It’s been on the busy side lately, hence my brief absence of posting. I’ve been going to three belly dance classes a week, (which I think is peachy keen), working on my garden, hiking, biking, camping and preparing for a two week excursion to Ashland, Oregon (we leave tomorrow!) Now that we’re all packed I thought it would be a good time to update here in Blogland.
My garden is looking lovely! Everything is getting so big. Today I tied up my beans and zucchini to the trellices as they are starting to overtake my little chard patch.
Almost all of my veggies are heirloom! The beans are a lovely purple variety and the zucchini is a tri colored type. I can’t wait to taste them! The beans have grown little purple nubs on them. I’m not sure if they’ll turn into flowers or if those are the beans themselves. Time will tell…
My tomatoes are getting HUGE! All of my tomatoes are different kinds of heirloom, and I even have one little baby tomato! This is a Violet Jasper.
My mom gave an Anaheim pepper to go with my other two, and its the best pepper plant I have out of the three. It even has a little baby pepper growing on it!
As usual, Shardul is always interested in helping me in the garden.
My chard is doing excellent, despite having pushy neighbors.
It looked so good today that I had to harvest a few leaves for my lunch salad. Mmmmmm so good!
It was amazing! Such a simple salad with red leaf lettuce, red onion, cucumber, raw sunflower seeds, avocado, and my chard. I used olive oil and balsamic vinegar with sea salt and black pepper to dress it up. I felt so good from my lunch salad that I just had to have another for dinner.
This salad was a little different than my lunch and definitely more hearty. It has red leaf lettuce, red onion, tomato, cucumber, shredded carrot, carrot sticks, shredded zucchini, bell pepper, broccoli, raw sunflower seeds, walnuts, and raw pepitas. I used the same dressing, except I added a bit of apple cider vinegar to the mix.
I’m still full from it! I love eating all raw all day long. It feels so light and refreshing, and I always remember why I love it so much. It will be so rewarding when I have more of my own produce to add to salads like this! I can’t wait.
Well, that’s all for now. We’re leaving in the morning and I’m planning on making a stop at the Farmer’s Market for provisions while on the road. When we get to Ashland, I plan on taking advantage of two farmer’s markets a week! We are staying there for two weeks (Joe is attending a bike mechanic school), so it should give me a good idea on what they are like. Here are a few more pictures from the garden, my little seedlings. They have decreased in number, but increased in size.
Lovely sweet basil.
My two favorite boys. Joe is very proud of his monster butternut squash.
I’ll update soon from our destination point and fill everyone in on how cool Ashland is. Happy Gardnening!
Oh yum! I am so in love with this recipe. With my date ball kick I’ve been going on lately, I’ve been trying out a few different flavor ideas. This is definitely a show stopper, and I think I have it perfected! When chilled, these balls are smooth and creamy and taste a whole lot like truffles. I also just adore the combination of spicy and chocolate. There are two really good things going on there. Here’s the recipe:
1 cup raw cashews
1 cup shredded coconut
2 cups pitted dates
3-4 chili peppers
2 tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp chia seeds
2 tbsp water
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
Add the water to the chia seeds, stir and set aside. Process the cashews and coconut until they are a coarse grainy meal. Set aside. Process dates, peppers, oil, chia seeds and water, vanilla and salt. Add cocoa powder and cashew mixture and process until smooth. Roll the balls in shredded coconut mixed with a tiny bit of cocoa powder and chill until they firm up.
Don’t these just look scrumptious? It’s hard to go wrong with such healthy ingredients, too. I can’t wait to take these up on the mountains for a hike.
If you saw my post from yesterday, you may have noticed that my lettuce is looking quite ready to eat. Well, I’m pleased to announce that I have made my first harvest out of my little backyard garden! Isn’t my baby lettuce beatiful?
My mom brought me a delicious quinoa cucumber salad that she made, so I put some of that on top with a bit of olive oil and balsamic drizzled on top. So incredibly tasty!
