Anti-oxidant rich and tasty, this smoothie is quick and easy to make. Try it for a snack or breakfast. Feel free to swap your favorite (pasture raised cow or sheep yogurt are also good choices. Other flavors of juice would also be fine. Feel free to use other berries: raspberries, and strawberries are great, too.
Serves 1 for a very hearty breakfast
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries ¾ cup plain goat yogurt ¾ cup tart cherry juice 2 Tablespoons Navitas Naturals Palm Sugar 1 Tablespoon Navitas Naturals Acai Powder 1 Tablespoon Navitas Naturals Maqui Powder 1 teaspoon Simply Organic vanilla extract
Combine all the ingredients in a blender and process until smooth. Taste, and if desired, add additional palm sugar for a sweeter flavor.
For 15% off all Navitasnatural.com products, please enter the code leslie15 at navitasnaturals.com
Everyone can benefit from eating a wide range of gluten-free whole grains. Gluten-free cooking and baking goes beyond just replacing the few popular gluten grains wheat, barley, triticale, and rye in favorite recipes. It is a celebration of the earth’s bounty.
There are more whole grains that do not have gluten. This means more choices, more whole grains and whole grain flours to mix and match with local, seasonal produce for an endless variety of daily meals. Doing so isn’t as hard as it seems if you follow some basic tips:
Create Gluten-Free Makeovers.
You can make pasta dishes, pastries—just about everything that can be made with gluten—into delicious, nutritious, gorgeous dishes with a wide gluten-free whole grains and flours.
Go Beyond Toast.
Start your day with nutritional powerhouses: gluten-free grains such as millet, rolled oats, teff, quinoa, and amaranth make tasty porridges cooked in water or coconut milk with a variety spices like ginger and cinnamon, and dried fruits. Top with your favorite yogurt, milk, fruit, or maple syrup for a great breakfast.
Pancakes and waffles are delicious and super nutritious made with one or a combination of gluten-free flours: teff, sorghum, quinoa, brown rice, corn, buckwheat, maca, and coconut flour.
It is easy to make grain loaves, polenta, and croquettes with corn grits, millet, and teff. Once cooked and cooled, you can cut them like a brownie. Slice and serve or refry; the possibilities are endless.
Cook Like An Artist.
You can make beautiful dishes mixing and matching grains with nuts, seeds, and colorful vegetables. Decorate finished dishes with edible flowers, springs of herbs, and sauces.
It is rare for whole grains to be complete proteins; however quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat and oats are complete proteins making them ideal for main course entrees, and side dishes.
Employ a Variety of Textures.
You can create dishes with many different textures: running the gamut from dense, smooth dishes like polenta to chewy wild rice to crispy granola. In the realm of desserts alone, grains and their flours can be used to create textures ranging from creamy rice pudding, to dense and chewy hazelnut brownies, to crispy cookies made with teff flour.
Create Great Pastries Everyone will Love.
Bake delicious cookies, piecrusts, fruit crisps, muffins, and brownies with a great variety of gluten-free flours: teff, oat, brown rice, quinoa, coconut, ground nut and seed flours (hazelnut, almond, and flax seeds, etc).
Photo: Tracey Eller
Roll Some Sushi.
Vegetarian sushi, also known as nori rice rolls, are delicious and easy to prepare with a wide variety of rice: Bhutanese Red Rice, Forbidden Rice, brown rice, Jade Pearl Rice, sweet brown rice, among others. Mix and match fresh and sautéed seasonal vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, beets, salad greens, etc) with avocado, pickles, sprouts, seasoned tofu and ginger tempeh, and more.
Stake Out a Variety of Shapes.
Gluten-free pasta comes in many shapes and sizes and made from a variety of grains: rice, quinoa, corn, amaranth, and buckwheat. All are great topped with savory sauces: tomato, peanut, pesto, mushroom, among others.
Expand your Repertoire.
Say yes to abundance of choices: enhance your nutrition by including high fiber, whole grains in your diet. You can make pilafs, soups, stews, porridge, and marinated salads and more with gluten-free grains.
