Coconut and Strawberry Ice-cream with Chocolate sauce - Dairy and sugar free! ~ Mariella

So, now you have delicious frozen homemade coconut milk in an ice tray in the freezer.

(see http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-make-your-own-coconut-milk-at.html) 

But what can you do with it? You can use it as a substitute for cream in any dish from pasta to Thai curry and it’s great in smoothies and baked desserts. This is what I did with mine this week and my kids are bugging me to make more!

I tipped out one ice tray full of frozen coconut milk and added an equal amount of frozen organically grown strawberries which I bought during season from the 'Home Grown' stall at my food  market. Organic fruit is obviously first prize, but any frozen fruit will do, just remember to peel and cube it before you freeze it.

(see http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/10/our-first-market-day.html )

I then put it all through the Oscar and it looked like this:

Which, for all of it’s yumminess, doesn’t look all that appetizing, which is why I added a little Agave, then put it through the Oscar again.

I then made homemade chocolate 

(see http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/07/super-easy-healthy-snacks-on-move.html) 

and instead of refrigerating it, I poured it straight onto the Coconut and Strawberry ice-cream. It was such a hit, completely dairy and sugar free and quick to make!

  

How to make your own Coconut milk at home! ~ Mariella

As I am sure you are well aware, I’m nuts about coconuts! Coconut oil, fresh green coconuts, desiccated coconut, coconut milk, coconut cream. There just one problem, all of the above are easy to find except for the coconut cream. Most tins have horrendous lists of stabilizers and additives. My favourite is sodium metabisulfite, which is an inorganic compound of chemicals, formula Na₂S₂O_5.

This chemical has been associated with broncho constriction, shortness of breath, wheezing, coughing, gastrointestinal disturbances, swelling of the skin, flushing, tingling sensations and shock. Direct contact of sodium metabisulfite with your eyes can cause irritation, pain, stinging, tearing, redness, swelling, corneal damage and blindness. 

Ingesting pure sodium metabisulfite irritates your gastrointestinal system as it reacts with acid in your stomach by releasing sulfurous acid. Ingesting high amounts can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, circulatory disturbance and central nervous system depression. A fatal dose is estimated to be 10 g for the average adult, that comes to approx two R2 coins!

Suffice to say, I’m not so into it! But I do like coconut milk, so I've devised a cunning plan! It’s so easy.

-Take desiccated coconut, pour it into a pot and add approximately double the amount of water.

-Let it boil for 5-10 min

-Remove from heat and allow to cool.

-Run through your Oscar, 

Which happens to be on Sale at Fresh Earth at the moment 

(http://www.freshearth.co.za/store/p-2179-oscar-juicer-da-900-chrome.aspx) 

or other food processor, using the juicing element and viola, you have coconut milk!

It doesn’t keep for longer than two days (which is probably why they load it so full of nasties!) so it’s best to make it on the day you intend to use it. You can also freeze it in an ice tray and add to curries or smoothies.

I did that and had a little left over, which I added to my smoothie.

Today’s smoothie:

-Homemade yoghurt 

(See post : http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-make-your-own-yoghurt.html)

-Homemade coconut milk

-1 white nectarine

-Agave/honey

-Tahini

-Macadamias

-Roasted desiccated coconut and goji berries to garnish

So yum and all before work this morning! It’s so easy and…… I’ll show you next week what I have in mind for the frozen coconut milk in the freezer....!

Grow your own! ~ Mariella

I picked these tomatoes in an open field close to my house.

They were growing wild. 

They taste great! 

And this got me thinking, 

if we threw seeds into every open plot, how much extra free food we would have and that got me thinking about the open space in our gardens, especially if you include the lawn! And that got me pondering the mass crop situation and how unnatural it is to grow just one crop for kilometers repeatedly in the same place year after year, and then I thought (all this thinking was very linear, as you can see!) about supply on demand and how we have the industrial era to thank for suburbia and now we have suburbia to thank for the protracted employment of mass crop farming.

 

If you look at these two images, they look rather similar and in fact, the one necessitates the other. The concentration of people in one space, not growing their own food, requires an unsustainably vast quantity of food grown in another place. 

This visibly explains that if we want an end to commercial farming we have to feed ourselves, we cannot demand a change but still go to the supermarket to buy groceries. What we need is something more like this…

We need to grow our own. 

