Love your Coconuts

I have one simple statement to make today: Meredith's Chocolate Mousse Pie is chocolate orgasm on a plate. I wanted to blog about it while it's still fresh in my mind, but words to describe food usually don't capture them at all. "This taste good/this taste amazing, etc." doesn't give away what you a truly experiencing. The taste of this cake is absolutely amazing, the texture is divine. It has the perfect resilience, not too mousse-y and not too hard. It's juuust right!

Andrew's and my favourite hang-out when we lived in Kingston was a place called the Sleepless Goat. It had the most amazing cakes (both vegan and non-) that you could ever imagine. Once we left there, I never thought we'd be able to recapture those experiences, but this cake brought them all back. Right after my first bite, I thought "Wow, this is just like Goat cake" (no, you never do stop giggling, no matter how many times you say that).

On a scale from one to yum, this gets a YUM! I so won out when I suggested to Meredith that I work through her ebook and blog about it! Every day just gets better and better.

For those of you who may have gotten her book or who have tried your hands a raw cakes that use coconut oil (like this one), don't get caught up in all the fear-mongering there has been over the last little while about coconuts and fat and what not. In moderation (like most fats, even if they are the healthy kind), coconut oil is SUPER good for you. Here's how and why:

Coconut oil is good for your hair, your skin, your teeth, your kidneys, stress relief, weight loss, a stronger immune and digestive system, and maintaining cholesterol levels. It's also antioxidant, antibacterial, antifungal, and more. The problem with most foods is not the food itself, it's what we've done to it. People freak out about coconut oil (or coconut fat in general) because big ag industries decided to hydrogenate it at one point to make it cheaper to produce.

Hydrogenation is evil, not whatever the original food was! Hydrogenation changes the chemical make up of your food, ultimately making it something completely different than were we to eat it in its pure raw form. That's why society has now turned on margarine, peanut oil, and most other fats that were potentially very healthy but that the industry chose to hydrogenate.

YES, coconut oil has saturated fat, but not all saturated fats are created equal. The ones in coconut oil are assimilated very well by the body because most of them are medium chain triglycerides. 40% of the saturated fat in coconuts is made up of lauric acid which helps fight viruses and bacteria-causing diseases including herpes, influenza, and even HIV.

Really, think of all the South Asian cultures who eat coconuts all the time, I don't think any of them are suffering from a lot of the diseases plaguing our unhealthy country! I can't stress it enough, it's not the coconuts! They're amazing for you, so leave them alone... well actually, eat them (especially in the form of Meredith's pie)!