Yoga and Strawberries

Carolyn, my dear friend from college, who has lived all over the world in such places as South Africa, Morocco and Ethiopia, just got certified as a yoga instructor. So, my friend Sarah (you know the one) and I, invited her over to teach us a yoga class and eat some great food.

The second Carolyn turned the music on and we started breathing, I was transformed into a quiet and peaceful being, wishing I could stay in that place forever. Sarah and I told her that we were up for a more difficult class, so she didn't teach us the easy yoga, she taught us the powerful kind; salutations and holding our entire bodies up on our hands.
Afterward, we were all glowing and HUNGRY so we ate a beautiful spread of strawberries, avocados, almonds and raw honey, coconut oil and some amazing vegan pumpkin bread (yes Sarah made it) made of spelt, oats, flax and pumpkin.While we ate, we all talked about our experiences in third world countries . Sarah and I, too, have lived in third world countries. Sarah in India and I in Western Samoa. We talked about how during our encounters with these other worlds, we all reached a breaking point because of a constant witnessing of poverty and starvation like we had never seen before. As we ate such simple foods: a strawberry, an almond dipped in honey, a cup of tea, a glass of clean water, the moment became poignant and there was an unspoken gratefulness for all that we each have.

It was a beautiful and spiritual night with two of the most amazing people I've ever met in my life.

I am thankful.

I am grateful.

I am satisfied.

Peace,
Raw Melissa

Barbequed Cinnamon Rolls

I was in LA a couple weeks ago, shooting a raw dessert segment for a healthy living show pilot. (More about that later). While there, I stayed with my good friend, Reed Randoy. Reed is an actor and filmmaker whose latest film, "Hitman" is showing at the Silver Lake Film Festival in May. Those of you located in LA have to go see this wonderful film! Reed is going to be the next big thing in Hollywood so check out his stuff and you can say you were one of the first to know about him!


Reed and me at a beautiful little pub
overlooking the ocean.

I wanted to do some cooking while I was there and needed to work on the desserts for the show, so Reed and I went to the local Whole Foods Market and grabbed a ton of beautiful and fresh ingredients. I wanted to make a treat, too, so I decided on cinnamon rolls. We bought some good organic, unbleached flour; organic powdered cane sugar; Mexican cinnamon; organic, unrefined, cold pressed coconut oil, and we were set.

I started out by making the dough with my hands. I never use a breadmaker or a Kitchen Aid kneader because I love getting my hands into the dough and really working it. It's also a great arm workout! When the dough was finished, I put it into a bowl, coated the top with olive oil so it wouldn't dry out, and then let it rise until it was doubled in bulk. Next came the fun part: punching it down. I punched and punched until all the air was out and then put it onto the counter for rolling out. The problem was, I couldn't find a rolling pin anywhere. Weird. A bachelor not having a rolling pin? Who would have thought? I grabbed a long skinny glass and put one hand inside for pressure as I rolled with the other hand. It actually worked quite well.

Once the dough was rolled out, I coated the entire surface with melted organic butter, cinnamon and organic cane sugar. I rolled the gigantic good smelling flat of dough into a long snake and then looked for some thread to cut the rolls with. Reed hadn't woken up yet so I asked his roommate if he knew where any thread was. He didn't. Weird. A bachelor not having thread? Who would have thought? I tried using a knife but it just wasn't making the beautiful cut I can make with thread so I thought and thought. That's it! Dental floss. I was a little worried about the possibility of our cinnamon rolls having a hint of peppermint flavor, but other than that, it worked very well. I slid a length of the floss under the end of the snake and brought the two ends together at the top. I criss-crossed them and pulled, and the thread, I mean, dental floss, cut right through the dough in a straight, even pattern. When I was done cutting the rolls, I put them onto a jelly roll pan and left them there to rise again. Now it was time to turn on the oven. It would be perfect timing for the oven to be just hot enough when the rolls were risen.

Reed had told me that he'd need to turn on the oven for me because there was a glitch with it. He was awake now so I gave him the go ahead, and guess what? The oven was broken. No turning on. Weird. A bachelor not having a working oven? Who would have thought? You know something, though? Just because bachelors are missing a lot of the items needed to make cinnamon rolls, doesn't mean they aren't innovative. Reed looked at me. "What about the barbeque?" My eyes widened and I thought about it for a minute. Other than frying them on the stove or blowing them up in the microwave, we had no other choice. "Let's do it," I said. So Reed fired that beautiful barbeque up and we got the temperature up to 500 degrees. I love to cook my bread at a high temperature, so I was banking on the cinnamon rolls doing really well at 500. When the dough was risen enough, I put the pan into the barbeque and closed the lid. I stood out on the patio, laughing because it was so funny, what we were doing, but guess what? About twenty minutes later, I had the most beautiful golden brown cinnamon rolls I had ever made. We brought them in, Reed frosted them with a thick frosting I had made, and we dug in. I can honestly say that I will never have another cinnamon roll as good, unless of course it's barbequed.

