La Belle Vie Holistic Living

This year's Thanksgiving was another great gastro success. My mom and I took over the kitchen, each with our own designated areas - key for minimal panic while trying to create a multi course meal for eight in a few hours. I took on three dishes - a raw apple pie in a spiced pecan crust, a pumpkin tiramisu, and a gnocchi as one of the main course entrees. For the gnocchi, I adapted a recipe by Allyson Kramer and whipped up an easy and quick sundried tomato marinara sauce with oregano fresh from the garden. The result was a delicious, light, and fluffy pasta. Gnocchi 2 medium (about 3" length, 2" width) white potatoes 1 medium sweet potato (about 4" length, 2.5" wide) 1 3/4 cup gluten-free flour mix (see below) 1/3 cup nutritional yeast 3 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp salt Peel the potatoes, cut into small pieces and boil until they are soft. Using a potato masher, smoosh them up, adding the other ingredients a bit at a time and continuing to smoosh until everything is w...

Raw cucumber rolls stuffed with beets, carrots, cilantro and avocado and drizzled with a tropical fruit coulis My first week in South America, I met a girl named Rebecca. Since then we had been trying to reconnect, but keep missing each other. In May we caught up again in Cusco and had a delicious raw dinner to celebrate. We made cucumber rolls and carrot dumplings both with a maracuya (passionfruit in non-south america speak) and papaya coulis. A great sweet and sour tropical flavour for these refreshing and savoury dishes. After a week of eating not very awesome and definitely not too health food in restaurants in Lima, this and the company of a great friend were just what I needed. The dumplings were incredibly easy to make but had that fancy look to them that excited and impressed onlookers as well as ourselves and our palates. The lighting was poor, so please excuse my pictures... Carrot dumplings drizzled with a tropical fruit coulis Raw feast in Cusco. From bottom left (clockwis...

Welcome to my new bloggerific home, La Belle Vie. I moved over my posts so that you can access all of them from here. I've also just launched a website where you can find out all about my holistic nutrition services, such as personal consultations, healthy eating makeovers, private cooking lessons, and personal meal preparation. Thanks for all your support over the past years! I am so excited to keep sharing yummy food and healthy living tips with you, starting with this raw cauliflower tabbouleh I made the other day! I only really discovered my love for cauliflower a few short years ago. So I'm making up for lost time and trying to find as many ways to enjoy it as possible. At the Sunday market last week, among the 20 mangos we bought (yep. note that a week later, they're all gone), we also scored one awesomely huge cauliflower. One of the first things I made was a raw tabbouleh. Cauliflower "couscous" Using cauliflower as a grain replacement is super easy and a...

I made a commitment to myself to not eat out this month, which means having to prepare and pack myself lunch everyday, and dinner on some days too (as I don't have time to go home and eat before my evening activities). I'm also trying to eat a larger variety of foods and food combinations. I love to cook and try new dishes, but when I'm tired or super busy, I tend to rely on the same dishes. Do you find that you do this too? Well, we're not alone! With all the gazillions of foods out there, people tend to rely on the same small selection - on average, only about 15!! So tonight I made my awesomely easy carrot lentil salad, but changed it up a bit. I used a lentil blend instead of just green lentils, and I added shaved asparagus!! Fancy! and super easy to do! You just buy the big asparagus stalks (as opposed to the thin ones, which i prefer for roasting), snap off the tough bottoms, and use a veggie peeler to make thin strips! I'm going to be adding shaved asp...

I've moved! Visit my new blog La Belle Vie for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks There are few things I love more than dinner parties. They're pretty much my favourite way to see and chill with friends - especially when it's not beach picnic weather. Here is the deliciousness that was enjoyed at one I went to the other week (all photos by Lucas Soloway). Oven-roasted peppers, mushrooms and aubergine with a cesar salad. Salad made by the lovely Joanne of We Animals . Lasagna in an alfredo sauce made by the amazing Lucas. The lasagna recipe is by PETA and can be found here , the alfredo sauce is by Don't Get Mad, Get Vegan . You can get gluten-free lasagna noodles at certain stores (check Kensington if you're in Toronto). If you can't find them, then make this dish with gluten-free pasta as a casserole! The Kind Life's Candied ginger pears by Joe and my chocolate orange gluten-free biscotti (re...

