Strawberry mousse

Strawberries mousse.

This dessert is as good as the strawberries you use. Which means that here, in Calgary, you’ll have to go for the most rotten strawberries in the store and then add some sugar. On the plus side, this dessert takes 10 minutes to prepare and can be frozen if needed.

Smoothie time!

Banana, mango and orange smoothie.

Don’t know about you, but around 10:00 am I’m always starving! When I’m lucky enough to be in the vicinity of a blender, a quick smoothie is the best snack ever!

Celery, Apple and Carrot Salad

Peeled veggies, ready to be grated.

Combine apples, carrots and celery root in a very tasty salad. It’s easy to make too, which is always an advantage. This is what you’ll need:

Pineapple Raw Muffins

Pineapple raw muffin.

No flour, no eggs, no sugar, no cooking (just blending!). Yet, you’ll still be able to make some delicious muffins. How? It’s actually quite simple! All you need to do is blend all the ingredients below, then scoop and press the dough into a muffin tray, refrigerate for a few hours and voila, you’re enjoying your raw muffin!

Mango Pie

Mango Pie

I made this mango pie the other day – it’s fresh, not too sweet and the texture is very smooth. It works with frozen pie dough or with a regular pie shell. You’ll need: 1 pie shell, 150gr Philadelphia unsalted (cream) cheese, 3 mangoes (or you can use frozen mango), 3-4 tbsp sugar (add more if you want the pie to be sweeter), 4-6 tbsp white flour, milk, orange juice (or any fruit juice – under 1/4 cup), vanilla extract.

Instructions:

1. Wash, peel and cut mangoes. Apparently you can peel mangoes very easily if you sink them in boiling water for 1-2 minutes.
2. Put mango, fruit (orange) juice, cream cheese, sugar and 1 egg in the blender and mix well. Add vanilla extract, flour and a bit of milk (something like 1/4 cup or even less) and mix again.
3. Pour everything into the pie shell.
4. Bake in the oven (350F) for 20 minutes or until the filling becomes firm.

Quick Snack: Chocolate Strawberries

Chocolate Strawberries

Nothing new here, just get some dark chocolate from the bulk foods section, melt it on the stove and dip strawberries in it. Put them in the fridge for 10 minutes and voila, you have a quick and healthy snack. Where/ when I grew up, strawberries were small and extremely sweet. When ripe, they were red inside (not white, like the ones you buy these days). They had an unmistakable smell and when left for a day or two in a big bowl, they would leave a red and sweet juice behind. If you can’t get those anymore, dipping them in chocolate brings back some of that sweetness.

Banana Chocolate Cookies

Banana by Jason Gulledge

I had two ripe bananas that nobody was gonna eat, but I didn’t want to make a banana bread again. I googled for some recipes, and came up with one for banana chocolate cookies. You’ll need 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup (or less if you’re not a big fan of sweet things) sugar, 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence, 1 and 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon soda bicarbonate, 2 bananas, pinch of salt, chocolate (use as much as you want, depending on how strong you want the chocolate taste to be. You can use chocolate chips too).

Instructions:

1. Heat oven to 350F.
2. Mix butter with sugar (your life will be considerably simplified if you leave the butter at room temperature for 30 minutes before you start working on it).
3. In a separate bowl, mix egg with vanilla. Then gradually incorporate it into the butter mixture.
4. Add flour, pinch of salt, soda (I always dissolve it with one teaspoon of lemon juice) and bananas.
5. If using chocolate chips, simply add them. I used 2 squares of a cooking chocolate bar, melted it in a small pan (you can do it on the stove or in the microwave). Incorporate melted chocolate into the mixture.
6. If you want (and  I would highly recommend it), add some raisins and a bit of rum.
7. Using a spoon, place small round cookies on two baking sheets. Bake for 10-15 minutes.

Photo credits: Jason Gulledge

Fruits to look for these days

I try to eat my 7 fruits and veggies a day, but man, it’s hard… I buy most of my fruits in Superstore, Safeway or Coop, and while the last two are always better than the first, all three stores bring tasteless, plastic-tasting, heavily waxed fruits (hey, i have to scrub apples with detergent!!!).

If you wanna eat some good fruits these days, look for oranges (with very smooth, thin skin), kiwi (especially the golden one from New Zealand is quite tasty), pears and pineapple (look for the yellowish one which smells intensly). Some of the seedless grapes are quite sweet too.