Barbequed Cinnamon Rolls

*2 batches, made from scratch bread dough
*1/2 C plus 2 T. organic butter or organic cold pressed coconut oil for vegan rolls
*cinnamon
*organic cane sugar or honey
*1 lb. organic powdered cane sugar
*Real Salt or sea salt
*soymilk, almond milk or rice milk
*1 tsp. real vanilla extract

After first rising of dough, roll out into a long, flat rectangle.
For vegetarian rolls, slather with about one stick of melted butter, for vegan rolls, slather with about a half cup melted coconut oil and lightly salt entire surface. Sprinkle with cinnamon and cane sugar or a drizzle of honey. Roll dough lengthwise, taking care to make the roll tight, until you have a long "snake" of dough. Cut using the thread technique described above. Place individual rolls next to each other on a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet. Let rise until doubled in bulk. Place into a 500 degree barbeque. Watch the rolls carefully but try not to open the lid too much, as the heat will escape and your temperature will go down. After 10-20 minutes, or when rolls are golden brown, but not too dark, take them out and frost with a mixture of one pound powdered sugar, 2 T melted butter or coconut oil, 1-2tsp. vanilla, a pinch of salt (more if using coconut oil) and enough of your chosen milk to thin to a desired consistency. Be careful not to add too much milk at once. Powdered sugar is very absorbent and will become very thin if too much milk is added. After frosting, eat those ooey, gooey things right away, before they disappear!

Winter

Snow. Cold. Gray Skies. Gray World. Any green? Yes. Hidden underneath the snow.

A bit poetic isn't it?

As soon as Christmas is over, I start poring through the Gardening Catalogs, looking at my garden plots to see if there's any dirt peeking out of the snow yet, and searching, oh so longingly, for any sign of the sun. I know, I know, Winter just officially started but I officially want it to be over. I went sledding the other day and it was absolutely exhilarating. I would like winter a lot more if I could play in the snow all day, everyday, but I think people might start asking around for me if I disappeared like that.


Yesterday I couldn't take it anymore. I went to my garden and kicked at the snow, thinking I might be lucky and find some tasty edibles left over from Summer's Bounty. I did find lots of inedibles: frozen squash, dried up tomato plants, and a couple of wilted and cracked hot peppers. I had given up when I remembered the arugula. My arugula stayed green for so long. It even survived the first frost and a couple of light snows. Could it still be green and edible? I walked to where I remembered planting it and started moving the snow away. I kicked and scraped and there it was! I pulled a leaf off and ate it. Mmm, frozen arugula. It was definitely still edible, but had grown very spicy and was a little icy. (Hey, more poetry). The fact that it was still green and edible (though not tasty) made me happy, but didn't quite satisfy my urge for summer. I went inside, drove to the grocery store and bought a package of arugula from the produce section, and today, while I looked out my window at the snow, I made a tomato, avocado, and arugula sandwich. I toasted the bread in olive oil, salt and peppered the veggies and dipped the finished sandwich in balsamic vinegar and more olive oil as I ate it. Not as fresh and tasty as a summer version, but I think it will tide me over for at least another twenty-four hours or so until I'll need to find some other relic of summer to remind me that it still exists.

Faster!

