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...

As Fall comes along and the weather gets colder, I tend to follow the "raw until dinner" rule pretty often. When I go for that option, the day is made up of fruit, green smoothies, and a few dehydrated goodies, and dinners tend to be any kind simple cooked veggies with the occasional tempeh. I've mentioned before that I tend to get a little bit obsessed with certain foods and eat them every day for a month until I move on to something new. This month, I figured why limit myself? So I took all of my favourite meals from over the past few months and put them into one. The result was this amazing  kelp noodle bowl that I created a couple days ago. It pieces together all my favourite cooked and raw foods all into one giant bowl of yummy. On top of a flavour and texture extravaganza, it's nutrition-packed, warming, and can be made in under 20 minutes. Pure deliciousness. Given its components, I'm also sure it contains all the minerals, vitamins, healthy fats, prot...

How many times have I gone on and on about my on-and-off again relationship with yoga? From an ode to discovering the beauty of a Yin  practice, to endless praises for the benefits of a daily 20 minute yoga practice , to my 3 month love affair with Bikram , I always wanted to commit... and finally, I've made the leap! I can now say that yoga and I have been in a steady relationship for about two and a half months. I don't know what came over me when we got back from our trip to France in mid-June, but I got home and knew it was time to nurture that relationship again. As usual, the first month or so was super emotionally taxing, releasing (or starting to release) all sorts of bizarre hang ups. Now, as much as yoga is always  about clearing the mind, I know it's become more about the physical practice as well, learning to push and test my limits just that much more, and grow physically as well as mentally. So far, I've been doing a minimum of two and a half hours...

I celebrated two stages of matrimonial bliss this weekend, all of them involving mountains of happiness and buckets of tears. Needless, to say it was an emotionally packed weekend, but I'll share its joys with you in the way I know best... through food. The first tearjerker was the beautiful wedding of two very dear friends. They both just  looked so beautiful and so happy. If I haven't cried already at some point during the day, all you have to do is push the "first-time-the-couple-hears-the-terms-husband-and-wife" button that just really gets me going. Call me old fashion but there's something so beautifully transitional (and traditional) about that moment that's just... timeless. But back to the food. The reception was a pot luck, and given that the bride has been a vegetarian/raw foodist/vegan, it was right up my alley. Everything I made was of course 100% organic, 100% vegan, and 100% made with love. For a main dish, I went for something that would f...

Luckily, I never really had time since I went vegan to become a "junk food vegan" before choosing to go mostly raw. However, that didn't stop me from eating my share of junk food in my pre-vegan years. Thus, like most children, I remember the very specials days when we got to make Rice Crispy Squares with my babysitter. Though the occasions were rare since we didn't eat that kind of stuff too often, it was always wonderful. The smell of melting butter, the joy of making a gooey sticky mess when I added the marshmallows in and then tried to stir in the Rice Crispies, flattening the whole thing out with the white spatula I still have in our kitchen today... pure high fructose corn syrup deliciousness. Fast-forward about fifteen years: Here I am in the natural foods store before my dance class in front of the discount shelf. And there, shining brightly in the centre of the display is Suzanne's Ricemellow Creme , a fancy vegan and gluten-free name for Marshmall...

Okay, Stanford. *rolls up sleeves* I wasn't even suppose to post today, but I couldn't wait til tomorrow to say I have three letters for you: W.T.F. So, there's been some buzz in the blog/"news"/facebook world about Stanford's latest study  nutritionally comparing organic and conventional produce. To give you a really quick summary on what the deal is, the big claim is that: “The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods  are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods.”  Based on that sentence, newspapers have found a new way to restate that we are wasting our precious dollars "buying in" to some organic fantasy. Well, this girl doesn't think it's a fantasy if you don't mind, and here's why: (Note: Though these thoughts are my own, I've also done some background research. A lot of these points are motivated by the more scientifically legit opinion of  Charles Benbrook .) 1. For st...

Time for another What I Ate Wednesday post! I've only done one other before... The problem with any WIAW post of mine is that they'd all probably end up looking pretty much the same, changing up maybe only every season... conveniently, my constance means when I forget to take pictures, I can just recycle some old ones. Breakfast: My favourite Green Smoothie (note the obvious photo recycling thanks to the dead giveaway of the Christmas table runner) At this point, I've probably had this smoothie over 500 times in my life considering it's been my go-to breakfast for a few years now. I would do something different, but I don't, because it's just so yummy. Mid-Day Snack: Raw   Granola Crunchies These crunchies have also become my replacement cereal option since I went raw. I now cut the liquid sweetener all together from the recipe and just used pureed dates (dates and little bit of water to make it mixable). The batch I had today were the same ...

I actually find it really bizarre to eat certain foods out of season. I think it's my body recalling the ancestral days when we could only eat what was only readily available given the time of the year. Eating watermelon and strawberries in the winter? As much as I love them, that's just plain wrong... so is eating pumpkin in the late spring/summer. Okay, so I know lots of you out there love pumpkin, so you might disagree and want to eat it at all hours of the day and all seasons of the year. That's totally cool, and also exactly why I busted out this high raw pumpkin ice cream recipe yesterday to make Andrew happy: High Raw Pumpkin Ice Cream Yield: About 4 servings. 2 C cashews, soaked 1 1/2 C canned pumpkin pie mix 2 C water 1 T of coconut oil, melted 2 T maple syrup 1 inch chunk of ginger 1 teaspoon of cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon of xanthan gum (optional) 1/2 teaspoon of salt Directions: 1. Place all ingredients in a high speed blender and b...

I had a sudden urge for pesto when I saw some at the Wild Oat Bakery  yesterday. I've made vegan pesto a few times before, but the way I make it, it never tastes as good nor is ever worth the hassle so I usually just buy it. Immediately after I did, I figured out that I could concoct the best thing to do with kale since I discovered the joys of my  kelp noodle kale salad ! Creaminess, oh yeah... Pesto Kale Salad Yield: Serves 1 or 2. 1 head of massaged kale 1/2 to 3/4 C pesto veggies of choice (I used peppers, celery, carrots, and tomatoes) Directions:  1. Once you've massaged your kale (click here for a how-to), stir in pesto. 2. Add in chopped veggies. 3. Eat!  Yep, it's that simple! Have a great weekend!