Awesome roasted nuts and seeds

Nuts and seeds are great. But I noticed that I was not feeling very well after eating them straight from the bag. So I decided to find the way how to eat nuts and keep my tummy happy at the same time. Maybe this post will be helpful for you too!? Let me know what do you think!

4 signs that you are not processing nuts well:

• Heavy feeling in your lower stomach after eating nuts
• Stomach pain
• Heartburn
• You can literally see bits of them in your poo (SORRY! I have no idea how to write about this indirectly 🙂 )

I remembered that during my Nutritional Therapy lectures in BCNH we studied that nuts&seeds contain  lectins, phytates, and enzyme inhibitors (I will call this bunch LPEs), which may be one of the causes of the above mentioned conditions. I must mention, that “enzyme inhibitors” are good nature’s way of “protecting” them from heat, etc. before “right”conditions come (eg. rain) for the nuts to grow into trees.

By soaking nuts you can not only minimise the impact of LPEs, but also enhance the flavour of nuts!In a way, you are “tricking” the nature, by providing conditions when nuts&seeds may “relax” and start releasing all good minerals and micronutrients.

Also, you need to remember that roasted nuts from the shop are most likely not soaked first which means they still have LPEs. There are a few brands though which actually soak the nuts before they roast or dehydrate them, check out LivingRaw nuts, or Raw Ecstasy but they are not very cheap.

So, why not to try to prepare and “activate” your nuts yourself, it is super easy! Let me show it to you 🙂

 Easy process for soaking nuts

• Rinse nuts/seeds with fresh water (better purified water, not from the tap)
• Put them in a bowl (better in a glass or ceramic bowl)
• Cover nuts with water (2 cups water/ 1 cup nuts) and put smth breathable on top (paper towel or tea towel)
• Let them stand for a few hours (during the night/day/ or 24 hours). If you have time or you are around, change the water a few times. If not, don’t worry about it 🙂
• Drain the water (which will look very dirty)
• Rinse again with fresh water (the water contains all those LPE which are acidic to the body, so rinse well!)
• Dry your clean and beautiful nuts on a sheet of paper towel or dehydrator (if you have one)
• Put in a bag or a glass bowl and keep in refrigerator for 3-4 days

Check out timings for each type of nut/seed here. But! Just not to overcomplicate things too much, a few hours would be good. For example, arrange all in the morning and it is ready for the evening or make preparations in the evening and the nuts are ready for breakfast!

And finally a recipe!!! 🙂

Soaked and roasted walnuts and pumpkin seeds

• Soaked pumpkin seeds (I made them overnight)
• Soaked walnuts (I made them overnight)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp rosmarin
• Pinch of dry basil
• Pinch of dry coriander
• Pinch of pepper
• Optional: 1 tbs bee polen

Preheat the oven for 200 C, mix all the spices and nuts in a dry bowl and put the mixture to the baking sheet. In 25-30 min the AWSOME nuts are ready to eat! 🙂

Note! It is better to add bee polen 10 min before the nuts are ready, so it doesn’t burn 🙂

Awesome Roasted nuts and seeds

 

Norice-salad “sushi”

Salads are awesome – a lot of vitamins, phytonutrients and fibre. But seriously, eating a salad every day CAN become boring. And then…and then you need to make Norice-salad sushi! 🙂

This is what I have done today to perk things up a bit:

Norice-salad sushi

-100g cucumber grated
-2 beetroots grated
-1 parsnip grated
-bunch of dill
-2 Yaki Nori sheets (bought in a Korean store)

In big bowl mix all ingredients and add any dressing (I have added: 1 tbs Extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp apple vinegar, 1 tbs hemp oil). Prepare sushi mat (also could be bought in a Korean store) by putting 1 Yaki Nori sheet.

 

Then squeeze the juice from the salad – otherwise you are going to get a “sushi ocean” on your plate:)

Place the salad on the sheet, BUT make sure that you have left 2 cm (1 inch) from the top of the sheet – to avoid salad “jumping” from the sheet while you are rolling a sushi roll.

Roll and enjoy! SUPER easy and fast! :)…and OMGsoTASTY!!!! 🙂

Healthy Bars Review – Vol.1

I love tasty snacks. To be honest I am obsessed with snacks 🙂 I love cool packaging, good recipes and creative claims. It is super great when people do staff like that and actually create business with the goal to help people to eat and live better. Also, after over 9 years in FMCG marketing I truly appreciate great products. So I can never pass by without tasting (or maybe it is an excuse to try cool things?? hehehe)

Anyway, this is the first post about healthy packaged snacks which I LOVED.

Lets’ start from a few key points. In my opinion, its better to eat raw or just cooked, BUT when you are on the go and simply didn’t have time to prepare your snack than its ok to buy a packaged one 🙂

My criteria for assessing healthy snacks:

1) It must be OMGsoTASTY
2) It should have NO added sugars
3) It should have well balanced ratio: protein/carbs/fat
4) Packaging should be good looking 🙂 (Its always nice to have a nice thing from a nice pack, right? 🙂 )
5) Claims should be interesting and really appealing
6) It should not cost a fortune

The First review is of the FRANK bar.

It is very recently on the market in UK (guys on the website said that they started in 2012).  There are a few flavour available, check out here more info.

1) FRANK bar would score super good on OMGsoTASTY scale, its rich and chocolaty and not to sweet but very nice. And you would not want to have 5 to feel like you have eaten enough, you would be happy with just one, which is cool, and exactly what you want when you are running somewhere!! It tasted a bit like chocolate brownie, soft and chewy and chocolaty. Nice!