I have to say it feels very good to be eating food that I grew myself. Now I’m having fantasies of being a small scale urban hobby farmer. I would love to grow year round greens and veggies for markets, restaurants and co-ops. Wouldn’t that be cool? Well, it might not be too far out of reality. Happy a great Wednesday, everyone!
Since my last garden post, a lot of changes have been made. First, I decided that my little tiny plants I grew from seed are too small to produce fruit this year. So, I found an heirloom grower on craigslist and bought 5 tomato plants and two peppers.
With the new tomatoes, I got some cages. I also got some trellises for my beans and zucchini that I planted about a week ago.
The beans and zucs are doing great! Other than some leaf eating by pests.
Lettuce and butternut squash is doing wonderfully!
We got ladybugs to get rid of the aphids.
They are so cute!
Shardul likes to help us in the garden.
He also likes to climb on the roof.
Well, that’s all for now! Happy gardening, everyone!
As the title suggests, I’ve been keeping busy lately by all the performances I’ve been doing! It seems that once the weather warms up a bit, its non stop belly dance activity! Here’s a list of some of the venues: Speak Through Dance: Autism Awareness Show, SLC Sci-Fi Convention, Thia’s Wild West Show, and the NW Rec Center’s Open House! These are all in the past couple weeks. The last venue I danced with a new group that I abolutely love! Here we are waiting to go on.
And on stage.
Other than dancing, I’ve been working more in my garden planting and growing. Our back yard is cat alley, so I put a bunch of sticks in the ground to keep them out. We also put up some sun protection, because its getting very warm out there!
My lettuce is getting so big! I planted purple heirloom beans, heirloom zucchini, and chard in there. And here are the surviving tomatoes, peppers and basil.
They are slowly making their way along. I had Joe pick me some of the beautiful flowers from our yard. I love irises and roses, the smell so good!
Other than all that, we’ve been really enjoying the view from our front porch.
Today I got another 11 lbs of medjool dates shipped to me! Stay tuned for some more date ball recipes!
A lot has been going on since I last blogged. Discovery #1: Joe and I finally made it over to Cali’s Natural Foods, which is an awesome store in the heart of SLC. I love this store! We found so many great deals there and I was able to buy all the ingredients I needed for onion bread.
Discovery #2: From the above picture, you can see that I also purchased chia seeds. This is the first time I’ve been able to find them in a local store, and I’ve never tried them before, so I was super excited with this find! After reading Angela Stokes Chia Cheat Sheet, I was sold on the brilliance of these tiny seeds. Protein, fiber, calcium, antioxidants, chia seeds seem to have them all. We tried out “Chia Fresca”, a recipe listed on the Cheat Sheet. I chose this one, because it was the easiest with the smallest amount of ingredients. It was really quite tasty! Here is a picture after a few minutes of mixing the seeds with water. Even though the seeds gel up, they still have a nice, little crunch to them, and the flavor is mild easy to blend with.
We’ve been making a lot of raw foods in our house lately, and one of our favorites is raw onion bread! This latest batch has carrots added to it, for a nice change of pace. Onions, carrots, sunflower seeds, nama shoyu, and olive oil are all that go into this delicious snack or side dish. Here is what it looks like going into the dehydrator.
And here is the scrumptious final product.
So delicious! I know I’ve made many posts about green papaya salad, but we just can’t get enough of this stuff! It’s easy to make, inexpensive and making it in large quantities provides meals for several days. And just look how exquisitely tasty it is!
Add a bit of peanut sauce on top, and you’re all set for a fantastic meal!
Finally, I will leave you with a quick easy recipe for yummy key lime date balls! I made my second batch in a week because they never stick around very long!
1 cup raw cashews
1 cup shredded coconut
2 cups pitted dates
Juice from 2 limes
2 tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
Start by blending the cashews and coconut in a food processor. Set aside and process the remaining ingredients until the dates start to blend together. Add the cashew mixture and process until it forms a sticky dough. Roll dough into bite sized balls and roll in shredded coconut.
I love the flavor of these! This was my first time experimenting with lime and dates, and I have to say that it turned out great!