Enjoy Being Environmentally Friendly.
Going gluten-free can help you decrease your carbon footprint. Huge monocultures of wheat and other common grains have damaging impacts on the earth, especially when grown commercially using petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
Because many varieties of gluten-free grains are more closely related to their wild cousins than the hybrids we’ve come to rely on, they can often be grown more easily, using less intensive methods. Some gluten-free grains are drought resistant, requiring less land and less water to produce high yields. Others grow in harsh conditions, arid uplands to moist tropical settings.
As a bonus, many of them offer superior nutrition and higher-quality protein than wheat and other common grains. That means more net nutrition from the same amount of land. And best of all, this approach to easing our impact on the planet offers a delicious culinary adventure.
Worldwide, gluten-Free whole grains truly are the foundation of a healthful diet—healthful not just for us humans, but also for our planet.
You’ve probably heard about the devastation of rainforests to create grazing land, water pollution from feedlots, and the problems with methane from cattle. And chances are, at some point you’ve read or heard that eating lower on the food chain is more sustainable, so I’ll just offer the reminder that it’s far more efficient to eat grain than to feed it to animals and then use those animals for food. As food resources grow scarce for an ever-increasing human population, it becomes more important to eat less meat, or avoid it altogether.
All of that said, I do believe that there’s a place for organic eggs and dairy products, especially when the animals that produce them are allowed to range freely and fed a diet that’s more natural for them (for dairy cows, that means grass-fed).
Leslie Cerier, “The Organic Gourmet,” is a national authority on gluten-free cooking and baking specializing in local, seasonal, whole foods and organic cuisine with 20 + years experience: Chef, Educator, and Author of 5 cookbooks including Gluten-Free Recipes for the Conscious Cook (2010), and Going Wild in the Kitchen (2005). Leslie teaches exciting “hands-on” vegetarian cooking classes in some of the most prestigious centers of holistic evolution and organic lifestyle. She will be co-teaching a special workshop with 10.5 CEC; Thriving Gluten-Free July 6-8 2012 with Celiac Expert and Dietician Melinda Dennis at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Check out more at http://lesliecerier.com/blog/class-schedule/.
Teaching Improvisational Cooking for Health and Vitality at Esalen Institute
Thanks to Tracey Eller for the Great Photos of my Hands On, Garden to Table, Gourmet Vegetarian, Cooking Classes for Health and Vitality at Esalen Institute March 2012
Teaching Great Meals with Great Grains Hand On Cooking Class at Esalen Institute
Amazing Fruit Crisp with Teff Flour, Maca, Almonds, Organic, Local Berries and Apples
Whether you are gluten-free, vegan, or omnivore, who can resist fruit crisp hot out of the oven? I have been baking and eating fruit crisps using teff flour for over 20 years and loving it. Here is a tasty variation, where I swapped a tablespoon of super food maca for some of the teff flour. You can do that with any flour; swap a little maca for about a tablespoon of flour. You will find yummy fruit crisp recipes in my cookbooks, Gluten-Free Recipes for the Conscious Cook and Going Wild in the Kitchen. Also, you can add some almonds to the sweet maple syrup sweetened crumble on top. I also love to use extra virgin coconut oil. Local organic apples, along with fresh picked then frozen strawberries, raspberries and wild cranberries line the bottom of the baking dish before the crumble goes on top. Delish! Feel free to mix and match seasonal fruits all year round! A generous touch of organic cinnamon and organic vanilla extract “Spices this Up” and makes this a “Great Meal with Great Grains”. “Improvisational Cooking for Health and Vitality and Pleasure, too. All major themes of my cooking classes and cookbooks.
Serve it for breakfast with yogurt on top, or for enjoy as a snack or dessert with whipped cream or ice cream. Since oats are a complete protein, this is a great meal with great grains any time of day!
CHICOPEE Mass. (Mass Appeal) – Dark chocolate isn’t just delicious, it’s great for your heart. Leslie Cerier is a Chef and Educator and also known as The Organic Gourmet and she’s here to make a some delicious truffles with us.
