First trial of the food dehydrator

Strawberries, pineapples, apples and banana slices all ready to be dehydrated. 

Homemade Pho Sate

Got up this morning and saw that there's a rainfall warning in effect, all I could think of was a hot bowl of pho sate soup. I had bought some beef soup bones a month ago, and still sitting in the freezer. So, I got it out, and started making the broth. After searching for some Pho Bo recipes online, I decided to go with the one from www.vietworldkitchen.com (http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2008/10/pho-beef-noodle-soup.html), which included spices like star anise, cloves, cinnamon sticks. I skipped the fish sauce, which I know was one of the most important ingredients in Vietnamese cuisine! I substituted with a bit of tamari sauce.

Now the sate part... I looked for sauces at a couple of Asian markets but couldn't find any sate sauce that contained no MSG or peanuts (can't have them due to allergy). So, I decided to make my own. Again, Viet World Kitchen had a recipe for vietnamese style sate chile sauce (http://vietworldkitchen.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/lemongrass-chil.html), so, I just followed it. I used all the ingredients besides peanut oil (substituted with olive oil), red chili (substitued with jalapenos cause I couldn't find any red ones!), and siracha sauce (which has misc preservative that I wasn't sure about).

Voila! 

Despite no fish sauce, the soup turned out good. The broth could be simmered a little longer (I cooked it for only 3 hours).

A Tray of Goodness

I've heard a lot of good health benefits about wheatgrass but had never tried it myself. On the weekend, I saw a beautiful tray of organic wheatgrass at the farmers market, so I decided to give it a try.

I cut a handful of grass everyday to put in my smoothie or squeeze it through my juicer with other fruits and vegetables. It doesn't have much of a strong taste to it, so it was easy to combine wheatgrass into smoothies and juices.

After 6 days, this is what's left. I've been watering and giving the wheatgrass lots of sunshine by placing it outside for a few hours a day. After a few days, the patch that I had cut earlier started to grow taller. The grower of these wheatgrass told me that it will last for about a week. It's hard to tell from the picture, but some tip of the grass has started to turn yellow.

Thai Cabbage Wrap

I have been trying different vegetable leaves for making wraps. I find collard, lettuce, and cabbage leaves worked the best. This dish uses collard and cabbage leaves. Cabbage leaves needed a little more time to get softened in hot water.

For the filling, I stir fried some onions, garlic, peppers, carrots, kohlrabi, mint, and mung bean noodles (aka glass noodles). For the sauce, I mixed together some lime juice, mint, chilli, miso paste, honey, and almond butter.

You can probably use any vegetable-noodles combo for the filling. And use peanut butter instead of almond butter if you want to make it more Thai.

Dissecting a Coconut

I see coconut at the grocery store all the time, but never actually bought one myself. Maybe because I grew up with coconut trees in our yard, and always have fresh coconut in hand. Anyway, I thought I would get one and see what I could do with it. This one turned out to be a bit older, and the flesh was hard. Due to its age, the juice was too sour drink.

 After about 30 minutes prying out the flesh, I decided run the flesh through my juicer and see how much coconut milk I could get out of it. 

In the end, I got some coconut butter, shredded coconut, a small amount of coconut milk, and a glass of sour coconut water. I think I'm going to make some curry with these homemade coconut products.

"Chocolate Milk"

As you can see from the pictures that this is not your typical chocolate milk :-) I named it "chocolate milk" mainly because of the colour of the juice.

The ingredients were juices from carrots, dandelion greens and apple. Carrots and an apple helped cut out the bitterness of the dandelion green.

Non-traditional bibimbap

This is my own creation of bibimbap (a Korean dish) with fish, dandelion and lettuce greens, pickeld daikon and carrot pulp, and cauliflower "rice". I made the sauce with miso paste, chilli powder, and some honey.

I realized after I was done that I forgot to top it with an egg like they do in traditional bibimbap.

Beet burger

Since I got a juicer, I started juicing more, which means I have more vegetable pulp to experiment with. This beet burger was made with beet and carrot pulp. It turned out delicious - very juicy. The burger was served with a green salad with homemade salad dressing and some goat feta.

Grainless Sushi

Today I experimented with no-rice sushi. The recipe called for jicama for the sushi rice. I didn't have any jicama, so I ended up using half a kohlrabi that had been sitting in my fridge for a couple weeks now. I grated the kohlrabi, seasoned it with rice vinegar and salt, then sprinkled some flaxseed on to give it some texture. I also have some carrot pulp from juicing carrot this morning, so, I threw them in as well. The carrot pulp turned out looking like fish roe.