I do some consulting for a local restaurant called Ginger's Garden Cafe. They specialize in vegetarian, vegan and raw vegan dishes and they're only open for lunch - but occasionally, they have large, private dinners. At their last dinner, they wanted to serve a sampling of raw vegan fare to help educate the attendees about the complex tastes and delicious flavors that can be present in raw gourmet food. The head chef, Sandy Thomas (a.k.a. "The Red Hot Chef") asked me if I could help her create a raw sushi dish for the event, so about five days before the dinner, we got together in the kitchen and started creating. For the sushi rice, we used jicama, a large root often used in Mexican Cuisine. It looks like a large squashed ball with brown elephant-looking skin and tastes like a radish with a bit of sweetness and none of the heat. Jicama is over fifty percent water, so we first peeled the thick skin off, cut the white inside into chunks, processed it in a food processor until it was thoroughly shredded, and then packed it in cheesecloth and pressed it in a hydrolic press to get the water out. When we were finished, we had two bowls: one full to the brim with jicama water and the other about half-full with the fibrous white pith. We seasoned the latter with traditional sushi rice seasonings and then spooned it onto nori sheets (dried seaweed pressed into a thin square). To this we added thin slices of cucumber and avocado (traditional japanese sushi fillings), marinated portabello mushrooms, red pepper strips, sunflower sprouts, and julienned carrots. Sandy made a traditional pickled ginger by julienning ginger and pickling it for several days in a mixture of beet juice (for color), agave, and apple cider vinegar. I created an almond and shoyu sauce I call Thai Nut Sauce, and we decided to plate up the sushi with a side of this sauce and regular Nama Shoyu (a living/raw version of soy sauce).

A couple days before the event. One of Sandy's chef's fell ill with a terrible flu, so she asked me if I could come in and help. I absolutely love the intensity of a commercial kitchen; food and people flying everywhere. So, 0f course I said yes. My work was much less challenging than creating a sushi dish, but still fun. Sandy and her team chose to serve a grilled polenta dish with a brazil nut hummus sauce to their vegan guests and I was set to the task of forming the polenta rounds and frying them for later reheating. Sandy also asked me to cut and assemble a fruit tray. There are two things that really get me excited about food: 1) the smells and 2) being an artist with the final product. I was so thrilled to do the fruit. It smelled glorious and designing it was like putting together a puzzle of a Hawaiian Sunset.

I thought I would be involved in just the preparation part of the event, but the day before the dinner, Ginger's manager asked me if I would be the host for the event. I gladly accepted and after preparing the last of the sushi, ran home, changed my clothes and went back to the restaurant. After everyone was seated and dinner started, I ended up spending most of my time in the kitchen helping with last minute preps before the plates went out. The energy was frenetic and exhilirating - focused expressions, furrowed brows, people (mostly Sandy) running back and forth shouting orders. I helped garnish plates (in my nice clothes) and took lots of pictures to prove to the staff, later, that they were amazing.












The event, thanks to good planning and a talented kitchen staff, turned out to be a great success. Sandy got several compliments (you know, "My compliments to the chef") and we got raving reviews on the sushi, most specifically on the Thai Nut Sauce. People were asking us if we'd bottle it and sell it at the restaurant. Well, I'm not planning on bottling it any time soon, but look for the recipe in my upcoming cookbook. I'll keep you posted (literally).







The best part of the night was at the end
when I got to steal some leftover sushi.
Shh! Don't tell Sandy.

Taste Memory

In the interview I wrote about a couple days ago (with Madhur Jaffrey), the interviewer asked Mrs.Jaffrey if she thought there was such a thing as "taste memory". I was astounded at the question because I didn't realize that taste memory is a theory, I thought it was a known fact because, well - in my world, it is.

A couple weeks ago, I had been thinking a lot about my maternal grandma. She died just after my nineteenth birthday and I've been missing her terribly. As I learn more about myself, I realize I am more like her than I knew. She did things that in her day, were probably considered pretty liberal. She was a very proactive woman who was into politics and held several leadership positions. She was instrumental in the founding of one of the first drug rehab centers in her city, and most important, she was really into health, nutrition and cooking. I think if it weren't for her, I would have never started Raw Melissa.

When I was little, she always took my mom and I to a little food counter in this mom and pop health food store. The shop was tiny and dimly lit and jammed full of dried leaves and flowers and "alternative" health products. Of course, you can imagine the smell: potent yet earthy herbs, spices that opened your nose with their sharp and far-away-land scents, and fresh, healthy food smells coming from the mini kitchen in the back. We'd sit up to the counter and in my memory, we always ordered the same thing. Maybe it's because it was the only main dish they offered, but I'll never forget it- Bible Bread Sandwiches. Bible Bread is the name they gave to pitas. They filled the pitas with a mixture of sprouts, sunflower seeds, tomatoes, onions, avocados and mayo. Their secret ingredient was Spike. A very distinctive spice blend still available today in health food stores. The great thing about these sandwiches was that they didn't just put all that stuff in the pita and serve it. They chopped everything very, very finely, mixed it together with the mayo and then filled the pita with it. I remember sitting at the counter, feeling so special because my grandma and my mom had taken me out.

