Eat Dance Live

Everyone knows that fall means it's time for Pumpkin EVERYTHING! I feel like I'm surrounded by a sea of Pumpkin Spice Lattes when I walk down the street, that the smell of pumpkin pie haunts all my favourite restaurants (no complaints there!), and we may or may not have just brought back TONS of pumpkins to carve from our trip to the pumpkin patch last week... b ut did you know that aside from being nutrient packed for your tummy, th ey're also great for your skin when used externally?  Pumpkins have oodles of vitamins, minerals and enzymes that are amazing for your skin. Pumpkin's Vitamin A is great to soften your skin while vitamin E repairs it from free radical damage... and how about all that nourishing zinc, beta carotene, Vitamin C and those antioxidants! Pumpkin also contains a natural enzyme that helps dissolve dry or dead skin sells, allowing the clear new skin underneath to come out vibrant, refreshed and glowing. Though I haven't test this out myself,...

Am I finally an early adapter for the next cool thing? I think I just might be! Sure I might have joined Instagram or Twitter (and even Facebook) months, if not years, after everyone... but I just discovered Vine, thanks to the awesome Christine , and I'm pretty sure I'm addicted! Vine allows you to make 7 second videos with your phone of anything you possible want. It's a really fun and creative way of figuring out how to get a message across in very little time and with only a few images. So much fun! What did I do with my first video? My signature smoothie of course (just click on it and unmute the volume to get it started!): Hehe... kind of feel like the Chairman from Iron Chef at the end of that: Vine was bought by twitter so you can cross-post your vine videos on Twitter , Facebook or you can easily embed them in your blog just like this! Expect a lot more of these in the future... 

And once again, a stroke of culinary genius! Yet another one of my childhood favourites made vegan, and mostly raw!  Whenever summer time is around the corner, (yes, all you Canadians, it did just get warm today, I KNOW I'm wishful thinking...) I start thinking about how much my sister and I loved Caf é  Li é g e ois back in the day.  Every summer when we went to France and got to eat at a restaurant, it was our dessert of choice. It was an unspoken rule that regardless of what we ate, we would still make room for one of these bad boys. I can only imagine what it would be like for our parents to have two small children on coffee and sugar!  The real deal is pretty "unhealthy" stuff: coffee, cream (made with God only knows how many egg yolks), sugar and vanilla ice cream... The version I originally wanted to make would consist of a sweetened vegan coffee-like substance with raw vanilla ice cream dumped in and topped with coconut whipped cream. However, I'm g...

Every once in a while I'll have someone ask me what raw foodies eat on a daily basis without making their lives super complicated. By "super complicated," I mean, when you don't have to dehydrate, prep-prep, sprout, and do all the usual things that might make a lot of raw dishes pretty time consuming. Here's almost a week's worth of dinners I made that all took less than 20 minutes to prep. And they were all deeeelicious and is generally what I make when I want to keep it relatively simple. Of course, it's usually paired with some fancier things like raw crackers and such. (I'll make large batches of those types of things over the weekend when I have more time.) I would give you the recipes... but as usual, these recipes are ideas that caught my fancy when I got to the kitchen counter to make dinner, and they were not written down because they're based off of intuition and whatever my little hands could find in the pantry and fridge. I can...

Am I the only avid brown rice eater who was unaware of the whole toasted brown rice thing? As if brown rice weren't delicious, comforting, and warming enough already! You might think it's "just" rice but did you know that if you toast the rice before you cook it as you usually would, it increases brown rice deliciousness to level AWESOME?! When we had dinner at our friends' place a few weeks ago, the brown rice that we had for dinner kind of blew my mind. I had to know the secret! Kristen (who apparently teaches me all sorts of wonderful food things ) told me it was super simple: toast your rice. And it actually was  that easy! I went over to her place on Friday for a cooking demo, and well enough, it was pretty straightforward. Here's the secret:  Toasted Brown Rice Bowl 1. Over medium heat, warm up  some oil (we used abut a couple tablespoons of olive oil, but coconut would also be a good option). 2. Add in your rice and mix it with the oil to...

Oh, turmeric, you and your majestic golden hues, how you warm my nights and allow me to fall peacefully asleep, dreaming of warm humid summer nights, candles, and sequinned baldaquins... too much detail? I discovered turmeric milk thanks to my friend Kristen, who has been using it as a pre-bedtime sedative for quite some time. As someone who often has trouble sleeping, I was skeptical. As much as I love chamomile, lavender, and all the usual tricks, they haven't always worked for me. I've heard of the whole "drink a glass of warm milk before bed" idea but never tried it myself, thinking such a thing would be too heavy before bed. Yet, this new concoction won its way to my heart. Clever, turmeric, you. Turmeric, the beautiful orange spice from India, is from the ginger family. (Go figure, I love  ginger.) Ayuverda and TCM boast that turmeric is anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, and helps deal with internal and external infections. Doctors have ...

Back in my optimal health days, I ate a grapefruit every day. There were so many great reasons to do that, and I can tell you I definitely felt a difference! You might already know that along with celery, grapefruit is one of those "negative calorie" foods, ie. it takes more caloric energy to eat it than the calories in it! There's also a flavonoid in grapefruit that helps balance out blood sugar levels and to prevent metabolic syndrome, which is when you pack on the pounds around your waist. Finally, if you start your day with a grapefruit, it actually kick starts your liver into fat-burning mode! Now, I've discovered a way not only to get my daily grapefruit in, but also add a whole bunch of other healthy ingredients to make an optimal morning or post-workout meal. I give you: The Fat Busting Smoothie This smoothie has a satisfyingly tart and "healthy" taste. Packed with fibre, all sorts of nutrients and metabolism boosting goodness, it's...

Sometimes in winter, when your face feels so cold it hurts, you just want to come home to something warm. A couple night ago, that something came in the form of a warm vegan bolognese sauce poured over gluten-free brown rice linguini. Now for your little bit of food history: Bolognese sauce is a meat-based sauce that originally came from... Bologna, Italy, of course! It was first documented in the late 18th century by the father of Italian cooking, Pellegrino Artusi (also the guy who penned one of the earliest recipes for minestrone, which he thought had made him fatally ill until he found out it wasn't bad minestrone, but cholera. No really, look it up.) The original recipe calls for meat, specifically veal (the cursed meat of all vegans), onions, carrots, and butter. Mushrooms were approved as a good addition. The recipe was pretty simple: nicely mince and brown everything, and then cook the whole thing in meat broth. My vegan recipe is almost just as simple... but healthier...