I've moved! Visit my new home  Make Life Beautiful for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks xoxo Things have been pretty crazy since I got back from Iceland (more about that in a later post), with all types of stress and change being thrown my way. I won't say I've been dealing with it the best that a person could hope to...there has definitely been some ups and downs. And I've broken out and become permanently bloated and haven't been sleeping all that wonderfully. But - a BIG but, and one that I am quite proud of myself about - I have managed to maintain a relatively healthy diet. (Relatively as there were a couple of nights where a bag of daiya and gluten-free bagels and tortilla chips were my dinner.) Normally when I get really stressed, I eat more processed foods and I skip meals or have "salads" made from lettuce and some kidney beans with maybe a tomato thrown in. Now there have been a far a...

Taking a little break from my Preventative Nutrition studying to drool over the stunning photography and recipes of amazing raw chef Golubka . Some of my faves... Sun Dried Tomato, Basil and Olive Tart   Falafel and Tabouleh Chocolate Persimmon Tart

I've moved! Visit my new blog La Belle Vie for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks xoxo Salads are an amazing meal option. They offer a variety of tastes and textures and a mega dose of nutrients. They're also super portable and don't require heating, which makes them a great lunch for work. Sadly, many people have an irrational hate for the salad. A hate that stems from the unfortunate myth that salads are confined to two to three ingredients, one usually being lettuce, and that they can't ever be enough to fill someone up, and that they're just for diets and therefore a food you don't really want to eat but do occasionally and grudgingly like it's a punishment. The truth is that salads, with their endless combinations, are a form of culinary art; they require imagination and innovation. And without it, salads are in fact just lettuce with a slice or two of tomato and cucumber, maybe some onion. But do...

I've moved! Visit my new blog La Belle Vie for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks. xoxoxo   Collard greens, destemmed seaweed shitake mushroom caps, sliced, marinated snow peas, cut into strips carrots, julienned napa cabbage, cut into strips cucumber, cut into strips marinate 1 tbsp ginger, minced 2 cloves garlic, derooted, minced 2 tbsp tamari 2 tbsp lemon juice 2 tbsp sesame oil Marinate the mushrooms for 15-30 min. Squeeze out excess marinate back into bowl and set marinate aside. Put ingredients in the middle of the collard leaf and roll. Wrap and secure the roll with a strip of seaweed. Use marinate for dipping. For a richer sauce, add in some nut butter or tahini. Enjoy! xo Selene

I've moved! Please visit me at my new home at labellevienutrition.blogspot.com for more recipes and healthy tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks! xoxoxo I love kale. It's one of my favourite foods, my preferred leafy green and the last name of one of my best friends. Kale, also known as borecole, is a a member of cabbage family ( Brassica oleracea Acephala Group ), along with broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens, and brussel sprouts. Easy to grow and full of nutrients, kale was a choice vegetable for England's Dig for Victory campaign during World Way II. The history of this magnificent leafy green dates back at least 2000 years, when Sabellian kale, the ancestor to the kale we know today, was cultivated by the Greeks and the Romans in the fourth century BC. It was the most widely eaten green vegetable in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages, when cabbage eclipsed it in popularity. In fact, in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 13th centuries it found i...

I've moved! Visit my new home  Make Life Beautiful for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks xoxo Broccoli smothered in cheesy tahini sauce I already toted the many amazing benefits of sesame seeds here so we'll skip that part in this post and go straight to the awesomeness that is tahini. Raw tahini is delightfully easy, and inexpensive, to make. And you can do such awesome things with it! I personally love using tahini as salad dressing. And when I discovered you could make a delicious cheese sauce with it...!! You can't really tell from the photo, but this makes a deliciously creamy and cheesy sauce that you can use on zucchini linguine, or for kale chips, or really just about anywhere that cheesy goodness could go (which is pretty much anywhere). The cheesy tahini broccoli is my version of Julie Morris 's awesome recipe. While you're there check out her other recipes, yum they sure do look good! How t...

