Christina Najjar

4 Ingredient Beet Radish Salad (vegan, paleo)

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I’m not the biggest fan of beets, but this beet radish salad is one way I’ll actually somewhat enjoy them. I make it when I need to incorporate raw beets into my diet. Beets and radishes support the liver, and I know that my liver can always take a bit of extra help. Raw beets are also a great food for platelet health, and they have anti-cancer properties. You can read more about the health benefits of beets.

4 Ingredient Beet Radish Salad

If your digestive system has been known to cause you problems, proceed with caution. Raw beets can be difficult to digest because of its high insoluble fibre content, or, simply put, “roughage”. If you’re new to beets, it’s also important to note that in 10-15% of people, consuming beets can temporarily alter urine colour. The pigmentation will also show itself in stools, so don’t panic! You could probably make a movie (a funny one, too!) out of all my reactions when I’ve forgotten that I ate beets the night before.

If you haven’t worked with beets before, I will warn you that your hands will be a funky colour by the time you’re done cutting everything. You can wear gloves when cutting beets to avoid that. Otherwise, washing your hands with soap a few times should take care of it.

4 Ingredient Beet Radish Salad

Ingredients
1 large beet or 2-3 small beets, peeled
1 large watermelon radish (aka pink radish) or 2 small watermelon radishes, peeled
1 lime, zested and juiced
1/2-1 tsp chili power (or to taste)

Directions
Peel and chop (or julienne) the beets and radishes. Zest the lime, and then juice it over the beets and radishes. Add the chili powder and mix well. This beet radish salad will store in an airtight container in the fridge for 3-5 days.

No Cook Carrot Salad (vegan, paleo)

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Today is probably the hottest day we’ve had so far this year in Ottawa. Like, carrot salad for dinner hot. While I was running around town getting a bunch of stuff done, I stopped into Starbucks to get hydrated. The barista commented that I was a in earlier than usual. When I told her I was just stopping in and that I didn’t have a blog post for today, she said, “But what about your fans?”

No cook carrot salad

So, for my readers, I went home and I made something that didn’t require the oven. My apartment is on the 5th floor, so it’s even hotter in there than outside. I seem to always have carrots and apples in the fridge, no matter how long it’s been since I’ve done groceries. In the winter, when I just couldn’t get to the grocery store, I made a raw carrot salad for dinner out of desperation a few times. It tastes good, but it won’t make a full meal if you’re looking for something protein packed.

I julienne the carrots using my trust Jamie Oliver Julienne Peeler, but you can use a mandoline or buy bagged julienne carrots. If you’re really committed, you can also just chop the carrots into juliennes slices. Let me know if you do that, because that’s pretty hardcore.

No Cook Carrot Salad

Ingredients
3 large carrots, peeled and julienned
1/2 granny smith apple, chopped (and peeled, if not organic)
1/4 cup sliced almonds
1 1/2 tsp raw apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 tsp raw honey

Directions
Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Serve immediately or refrigerate for no more than a couple of hours. If you plan to prepare the salad ahead of time, add the sliced almonds when you’re ready to serve it. If kept longer, the almonds will soften.

Chocolate Pudding (vegan, paleo, sugar free)

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Well, friends, it is finally starting to look like spring in Canada. It sure took Mother Nature long enough! It’s just about popsicle season! Speaking of popsicles, last year, I was planning to post a chocolate popsicle recipe. There was a little problem with my freezer at the time, though. The popsicles I made kept the consistency of pudding. So, I ate some very cold chocolate pudding. I did end up figuring out how to adjust the settings on my freezer so that it froze properly, and made raspberry cream popsicles a few weeks later.

Homemade chocolate Pudding

Avocado-based chocolate pudding is nothing new in the vegan and food sensitivities world. However, I find that most recipes complicate things by adding ingredients that don’t need to be in the pudding. For example, milk (cow’s or non-dairy) will do nothing but water down the perfect creaminess of the avocado. I also find that adding vanilla extract takes away from the richness of the cocoa, rather than complementing it. So, I like to keep my chocolate pudding recipe nice and simple. Let’s say it becomes a “dark chocolate pudding”.

