Smoothie Recipe #6: Mango Delight Smoothie/Dessert

I truly appreciate my fellow WordPress bloggers. The Mango Tango recipe from Fasting Food & Other Musings sounded so delicious but included quite a few ingredients I don’t consume so of course I adapted it and the result was a creamy Mango Delight that can either be a smoothie or dessert depending on how much water you add. I used…

• 2 cups of frozen mango (Make sure they’re ripe. I’m not a fan of the prepackaged ones because the mangoes aren’t usually ripe. It’s way cheaper to buy fresh mangoes in bulk, chop them up and freeze them yourself, but it’s also quite a bit of work!)
• 1/4 cup of raw cashews
• 1 cup of water
• 2 dates
• 1/2tsp of vanilla essence

Blend (I used the almighty Vitamix!) all the above ingredients until you reach a smooth ice-creamy consistency and enjoy. Give this recipe a try, you’ll be so glad you did. It’s healthy, raw, vegan and most importantly DELICIOUS! 🙂

~Blend & Delight in it!~

PS: I had it for breakfast the first time I made it. Who says you can’t have dessert for breakfast? 🙂

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Raw Breakfast Recipe: Freedom Fruit Salad

Here is the best thing that came out of week 2 of my New Year, New Me 6 week plan. I thought of waiting till the 4th of July to share it with y’all but that just feels like light years away! It’s a recipe I have dubbed Freedom Fruit Salad for it’s gorgeous red, white and blue colors. It’s not just beautiful, healthy, raw, organic, vegan but also out-of-this-world delicious and so easy to make. It’s the perfect healthy raw breakfast recipe, healthy snack or even main meal if you make a large portion of it. Here were the ingredients to this recipe that literally had me dancing in the kitchen as I devoured it. All ingredients are fresh, not frozen.

• 1 large organic banana, sliced
• 1 cup of organic strawberries, sliced
• 1/2 cup of organic blueberries
• The freshly hand-squeezed juice of 1 orange or clementine
• 1 tbsp or organic unsweetened dehydrated coconut *optional
• 1 tbsp of organic raw shelled hemp seeds *optional

I don’t need to give directions, do I? (Throw everything in a bowl and stir!) It’s the easiest, tastiest and most original breakfast recipe I have made in a while. I was in and out of the kitchen in 5 minutes. The last two ingredients are optional but really add a wonderful dimension to this recipe. If you don’t have them, the recipe is just as tasty but feel free to get creative with what you have in your kitchen.

~Enjoy!~

Juice Recipe #25: Three Greens Juice and Juicing Tips

I LOOOOVE having a day off. I mean, who doesn’t? Nothing inspires me more to create delicious and healthy recipes like having a day off spent ONLY at home. My internal alarm/bladder woke me up at 5:40am which I was very upset about but I turned my frown upside down and found about four more hours of blissful sleep. I then woke up feeling refreshed and of course ready to have a fresh organic raw homemade green juice! I generally make smoothies when I’m headed to work and juice on my days off. Today’s juice had to be simple, green and as always yummy! Here are a few tips to make your juicing process far more enjoyable.

• Line the pulp container with a plastic baggie that you would usually get at a grocery store. It saves on clean up time! 
• ALWAYS clean all the parts of the juicer immediately after juicing. It makes for an easier clean up and extends the life of your juicer. Dried-on pulp on your juicer’s parts is not the business!
• If you’d love to have juice for breakfast and would like to save time in the morning then clean your produce the night before. 
• Always keep your juice recipes simple. Unless you’re nuts like I am at times and want to make an ‘everything’ juice and an ‘everything’ green juice. I try to keep my recipes under 5 ingredients. You really don’t want to know what celery, ginger, carrot, beet, tomato, apple, garlic, kale, lemon and collard juice tastes like, trust me! My everything juices were beyond delicious though 🙂 There was a method to that madness.

So back to today’s juice. Here are the ingredients:

• 4 large organic celery stalks
• 2 organic granny smith apples
• 1 organic romaine heart

~Juice & K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple Sweetie)~

Do you have any other tips? Do share…

Updates on Week 1 of my “New Year, New Me 6 week plan”

Happy New Year everyone! Week 1 was an absolute success! Yay! A part of me was terrified that it would be painful and tortuous, which parts of it were, but overall it went really well. I don’t know why or how, but I have experienced a mental shift of some kind just like I did back in 2005 when I read Never Be Sick Again by Raymond Francis. I just know that I want to experience newer heights in my health and this 6 week plan so far has been the best way to begin this journey. Thanks to Dr. Fuhrman and his awesome book Eat to Live! I LOVE books. They say madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results, right? It’s safe to say, I’m not crazy anymore! Some would say that I’m only crazier now but what do they know? hummph!

Let me begin by saying that truly the only challenging thing about week 1 was coming up with new and interesting ways to make vegetable dishes and not including meat anywhere. There is an abundance of wonderful blogs with great recipes so I hope to remedy that by spending some time finding a handful of recipes to try each week. My main menu on a day-to-day basis this week was as follows:

• Breakfast: Green or Fruit Smoothie / Fruit Salad / Veggie Juice *this did not change for me, this has been my standard breakfast for a long time now.
• Lunch: LARGE green salad. I learned very quickly I need to make my salads larger than usual to fill me up and to change my mix-ins and dressings daily so I don’t get bored. 
• Snack: Nuts and/or Fruits *this did not change either
• Dinner: Veggie stews with sweet potato/brown rice, Bean stews, Spicy veggie medley soup

Please note that it would vary from day-to-day in that I would sometimes have the stews and soups for lunch and the large green salads for dinner. Some of the benefits I have experienced this week are that I am much more conscious about every thing I eat and feel lighter. Transit time for my meals is much faster! The best benefit I have experienced at this point is the feeling on a sub-conscious level that I am doing right by my body. I am so glad I don’t have my scale in the house right now because only God knows that if I weighed the same I would be missing out on the wonderful feeling I have that this is the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I know I mentioned my hubby was joining me on my plan but he is definitely just a cheerleader at this point! Lol! I am very ok with that though. He makes a great cheerleader. I really would have loved for him not to ‘cheer lead’ yesterday while devouring his take-out BBQ chicken in my face.

Here is a blog I found that I just love, AlmostRawVegan. Can’t wait to dig into it some more. I really love and appreciate the community of WordPress blogs. I have learned and discovered so much through them. It’s been a little while since I put up some juice recipes so you can be sure there’s a ton coming. Stay tuned!

Please share any great blogs/websites you love that focus on healthy eating below. Sharing is caring 🙂