Iris at The Daily Dietribe recently hosted an adopt-a-gluten--free-blogger-athon. I thought this was a super cool idea. Ever since I first came across Lisa's blog, Raw on $10 a day , I've been meaning to test drive some of her recipes; this was the perfect opportunity. Of course because timing always works out so perfectly, I ended up having an event to plan at work. I had great teammates helping me to do so, but it still took up an insane amount of my time. So, I ended up not being able to really try out any recipes for a while. But then! Kate and Robin emailed me that they were stopping in Toronto as part of their cross country tour. So we got together and had an awesome uncooking party of Lisa's fabulous recipes. The food was amazing and the company awesome.And, like any good dinner party, there was lots of kitty hugging. Ryder, the amazing foster kitty/best kitty ever was so excited and ran around so much that he was panting by the time Kate and Robin were leaving....

The boy came down with a nasty cold bug that's going around.  I made him put his face over bowls pull of steaming water and eucalyptus oil, drink lots of honey-lemon-ginger tea and, of course, made him soup. We didn't have that many ingredients kicking around so the soup was very simple, but incredibly delicious. It was so good I had to have a bowl too! Ingredients: brown lentils, organic low-sodium vegetable broth, water (because lentils take a lot of water, I didn't want all the broth to be absorbed with none left for the soup!), tomato, collard greens, yellow onion, garlic

I've moved! Visit my new home  Make Life Beautiful for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks! Curried lentil sprout salad with carrot, corriander and sundried olives. Have I spoken yet about the amazing wonder that is sprouting? I've wanted to try sprouting for a couple of years now, but have always put it off because I figured that it would be hard. Even though everyone says it'll be super easy, it still seemed kind of difficult. And they sell sprouting helpers for like hundreds of dollars, so why would I be able to do it on my own for free? Well, I finally did try it. And wow, it actually is super easy! And AWESOME! I used an old spaghetti sauce jar and a piece of mesh - the kind that is used for screen windows (I have a whole roll - live in toronto? I'll hook you up!). I just put some sprouting seeds in the jar, let them soak for a couple of hours, then drained them and left them on an angle in my dish drying ra...

I've moved! Visit my new blog La Belle Vie for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks! One of my favourite things to make raw food-wise is soup. Not only are raw soups a healthful and tasty addition to any meal, but they're also super easy to make. Have a bowlful as a starter course, a snack or even as a meal. A great way to use up any veggies you have kicking around, you can make them from just about anything. Have a tomato and only one lonely carrot left over from other cooking ventures? Instant, delicious carrot-tomato soup! Incredibly and refreshingly easy to make, just throw all the ingredients in a blender, add some water if needed and blend, blend, blend. Seriously, raw soups can be made from anything! Well, anything that blends well...Tomatoes, herbs, garlic, avocados, mushrooms, the list goes on! If you want a creamy soup, add avocado or soaked cashews. To thin the soup to the right consistency, add water. For this d...

I've moved! Visit my new blog La Belle Vie for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks! Back in september 2009, I climbed the CN Tower in support of the united way. It actually wasn't bad at all, I was just horribly thirsty as you're not allowed any water throughout the whole thing. Anyway, I had a fundraising gift setup where for different amounts of sponsorship, I would give you homemade raw treats made by moi. Anyway, at the $50 level, I offered a homemade gourmet meal. Well, 3 people made that level! Namely, the boy's mom, dad and dad's girlfriend. So last night we had my father-in-law and his girlfriend over. I made a three course meal, and I must say it was definitely one of the best meals I have prepared to date! starting course: salad with chopped cucumbers and mushrooms, dressed in a creamy tomato miso dressing and sprinkled with almond and sunflower parmasan entree: zucchini linguine in a sundried toma...

I've moved! Visit my new home  Make Life Beautiful for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks! I'm building my meal plan to allow for leftovers, because in any meal plan, really, leftovers are kind of needed to get by timewise. A note on raw eating...I am trying to achieve a high raw lifestyle, meaning that 90-95% of what I'm eating is raw. However, when it comes to spices and oils and tamari, I am often not opting for the raw versions. For spices and oils, this is a matter of accessibility (other than coconut oil, which is easy and inexpensive to acquire); although I am going to try to find and use more whole versions of the spices (like the tumeric root and cardamon pods, for instance), it will still be very hard to determine whether these are raw. For tamari, this is because nama shoyu (the raw version) contains gluten, which I am allergic to. Now, you could go with bragg's soy sauce-like product, but I don't use e...