P.S. If you want to make this into popsicles, all you need to do is place the mixture into popsicle moulds. It works well, provided that your freezer is actually functional.

Chocolate Pudding

Ingredients
1 large ripe avocado
1 tbsp cocoa powder or raw cacao
Maple syrup to taste (a couple tablespoons should do)

Directions
With a large spoon, scoop the avocado out of its skin. Combine all the ingredients in a food processor or blender. Put it into function until you have pudding. Eat the pudding. That was complicated, wasn’t it?

If you want to turn it into chocolate mint pudding, add a splash of peppermint extract.

Makes only 1 serving, so multiply as needed.

Any-Flavour Green Smoothie Template

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Breakfast on the go. That’s how I try to live my life. I know, it’s terrible, but it’s an improvement. At least I try to actually eat something now. Or drink it. I’ve been walking to work for the last two weeks, now that the weather is nicer, and that my bus pass has expired. I feel that $96 a month is a bit steep for a 5-10 minute bus ride, especially when the alternative is vitamin D and exercise.

My breakfast method is the following: make a smoothie while I get ready in the morning, pour it in my reusable bottle, and drink it whenever I have to wait for the pedestrian light to pop up at intersections. If I’m going to stand around and wait anyway, I might as well do something useful. If you think I should just drink my smoothie while walking, you’ve never seen what kind of a clumsy disaster I can be.

If you’re detoxing, try replacing the milk substitute with water. Milk substitutes can often be quite processed, which makes them less detox friendly. You can add a sugar free sweetening syrup instead to improve the taste.

Any-Flavour Green Smoothie Template

Ingredients
1 cup frozen fruit (I like raspberries)
1 ripe banana
1 cup greens (spinach is my favourite, or try kale, parsley, romaine lettuce, beet greens, chard, carrot leaves,  or dandelion leaves)
1 cup milk of choice (water can be used for detox, raw, paleo, etc.)
1-2 tbsp seeds (hemp hearts, chia, and flax are my favourites)
Optional: sweetener of choice to taste

Directions
Combine all the ingredients in a blender. The order that works best in my blender is (bottom to top) greens, frozen fruit, banana, seeds, and then milk. Find the order that works for yours. Blend for two minutes or until nice and smooth.

Carrot and Zucchini “Spaghetti” with Spinach Pesto

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Just recently, I ordered the Jamie Oliver All purpose 3-in-1 Peeler to help me finely julienne veggies. My mandoline makes the pieces too big to use as a replacement for pasta, and reducing my carbs isn’t such a bad idea. It took me an entire zucchini to figure out how to use it properly (do I ever feel silly), but now that I know how to use it, it’ll make my life so much easier. The peeler comes with a regular peeler head and a soft fruit peeler. I suppose I’ll probably end up using them at some point, but the real reason I purchased it was for the julienne head.

I had a lot of spinach in the fridge that was threatening to go bad, and I didn’t want to throw it out. I really enjoy pesto, but pine nuts are out of my budget. For this recipe, I opted for pumpkin seeds. Surprisingly, it’s hard to notice the difference. This makes me wonder about the necessity of spending $7 for a small container of pine nuts.

This meal is good detox food. The garlic is particularly cleansing, and the use of spinach, pumpkin seeds and raw veggies takes it that extra step further. You may want to reconsider this meal if you’ll be interacting with people though. It’s not exactly low on garlic. Or eat it with some green tea, and swish some mustard around in your mouth after.