Here’s the video of Leslie being interviewed on NBC affiliate Channel 22 in Chicopee, MA
Delicious Berry and Apple Pie with Maple Teff Pie Crust
You can make delicious pies with local, seasonal and organic fruits all year long. Simply mix and match and swap as you adapt the seasons. You can freeze the local berries in summer. Then add them to the fall apples and pears as I have done here. Even making a gluten-free pie crust is easy with teff flour. No need to roll or refrigerate the dough. Simply mix it up and press it in.
Have fun and eat well.
Leslie’s Gluten-Free Pie Crust
2 cups teff flour
1/2 cup melted Organic extra-virgin coconut oil or pasture raised Organic butter
Preheat oven to 375ºF. Lightly oil a 9-inch pie pan.
To make the crust, combine the teff flour, oil, maple syrup, and salt in a medium-size bowl and stir until well combined. Reserve 1/2 cup of the mixture to use as a crumb topping.
Transfer the dough to the prepared pie pan and use your fingers to press it out in an even layer over the bottom and sides of the pan. Poke a few holes in the dough with a fork. Bake for about 10 minutes, until it loses it shine.
Join The Organic Gourmet Chef, Author, and Educator, Leslie Cerier to learn how to use spices and create tasty dishes with seasonal ingredients. Garlic, ginger and coriander make a tasty dressing for an Asian cabbage slaw with gogi berries. See how you can swap coriander for cilantro. Learn how to season your dishes with lots of great cooking tips for cooking with spices: how to fix dishes that are bland or too spicy and lots more.
Lasagna with Chèvre, Arugula and Crimini Mushrooms
Lasagna is very versatile. In this version, chèvre stands in for the more commonly used ricotta cheese, and goat cheddar subs for mozzarella.
Other cheeses that melt well, such as goat Gouda, French petite Basque or Spanish Manchego, are good choices, too.
2.Spread 1/2cup of the tomato sauce in the bottom of an 8-inch square baking dish. (You can use one of the lasagna noodles to do
the spreading.) Lay 3 of the noodles over the sauce.
3.Spread the chèvre on top of the noodles, top with another 3 noodles, and cover with mushrooms and arugula.
4.Place the last 3 noodles over the mushrooms and arugula, and press gently. Top with the remaining sauce and grated cheese.
5.Cover with foil or a cookie sheet and bake for 45 minutes, or until the noodles are soft and the lasagna is hot and bubbly.
6.Remove from the oven and let sit about 10 minutes to set. Cut into squares and serve.
For a Change . . .
•Instead of crimini mushrooms and arugula, try a combination of marinated sun-dried tomatoes, fresh or roasted bell peppers, chopped radicchio, sautéed shiitake mush-
rooms, and kale.
•Replace the layer of vegetables with another layer of grated cheese.
•Vary the type of lasagna noodles; use rice, whole wheat, spelt, spinach, or artichoke soy. Even penne or macaroni pasta works well.
•For a Mexican-style version, use jalapeño jack soy cheese instead of chèvre, and salsa in place of tomato sauce.
This tasty dip is simple to make and gets plenty of flavor from salsa and fresh cilantro. Use mild, medium or hot salsa, whichever you like. You can also always add more cayenne, ground hot pepper, for a hotter dip.
Vegan, wheat-free, corn-free
Makes 6 cups
4 cups cooked or canned black beans
Or start from scratch with 2 cups dried black beans soaked overnight and 1 strip kelp and 6 cups water
2 1/2 cups mild salsa
1 bunch cilantro, 1 1/2 cups leaves
1 bunch scallions, 1 1/2 cups sliced
1 teaspoon sea salt or to taste
Optional: add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne for a hotter dip
If starting from scratch, simmer black beans, water, and kelp for 1 1/2- 2 hours.
Rinse the cilantro and twist off and discard the stems. Put the cooked beans and all the other ingredients in a food processor except for a few sprigs of cilantro, which you can use later as a garnish. Blend and taste the dip. Add cayenne for a spicier