This latest batch, I experimented a little more by adding a small amount of chia seeds to the recipe. So far, so good!
A few weeks ago my mom gave me a Jiffy greenhouse to start seeds in. My egg carton seeds have not being doing so well. The only ones to sprout were the tomatoes, and they have been transplanted in peat pots for a while now.
Well, its been several weeks since I filled up my greenhouse with seeds, and today I just barely transplanted 22 very tall seedlings into peat pots.
I still have a lot of basil, bell peppers and a few tomatoes in that greenhouse, but as you can see, I’m over flowing with plant life! I’m so excited for my garden this year! It’s going to take some creativity to make good use of all these plants!
Here is a little basil baby surrounded by tomatoes.
On a different note, we had the pleasure of taking a quick road trip for the weekend recently. This was my first time in New Mexico! We started in Fruita, CO so Joe could ride Bikerpelli. Once we found out that the event was canceled due to bad weather (Joe went back the next weekend to complete the ride), we decided to head South. It’s a good thing they didn’t ride. The mud was horrible! This is what Joe’s tire looked like just after riding through the parking lot!
We visited Taos, which I had never been to before. It would be a fun place to vacation to in the winter, I think. Then we decided to make our way West to the Grand Canyon. It was Joe’s first time there, and my second time. I hadn’t been there in about 12 years and once again, when I saw the depth of those rocks open before me, I was left breathless.
Here is Joe enjoying the view.
So amazing!
We even found a nice place to mountain bike, away from all the tourists!
As we headed up North, making our way back home, we came across a petrified wood forest and some really cool rock formations. So cool!
Here’s an interesting scene while heading North in Arizona.
Our Subaru, Thor is a pretty good vehicle for road trips! Joe is getting seriously interested in something bigger and more RVish, though.
That was a really fun trip, I love visiting new places! I only wish that we could have spent a bit more time in each area, it was a rather rushed trip. We traveled into four different states within 3 days! Well, that’s all for now. I had a huge salad for dinner last night and that got me very excited about raw food. Very soon, I will be posting some date ball recipes! In the meantime, go find someplace new to explore! Sometimes, that can be found right in your own back yard.
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since my last post, so I thought it was time for some more green smoothie pictures. Here’s all that went into it:
And here’s what it looks like after adding frozen fruit, water and blending.
It was so easy, so tasty and so satisfying. I’ve been having dreams of a green smoothie business. I think it would be fun to sell green smoothies in as a street vendor. I’d be the healthiest option out there! In other news, I recently purchased a bustier for an upcoming photo shoot. Here’s what it looks like:
Front:
And back:
It’s my first one, and its so fun to wear! Even if it is a little consticting.
Snowboarding season has officially ended, and that makes me a little sad. I know everyone is going to think of me as weird for missing snow already, but that’s ok. I’ll miss you Brighton. It’s been a fun year, and I really learned a lot. One final snow pic until next season:
Happy Spring, everyone! I hope all of you are enjoying the gorgeous weather we’ve been having. As always, we like to take our enjoyment to a higher elevation. Yesterday, instead of hitting up the slopes on a busy Saturday at the resort, we decided to go for a hike in the back country. Here is the trail that we hiked up, snowshoes on feet and snowboards strapped to our backs.
The weather could not have been more perfect. In fact, I was getting quite warm! This is definitely a workout, and my legs were feeling it.
Gorgeous scenery.
Stopping for lunch.
Digging my sunscreen out of my pack. I think I put on two layers, this time.
My mountain man.
At this point, you are probably wondering what the whole baby business is all about. No, I’m not pregnant. :p But I do have babies! My little heirloom tomato seedlings finally sprouted!
Aren’t they cute?
As much as I love winter, I’m very excited for Spring. I’m even more excited to plant a garden and grow my own food! It’s been about 4 years since I have done this. Next on the list for starting seeds are bell peppers, kale and basil. I can’t wait!!!
So get out there and enjoy the sun and snow while its still there! It’s warming up fast.
I had Joe pick me some of the beautiful flowers from our yard. I love irises and roses, the smell so good!
