Regular detoxing - a healthy relationship with food

Today is Day 1 of my Master Cleanse for October - so I didn't do much of any cooking and no eating for me until 12 days from now. The first day of any MC, I always spend sipping only water or herbal teas. 

I will start with the MC juice either tomorrow or Tuesday. I really enjoy this little clean out and besides my body takes a couple of days to adjust into detox mode. That's when the real work begins, not that it hasn't already!

I can honestly say I don't know how everyone doesn't live like this - my body gets a good clean out, repair, replenishment and healing takes place on every level and I always feel great after a cleanse. But, my house gets a clear out too, the kitchen will be reorganized, tidied and sorted and much more. 

Careful planning and thought goes into where things should be, creating better flow and ease of food preparation as well as finding better ways to store my kitchen gadgets. I really enjoy the down time -- for those who have been following along with my other detoxes, this is truly a creative time for me!

So, today has been enjoyable, I started in this morning and have not really stopped yet - even the windows were done today. It was such a beautiful sunny day (for the most part) that we were able to accomplish a lot.

The same with these past few weeks - I have been putting a lot of effort into concocting new recipes and revamping some old ones to suit our needs here. I have made some lovely dishes and played around quite a bit in the kitchen. 

Some of my favorites have been Rosemary Lamb Cobbler, Sheeps Cheese & Duck Egg Pie and my very own homemade dandelion coffee (we dug up dandelion roots, roasted them and made our own coffee). 

It just seems that whatever is made with love and from the spirit of wanting to have a healthy relationship with your food - tastes so much better!

April

Coconut balls and dandelion coffee - a favourite around here! 

Barley Coffee

One of the processed foods on my list to go and hopefully be replaced with a homemade version, was the chicory coffee we used to drink. It was an instant, roasted and most likely freeze dried vegetable coffee, which had a great taste, but obviously was highly processed to get it at the 'stir in your cup' stage.

Our mainstay morning drink is dandelion coffee, however, at times this can be hard to get and we like to stretch out the supply we have to make it last longer. The dandelion coffee is not ground or processed other than being roasted, thus it is lower on our list at the moment! 

Because we have been missing the chicory coffee and needing something to add in with dandelion, today I decided to try my hand at making some roasted coffee using barley. I have been mulling this over in my mind for a few weeks now, and this grain seems to be easiest to work with.

I found very little mention of what to do with it, while the information I did find varied quite a bit. So, once again, it is hit and miss - try something and see how it works out. To be honest, I thought it would be far more complicated then it turned out to be, or maybe I have got it all wrong! LOL

To roast the barley, I poured 2 cups of dry barley grain onto a flat pan and placed this into a hot oven, of about 220º for nearly 45 minutes. My plan was to roast it for at least the full 45 minutes, but I felt that it was getting too dark and turned off the heat around the 40 minute mark.

Barley grain ready for the oven

Then, I let the grain sit and cool down completely as the oven cooled. Once it was cool to the touch, I used my immersion blender and ground it up in the same way I do the dandelion coffee. I noticed right away, once it was ground - it smelled very rich and full, reminding me of the chicory.

Roasted barley grain

Now, that I seemed to have some promising results, I couldn't wait to try it out. When I was making our dandelion coffee, I added in 2 heaping tablespoons of the roasted barley and made our coffee as usual. 

It tasted great - there were some small bits of coffee floating around, and the plunger was a little harder to push down. These things we can work on and perhaps we can make coffee some other way to avoid this. Otherwise...

Barley coffee ground in jar ready to use

As I write this, I can only think one thing - it was that easy to make! OMG! Here I was thinking making a grain coffee was some magical process, and it was nothing of the sort. Right now we have a full jar of the barley coffee and I plan to make more each week to enjoy with our dandelion drink.

Great stuff!

Have a healthy day,

April

Dandelion and barley coffee with goat's milk - Yumm!!

Dandelion Coffee....Herb of Choice

Many years ago, I received a wake up call about my life, health, spirit and where on earth I wanted to be (and who I wanted to be) at the end of the road...and as a result of that wake up call, I made a lot of changes over the course of a few short years. 

In fact, to say that not one aspect of my life was the same (except for my partner and my children) would be an understatement. However, one of the most significant changes that we made was to give up coffee and all caffeine in fact. It has proved to be such a wise decision in the long term.