If you don’t already have your own garden and don’t have a lot of space, then start with potted fruit and vegetables that are easy to manage. Most plants do well in pots provided they have enough space.

Check out this website for tips:

http://www.container-gardening-for-food.com/

Growing you own food ensure food that it is fresh and grown with love and it’s so empowering when those first little shoots start to show. Good plants to grow in temperate regions in South Africa in January are: Dwarf beans, climbing beans, beetroot, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, Chinese cabbage, cucumber, endive, leeks, lettuce, marrow, spring onions, parsnip, potatoes, radish, silver-beet, sweet corn, turnips.

Pick one, find out what it likes and start from there! The time is now!    

Your number 1 energy saving asset! Mariella

The point of this blog is to ‘create a new understanding of health and sustainability through a combination of modern world creations and the reintroduction of some forgotten principles!’ And I think this post, as brief as it is, fits the criteria perfectly!

It’s one thing to know about an applicable bit of wisdom but I have found that until you are forced into a situation where you have to use that bit of what you already know, do you actually make the effort to apply it.

My daughter and her friends won the Young Designers Award at the Eskom Eta Ideas for Energy competition last year.

(See post http://freshearthorganicfood.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-daughters-team-wins-eta-awards-young.html )

They won with a research project about energy savings and introduced the concept of the ‘hotbox’ to the judges. Now before your eyes glaze over with memories from your college days, I’m talking about the concept of taking an already cooking pot, and insulating it either in a blanket or a container made specially for that purpose, so that it passively cooks itself. I use a very large polystyrene box to make my yoghurt, it works like a charm. But because I use it to store all the yoghurt tubs and other goodies for my market stall during the week, I don’t ever use it to cook with. Last night I cooked a meal which required all of the elements on the stove plus one! I still had rice to cook and had no space for it. So my husband came up with the ingenious idea of seeing how the cooler box would work as a hotbox. It insulates, right?

So I let the rice boil on the stove for five minutes and then transferred it to the cooler box, dropped a blanket on top of it and closed the box. It cooked in the same amount of time but with a fraction of the gas! 

This is really important information! 

It should go viral! No matter what our socio-economical situation is, most of us have a cooler box, which sits redundantly in a corner until there’s a braai at someone’s house! This cooler box can become your number 1 energy saving asset. I’m being very serious about this! If everyone started using their cooler boxes tonight, 71% of South Africa’s domestic energy crisis would vanish overnight! And think of what you could do with the extra money in your pocket! Really super-duper-extra seriously, try it. 

This post applies to you!

Today is the day! 

Happy 2013! Mariella

It’s 2013! And I quite like the number 13. Perhaps because so many people do not! I traveled on the 13^th once, and suffice to say I had the entire back of the plane to myself!

2013 is, as my brother-in-law so eloquently said, ‘uncharted ground!’ Every year I start my year with a good read up on all the different philosophies and what they have to say. I see it as having a look at the map before the journey starts.

2013 is the year of the Water Snake according to Chinese astrology. It begins February 10^th. The snake, also known as the junior dragon, is an enigmatic, intuitive, introspective, refined and collected creature. Ancient Chinese wisdom says a snake in the house is a good omen as it means that the family will not starve. In the year of the Water Snake, all things will be possible. Saving money and being thrifty should be on top of your list of priorities.

‘While the outside seems to be solid, the inside is empty.  Hence it is a year of conservation, a year of rebuilding and a year of changes’, this is what Paul Ng has to say about this year.

http://www.paulng.com/CMS/uploads/2013-geo.pdf

Numerologically speaking, 2013 adds up to the number 6, which apparently personifies the idea that we should love others as we love ourselves. This year there is focus on helping others less fortunate, and assessing how important material things are to us.

I have moon calendars in my shop made by a talented astrologer, Fiona Sim, from Cape Town. I find her calendar very sensitive and spot on! And I freely admit to consulting it on things like party dates. Full moon makes for a dance party, whereas if the moon will be waning, I make sure I have enough chairs! For example, the 1^st January 2013, the moon was in Virgo.

The calendar said ~ ‘Time to get organised, fix and finish things. The mood is useful and helpful. Enjoy health foods and stalls, crafts, detail work and planning.’ So if you found yourself organizing a little more than is healthy for a New Years day, that may have been why!  

I take these things with a pinch of salt, but I find it increasingly interesting how, in retrospect, there's a truth to them!

Happy 2013 everyone, may this year be blinded by how brightly you can shine!