Carrot and Zucchini “Spaghetti” with Spinach Pesto

Ingredients
2 large carrots
2 large zucchinis
3 cups baby spinach
1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds
3 cloves garlic (I used 4, it was too much)
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt to taste

Directions
Julienne the carrots and zucchinis into a large bowl. Place the rest of the ingredients in a food processor. Process until it’s reached the desired consistency. Pour it over the julienned veggies and toss until well mixed.

Detox salad

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The people around me must be getting tired of hearing about this detox I keep talking about. Unlike lots of other detoxes, it’s not harsh, and doesn’t work by depriving your body of its essential nutrients. The idea is to cut out toxins by going vegan, gluten free, sugar free, and alcohol free for a week, and to eat organic as much as possible. During that week, you eat foods with detoxing properties. Here is the link to the website.

This salad is more than some side dish. The quinoa provides protein, making this a full meal. For added protein (and tons of other nutrients), you could even sprinkle some hemp hearts on there, but I prefer to use hemp hearts in places where I won’t taste them as much.

Instead of cooking one cup of quinoa by itself, I made the salad at the same time as the cilantro lime quinoa, which is also good detox food, and which will keep in the fridge for a few days as well. The good thing about quinoa is that you can make enough of it over the week end and keep eating it for most of the week without having to constantly cook more.

Detox Salad

Ingredients
1/2 cup chopped cilantro, lightly packed
4 large leaves kale, ribs removed
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1 cup cooked quinoa – for raw, soak overnight
1 tbsp + 1 tsp (4 tsp) raw apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp olive oil

Directions
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl. It will be good for at least three days in the fridge (provided that your greens aren’t already at the end of their lives).

Apple Cinnamon Overnight Oats (vegan, no added sugar)

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Overnight oats are such a convenient concept. They take just a few minutes to put together, and then time and your fridge do the rest of the work. If this is your first time trying overnight oats, I’m warning you that some people don’t enjoy the texture. Personally, I’m really picky with textures, but I really enjoy overnight oat texture.

Overnight oats are versatile too. I like apple as a breakfast flavour, but really, you can keep the milk, oats, and chia seed proportions intact and flavour it as you wish. Some of my other favourite flavours include pumpkin spice and chocolate nut butter.

You can make a few tweaks to boost the nutritional content of this recipe. Chia seeds are a great source of healthy fats, but our bodies can’t access the fats in whole chia. While this may alter the texture a bit, you can grind the chia seeds before throwing them in, making the fats more available.

Additionally, if you’re only going to eat adequate protein for one meal, breakfast should be that meal. It helps “set the tone” for how your blood sugar levels are going to behave that day. This is especially important for diabetes, hypoglycemia, and hormonal conditions like PMS, PCOS, endometriosis, and infertility. To boost the protein in these overnight oats, I like to add some ground hemp hearts or hemp protein powder.

Apple Cinnamon Overnight Oats

Apple Cinnamon Overnight Oats (vegan, no added sugar)

Ingredients
3/4 cup non-dairy milk
1/3 cup gluten free oats
2 tbsp chia seeds
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Splash of vanilla extract
3 tbsp unsweetened apple sauce
1/2 apple, chopped
Optional: maple syrup, honey, or stevia to taste

Directions
In the evening, combine all the ingredients except the apple sauce and the apple in an individual bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, add the apple and the apple sauce before serving.

Lentil Sprouts (using materials you have at home)

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Between midterms, having a cold, and this outrageous winter, I haven’t really been consistent with my grocery shopping. My veggie supply is running out. I was considering growing all kinds of veggies in my living room, but after doing some research and asking around, I’ve concluded that it’s not worth it. I decided to make lentil sprouts instead.

Lentils just starting to sprout

They require so little effort and are ready in just a few days. In theory, this works with anything that has seeds. Herbs, beans, chia seeds, you name it. For more gelatinous seeds, I hear you need special equipment though, so don’t try this method with chia seeds. If this is your first time, I recommend you try this with your favourite kind of bean.