In it's place (I would subscribe to the thinking that if you remove something, you replace it with something far better) we hunted and searched for a drink that we could enjoy in the same way, but would not have the action of a drug on our detoxing bodies.

We tried many things of course, nut coffees, chicory, barley cup and a host of other mixtures and concoctions - some good and others not so great. Finally, we found pure roasted dandelion root, the kind that you have to grind yourself and then make into coffee.

Actually the first dandelion coffee we bought sat in the cupboard for about 6 months or so before we finally got around to giving it a try. But first we had to figure out how to use it. There were no instructions on the package telling us to grind it first, for example.

Dandelion coffee ground - just for a few seconds 

Through trial and error, we soon got the dandelion coffee where we wanted it and were hooked. I have long compared it to a cross between chocolate and coffee in taste and smell - it is bitter like coffee, rich and full bodied and each batch you get might taste slightly different.

We also use the grounds twice in a French press and add chicory to the mixture for the second pass through hot water. I like my coffee with goat's milk and we make it strong - everyone in the family enjoys it, with my daughter drinking it since she was a baby.

Perhaps the most important thing here is that this is a herb and therefore confers all the benefits of plant life in every precious drop. Dandelion is good for the liver, encourages detox, aids digestion, helps gut ailments, encourages bowel health as well as being known as a prebiotic or having components which feed beneficial gut bacteria. And this is just the beginning!

If you have been drinking your coffee while your adrenal glands scream from hyper stimulation and your body shuts down with an ever increasing toxin load, try switching to dandelion coffee. Our ancestors have been drinking it for millennia and, as we are finding out, they were not far wrong in their tastes.

Cheers

April

Coconut balls and dandelion coffee with milk 

Spiced Plum Sauce

Yesterday we came home from the market with all kinds of goodies and ended up with several different kinds of plums (red and purple, green gages, Damson).  Of course when buying organic fruit it doesn't last long, so I had to jump into more jam making early this morning. 

It is funny how I never intend to do anything in particular, the fruit is on hand and then thoughts form in my head - this is the right combination or this fruit will taste great with these spices. Today it was exactly like that - I had all of these juicy overripe plums, and could smell something spicy going with them.

It did start out as a jam, and I did add apple to the mixture still trying to make every effort to get these concoctions to thicken, however I ended up with a spiced plum sauce, which tastes delicious. My efforts do seem to pay off, when I just go with it! LOL

I chopped up about 5 cups of plums and added 2 small apples, plus the juice of 1 lemon (because it always seems like the right thing to do?) and 1/2 cup of apple concentrate. The plums immediately dissolved into mostly water and I had to let the mixture bubble away for a lot longer then usual.

Plums and apple mixture

Half way through the cooking I added 1/2 teaspoon full of cinnamon and then a sachet bag of whole cloves. For the life of me I could not see myself fishing them out at the end - so I placed a large tablespoon of cloves inside a piece of muslin cloth tied it up and threw it into the plum jam. 

Sachet of Cloves

It smelled great! Very spicy stuff in the end - and will be nice to complement other dishes. I had some on toast and my mouth is still slightly tinged with the taste of it. I could see this being used as a sauce over egg fried jasmine rice and fish...Yumm! 

Then I was back to our feast weekend - where everyone gets to choose their favourite meals and French toast appeared to have won for the lunch time treat. I don't normally do anything fancy when I make this, just duck eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, goat's milk for the mixture, soak spelt bread (it was cinnamon date bread) and cook this over a hot pan.

Soaking the bread....

Today I served the hot French toast with my homemade apple sauce, goat's butter and maple syrup. Needless to say, there wasn't anything left over! It was yummy and the kids got their treat. This is such an easy meal to make (once in a while) which everyone loves. 

Nearly done....! 

Last night I also made a big batch of Coconut Date balls to have on hand as snacks for the weekend, because I am not buying anything ready made from a shop of any kind (no more date bars etc) - not when we can make our own. These are little energy bars and taste great with chopped figs, dates, tahini, jam, ground nuts all rolled in coconut - lets see how long they last!

Coconut Date Balls with dandelion coffee...

Well, off to sort out the herb garden, enjoy your long weekend,

April