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...

This year, give Thanksgiving a healthy makeover for a holiday that's good for the whole body, mind, and spirit. Here are seven tips to up the fun, delicious, and good-for-you factors of Pumpkin Day.

Terrible picture, I know. I can't find my camera, so this was taken on my cousin's cell phone. This is a super easy fall time dessert I made for thanksgiving dinner with the family and some friends who don't have family in Canada. It tastes just like apple pie! My parents always travel in the fall, and I was in Vancouver with my best friend last year, so we've missed the past three years of Thanksgiving. So this year it was kind of a big deal. And we ended up with ten (!!) people - the four of us, my sister's boyfriend and friend, my couch surfer from France, my cousin who is visiting from India, and his two roommates who are also from India. Overall, it was an amazing Thanksgiving weekend and gave me so much to be thankful for - I spent all my time doing amazing things with amazing people including some very close friends and some new friends.  One negative thing about the whole weekend was around someone who I thought was close to me. I tend to take m...

I've moved! Visit my new blog Make Life Beautiful for more recipes and healthy living tips. Don't forget to update your bookmarks xo As some of you know, I recently visited Iceland. We started and ended in Reykjavik,driving along the South Coast for a couple of days in between. It was insanely beautiful, surreal and serene. Between the moss-covered lava fields and Jökulsárlón, the iceberg lagoon, we often felt like we were on another planet. When I told people that I was going to go to Iceland, many pondered at what I would eat while there. A common question was "don't they eat fermented shark? can you eat anything there?" As it turns out, it's quite easy being vegan and gluten-free in Iceland. Here are some of my fave photos and meal pics from the trip. Some travel tips and our itinerary follow. Tofu curry with carrots, onions and potatoes gluten-free brown rice pasta with tofu, canned tomatoes, broccoli, olives and raw vegan...

Every year I get lofty ideas about all the great holiday gifts I'm going to make. And every year, about a week before the actual day, I give up on the dream and say "next year." This year, with the help of Organic Body Care Recipes: 150 Homemade Herbal Formulas (strangely, there are 175 recipes in the American version...) and Anarres Natural Health *, I whipped up most of my gifts in one afternoon. I made chocolate orange body butter, and vanilla and sweet orange bath salt, lip balm and body wash. They all smell delicious, feel great and are free of the chemicals found in most of the products out there. There are a lot of things that are unappealing about conventional bath and beauty products. With no real regulation of the industry, many cosmetic products are made with chemicals that have not been properly tested for human and environmental safety. In fact, many of these chemicals are linked to such health concerns as allergies, cancer and developmental and re...