2) Ingredients of the Chocolate&Blueberry flavour:
Dried Fruit 49.8% (Dates 36.2%, Plums 13.6%), Fruit Juice Concentrates (Concentrated Apple, Grape and Pear Juices, Rice Starch), Gluten Free Oatmeal 10.9%, Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder 9.2%, Chocolate with Coconut Cream 7.4% (Cocoa Mass 47%, Coconut Blossom Sugar, Coconut Cream, Cocoa Butter 4.3%, Ground Vanilla Pods), Pea Protein, Pea fibre, Freeze Dried Natural Blueberry Powder 0.9%, Natural Blueberry flavour.

Well, there are a LOT of ingredients:) In my opinion it is better to try to have no concentrated fruit juices or coconut sugar, but it is maybe something FRANK guys gonna do in the future.

3)Nutrition Value (per 100g…one bar is 35g)
Energy 333kcal
Protein 11g
Carbohydrates 65g (Of Which Sugars) 41g
Fibre 11g
Fat 5g (Of Which Saturates) 3g

Well, this is quite a snack for a quick BOOST of energy (4:1 ration of carbs to protein), and for people who move a lot, as it has a lot of simple carbs in it (65g per 100g, or per one bar 22.7g).  Or maybe a good option after a run? when you just need to fuel up with simple carbs to replenish the energy. Some more interesting facts about running and cacao could be found here 

4) Packaging is super nice. Its colourful and really fun to hold in hand:) It has its kind super feel good factor:)

5) Simple and really engaging claims:
Gluten, Nut and Dairy Free
Source of protein (well…it is a source, but I wouldn’t say it is a lot in there:))
With energysmart – really cool, FRANK has even registered a trademark name for a claim! awesome! Its really hard to do it usually, so well done guys!

6) Frank bars do not cost a fortune:) You can check on their website

And one additional comment, this year on Gluten&Allergy free show in Olympia, London they were very friendly and nice. Which make a huge impact! And its great to see nice people behind nice products!

So if you are after a treat with chocolate and some “OMGsoTASTY” factor get yourself a FRANK bar! (Oh, by the way, try crashing FRANK’s bar on top of your morning cereal or yogurt  – it is super tasty!!)

x

Bananaaaaaaa

Yesterday i was making banana pancakes and in the evening i thought that it would be cool to have some sweets in the morning. The challenge was that I didn’t have a lot of ingredients at home…so had to be creative:)

And this is what I have ended up with, super simple and quick (as usual with all cooking that i do) and TASTY!

FROZEN BANANA BITES

1 ripe banana
1 tbs lucuma powder + 3 tbs water
1 ts cinnamon
1,5 tbs bee polen

Cut banana in a few pieces. Mix water, lucuma, cinnamon. Dip banana in lucuma mix and then roll it in bee pollen. Put on a baking sheet and place in a freezer overnight. Cut/Dip/Roll/Freeze – Simple!

Other dipping alternatives: nut or seed butter/chocolate/yogurt
Other rolling alternatives: nuts or seeds/crushed dry berries

This is quite sugary, but it is a treat, right?;)

 

 

 

 

Bananarama

Well well well, bananas! You never can get enough, they are SOOO TASTY!:) Today I was in a mood to buy some and guess what? I just got them absolutely for FREE, simply because they were quite spotty the store owner decided to give them away for free. Well, happy me!

 

And now I am thinking what to do with them….

Lets start with…pancakes!!! The first 3 of them were…well, not working at all. Stick to the pan, get all squashy…oh, I tried everything 🙂 Adding more egg, adding more flour…nope. It was not working:) So then i decided that I will simply bake the pancakes, as you can never go wrong with the oven:)

YAMMY BANANA PANCAKES (in the oven)

To make 11 pancakes (if you place them  in the oven and will not try to panfry them, or 8 pancakes if you will make an attempt and panfry the first 3…hehhe)

4 super ripe bananas
3 eggs (I used egg replacement)
1/2 cup flour (I used gluten free all-purpose flour)
Put coconut or olive oil on the baking sheet. In a big bowl crash bananas, add eggs, add flour and mix all. Take a table spoon and make little pancakes on a baking sheet. Put in the preheated oven, for 20 min, 200C. Then turn the pancakes super carefully on the other side and place in the oven for the next 5 min.

 

Put in the preheated oven, for 20 min, 200C. Then turn the pancakes super carefully on the other side and place in the oven for the next 5 min.

mmm…They are sweet and so fresh and so OMG so TASTY! But seriously after 3 of them you are totally full!

Enjoy! xx

 

 

What you eat/drink/feel now may affect your future child’s health!

Absolutely amazing research was made recently, which suggested that its not only your gens (from your mom  and dad), but also your body cells that affect your kid’s health and wellness…And it is very important to understand this concept, because cells of your body are constantly going through the phases of renewal following the influence from what you drink, eat, think and do! OMG!!! If you want to learn more about this research, check out this great website

 

Now, there are zillions of blogs, books, websites, etc teaching you how to eat and why. Well, to be honest, not all information provided there is SCIENTIFICALLY justified, soooo it may lead to a lot of really weird and to be frank not very clever decisions (eg eat one type of fruit a day and feel great, eat more of goji berries and feel more energetic, and list can go on…).

If you are really interested to learn some basics and more science based info (and have some time for it too). You could read/listen a course about nutrition. Usually this type of course costs about £200+, BUT! I have found for you  super interesting, super engaging, on-line course, which you can take from anywhere in the world and enjoy the power of knowledge for…ABSOLUTELY FREE!!! It was produced by a respected university and it is just a great summary of some basics, which can help you to navigate in the busy world of on-line nutrition. Here is the link to the TUFTS FREE nutrition course

Enjoy!! xx