I also have this distinct memory of eating a certain kind of cheese with my grandma at that same lunch counter. I remember it being the color of caramel and also tasting like caramel. Many years after my grandma died, I started looking for it. I remembered her saying that it was from a goat, but all the goat cheese I ever found was white and didn't taste like caramel. After years of looking for it with no luck, I started thinking I had just made up the memory. After all, a cheese that tastes and looks like caramel? I was just a kid, of course I made it up! Well, the same week I had been thinking so much about my grandma, I happened to be shopping at this amazing store in Salt Lake City called Liberty Heights Fresh. It's a wonderful local gourmet grocery dedicated to giving its customers sensual food experiences while remaining environmentally responsible. It makes me so happy to just stand in there! They have a wall of cheeses from all over the world, and while I've been in there before, I had never thought to ask about the caramel cheese because I had given up on ever finding it. But for some reason, this day, I walked over to the cheese counter and told the chef there my story. I thought I sounded pretty foolish starting out my inquiry with, "When I was a little girl..." but to my utter dismay, when I finished my description, he smiled at me, walked over to the top shelf, grabbed a hard cube of brown cheese and placed it in my hands. I looked down and read the label: Ekte Gjetost, Goat Cheese, Cooked until Caramelized, Norway. I looked at him with my mouth open, looked down at the cheese, and looked back up at him. "This is it!" I said. "This is it!" I looked back down at the cheese and the tears started flowing then. I couldn't help it. I tried to hold it back, but tears ran out of my eyes and down my cheeks. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't believe I'm crying. I don't know why I'm crying. It's just that I've been looking for this for so long." He smiled and said, "It's okay, it happens more often than you think." I wiped my tears, thanked him and went to the check out counter to pay for my items: an apple, a Delicata squash, a yam, a loaf of just baked German Pumpernickel, and my block of Ekte Gjetost, Goat Cheese, Cooked until Caramelized, Norway.

Later, when I tasted the cheese for the first time, I was with my dear friend John. We stood in his tiny red brick kitchen. I opened the cheese and we tore off pieces of the brown bread. I carved off a tiny sliver, put it into my mouth - and there it was, Taste Memory. Thoughts of my grandma flooded back to me and I started crying again. I felt so silly, crying over a hunk of cheese, but then I realized, it wasn't about the caramel cheese, it was about my grandma. Maybe she was reaching out to me (through food no less!) or maybe not, maybe it was just one big coincidence. Either way, I needed that reconnection so badly just then and that day will forever remain one of the most memorable experiences of my life because it enabled that reconnection by bringing my past to my present, if only for a moment.

Do you believe in taste memory? I do.

New Babies and Pumpkin Soup

So, in my other life, I'm a doula. A doula is a woman who offers physical, emotional, and informational support to couples during birth. On Saturday, my best friend, Sarah (watch my cooking show in January - she's my guest) had a baby and I was there as her doula. She didn't end up needing me much because she's the most amazing woman in the world. When she was seven months pregnant she was rock climbing these rock faces that hard core grown men I know couldn't climb and the day before she had her baby, she went kayaking down a river until she got to the lake it ended in. Needless to say, she pretty much got that baby out with a smile on her face.

Sarah and I have seriously bonded through food. Everytime we get together, there's food involved. For her birth, she made and froze pumpkin soup. Yeah, I know, not a big deal, lots of moms make stuff to freeze for eating after the baby's born. The thing is, she made the soup to feed to everyone present at her birth. You could say it was the celebration meal we sometimes hear about in other cultures. After the baby was born, I got it out of the freezer and heated it up and at 6:20 am, we all had a hot bowl of homemade pumpkin soup. Before I ate it, I wasn't too excited about pumpkin soup. I'd had versions before and I wasn't expecting much, but it was absolutely delightful. I know it sounds strange, but we were all starving (maybe from being up half the night) and it just tasted so good. I ate mine in a ceramic bowl that Sarah made herself (I told you she is amazing). It had a couple chips on the edges, but I think it made the soup taste better because I knew the bowl was well loved. After we ate our soup, I was laying next to Sarah on her bed, admiring her gorgeous baby and she turned to me and said, "Labor wasn't that bad." I wonder if the soup had anything to do with it.

Sarah said I could post the recipe but I'm giving her a bit of a break so as soon as I talk to her next, I'll post it. Trust me - this is one pumpkin soup that will change your view of pumpkins forever.