Daily bread

While I have not been writing very much in the last many days, I have been busy in the kitchen and in the garden. The weather in London was amazing, sunny and almost hot, and as everyone living in the UK knows, this is to be savoured and enjoyed, because we never know how long it will last. And so instead of sitting in front of my laptop typing away I have been planting lettuces and beans, reading in the sun Evie's Kitchen: Raising an Ecstatic Child and creating some lovely summery raw foods in between, when I needed a rest from all that sunshine.

As I mentioned before, I don't have a dehydrator, as the space in our kitchen is quite limited and Cooked Husband gets stressed about me overcrowding the kitchen with my 'raw gadgets', but since I had my first positive outcome using very low oven for my Easter feast I have been playing with dehydrator based recipes quite succesfully. I am lucky, I suppose, as the lovest setting on my oven is somewhere around 35-40 C - this basically means that the trays feel just warm, not hot, when handled with my bare hands. Please be careful the first time you experiment, as every oven is different and I would not like it if you burned your fingers! I have also, through trial and error, learned that it is very important to leave the oven door open a little bit to let the moisture out, as some of my first attempts went sour and ended up on the compost heap. I just stick a wooden spoon in the door so it stays open a crack. When you make something like coconut maccaroons this way, the whole house smells of sweet coconut and you are, at least mentally, transported to a lovely caribean island...

 My raw bread and the marinated mushrooms are from Russell James' eZine recipe. You can subscribe on the page where this link takes you, it is free, and I urge you, if you do not yet receive his eZine, sign up now. He is such an inspiration! The bread is based on sprouted buckwheat, zuccini and avocado, and it tastes rather nice. I found it a bit off an acquired taste at first, quite savoury, but it made a perfect base for several different open sanwiches and raw pizzas during the last week or so. On that note I would recommend to make only a half of the recipe if you are a single raw foodist in your household, as, even after I shared some with The Green Queen, I have been eating the bread every day and still have a few slices left in the fridge!

What you can see on the picture is my lunch one day last week; the base is the already mentioned bread, spread with home-made almond/cashew nut butter, drizzled with a bit of extra virgin olive oil, then topped with alternate slices of avocado and marinated and dehydrated mushrooms, decorated with a few vibrant radish slices and microgreens. It was delicious and filling, and another day, when I had a similar version of this for dinner, I gave Cooked Husband a taste ... and he liked it! Never say never!