muffins, so I did my best to adapt them to be more anti-candida friendly by reducing the sugar.  They didn’t come out quite as well as I had hoped, or nearly as pretty as Kimi’s but this is still a recipe I’d like to try adapting again.

I substituted 1 tbsp agave for the 1/3 cup of honey.  Also, by accident, I used coconut butter instead of the coconut oil the recipe calls for–not a huge problem, but I wouldn’t recommend this since they are pretty dry without the honey.  I baked them for 20 min.  They came out good but a little burnt around the edges, really crumbly and stuck to the cupcake tins.

I give them a 3/5 happy monkeys for now, but I think if we can make them hold together next time, they’ll get a 4/5. 

Next time: I need to really oil the cupcake tins, maybe have paper cups and press the batter firmly together into the cups.  Also, next time I want to use fresh berries, or at least defrost the frozen ones first.  Also, I’m not sure they need any sweetener at all, to me the berries are pretty sweet by themselves.  Of course, my husband, who eats chocolate chips for breakfast, called them “a little bitter.”  It all depends on your sensitization to sugar I suppose.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup coconut flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs, gently beaten with a fork
1 tbsp agave
1/3 cup of coconut butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup frozen mixed berries

Directions:

-Preheat oven to 375 degrees

-In a medium size bowl, place the coconut flour, sea salt, and baking powder. Whisk to remove any lumps.

-Melt agave and coconut butter in a small saucepan, just until melted (if you have over-heated it all, let it cool before combining it with the eggs so that it won’t curdle it. Combine wet ingredients (eggs, honey, coconut oil, vanilla), and whisk thoroughly into dry ingredients.

-Fold in berries. In papered or lightly greased muffin tins, put about 1/4 cup of batter in each muffin tin.

-Bake for 375 degrees until the muffins are lightly browned on the top and a toothpick comes out clean when poked into the middle of the muffin (20-28 minutes)

Almond-Coconut Cookies with Chocolate Frosting

Check out these fantastically yummy cookies from Girl Gone Primal–visit her original post here.  Many, many thanks to her for this delicious recipe.   These are currently my favorite cookies.  Of course, they are the only cookies I’ve found so far that stays within the No Food guidelines, so they’re the first cookies I’ve had in four months!

These are wonderful plain, but even better with chocolate frosting.  The frosting has 1 tbsp agave in it, which at 16 g of sugar per tbsp is crazy cheating, but this made 14 cookies for us, which only amounts to 1.14 g added sugar per cookie.  Yeah, I know I’m just trying to justify my bad behavior 😉  We should have used xylitol or stevia instead so as not to feed my candida, but xylitol is gritty and we don’t have any stevia (yet).  That will be for next time.

We’ve made these twice in one week so I think that qualifies them for the coveted rank of 5/5 happy monkeys.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups almonds
1/2 cup of shredded coconut
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 egg
1t cinnamon
1t nutmeg
1t vanilla (ground vanilla beans preferably)

Chocolate frosting:

3 tbsp cocoa powder
3 tbsp coconut oil
1 tbsp agave syrup (substitute with xylitol or stevia if concerned about candida)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Combine all ingredients in food processor and mix well. Roll dough into a long tube, then slice into 12-15 cookies.  They don’t rise much so cut them about how thick you want them in the end.  Press them onto a tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 15 minutes or until golden and beginning to brown around the edges. Oil will leak out of the cookies and foam as they cook – this is a good thing! Place cookies on cooling rack lined with paper towel to absorb any remaining liquid, leaving you with light, crisp cookies.

Mix together the frosting ingredients and spread on cookies once cool.  Try not to eat them all in one night.

Next time: I’d like to try the frosting with stevia and making these raw.  We just got some raw SweetLeaf stevia and a $5 dehyrator from craig’s list, so we’re all set for next time.  My only question is what to do about the egg?  Not sure if we’ll use it, or if it would even work in a dehyrator.  Maybe it’s not even necessary.  Any advice, let me know!  Otherwise, we’ll just have to experiment and see!