I’m looking into getting a sprouter because I’d like to do a lot of sprouting, but having gotten so excited about getting started, I didn’t want to wait until I had the sprouter to start. Today, I show you a method to sprout that you can try with what you already have at home.

Lentil Sprouts

Sprouting lentils

What you need

A jar
A strainer, cheesecloth, or pantyhose
An elastic
Seeds to sprout
An abundance of water

How to proceed

If you’re using some kind of bean, start by sorting through them and picking out the ones with spots on them. Then, rinse the seeds thoroughly. To give you an idea of the amount you might want to use, after your initial soaking, the beans will have more than doubled in size, and once they start sprouting, your batch will increase in size even more. Many website suggest starting with half a cup to one cup.

Once you’ve rinsed the beans, place them in a large jar. They shouldn’t take up more than about a third of the jar. Pour water in the jar almost all the way to the top. The jar needs to be covered but it needs to be able to breathe as well, so this is where the cheesecloth or the pantyhose comes in handy. I had neither, so for this step, I used paper towel. Keep it in place around the rim of the jar with an elastic. Let it sit for up to a day in a cool place.

Lentil sprouts

Lentil sprouts

Once it’s been sitting for no more than a day, the seeds need to be rinsed very well to avoid mold. If you have cheesecloth or pantyhose, this can be done directly in the jar through the fabric. Because I had neither, I transferred the set-up to my strainer. Once you’re done rinsing, make sure you’ve gotten rid of every last drop of water. Leaving water at the bottom of the jar will increase chances of mold.

Lentil sprouts

From this point on, you want to rinse the seeds/sprouts every 8-12 hours and keep them dry otherwise until they’re done. This can be anywhere between 2 and 7 days, depending on the temperature in your dwelling and how you like your sprouts to look. To store them in the fridge, make sure they are very well dried. They can be kept in a ziploc bag or a plastic container.

If you’re not sure what to do with the sprouts once they’re done, you can eat them straight, or put them in salads, sandwiches, or whatever recipes you find online. I really enjoyed my lentil sprouts in salad.

Probiotic Sauerkraut

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Homemade sauerkraut

Anyone who spends enough time with me knows how I feel about probiotics. In your digestive system, there are all sorts of microorganisms that help you stay healthy, your gut flora. Medication, alcohol, sugar, and many other factors can harm your gut flora. This can lead to all sorts of health problems. Probiotics help restore your gut flora. Probiotic supplements are available, but not all are of good quality, and the good ones can be really expensive. This is why I’m a fan of sauerkraut (the benefits, not the taste, bleugh). It cost me all of $2 for the cabbage and about $5 for the salt because all I had on hand was iodised salt. The salt will last me for many, many uses.

Now, I know you might be asking yourself why you would make sauerkraut when you can conveniently buy it at the supermarket. Unless otherwise specified, the jarred stuff you buy at the grocery store doesn’t have the probiotic benefits. So, if you’re interested, let’s get started!

Probiotic Sauerkraut

What you need
1 cabbage (red or green)
Non-iodized salt (I use 1 tbsp, but work to your tastes)
A large bowl (or two)
Jars – I reused two pickle jars
Patience

How to proceed
Quarter the cabbage. Remove the really thick ribs and the core. Take one quarter, lay it down on one of the flat sides, and slice it as thin as you possibly can without adding your fingers to the ingredients. Put the shreds into a bowl. I needed two bowls to fit all the cabbage.

Add the salt now – it will help you for the next step. Because I was using red cabbage and I didn’t want to go to work looking like a smurf, I used plastic gloves, but I just ended up ripping right through them. You might as well not bother with that.

This is where the fun begins. What you’re going to want to do now is start “massaging” the cabbage. Basically, you’ll be grabbing handfuls of shreds and making a fist with your hand, squeezing the cabbage. Kind of like when people with curly hair scrunch their hair. What this will accomplish, after you’ve repeated enough times, is squeeze the juice out of the cabbage and soften it. The salt helps speed that up. The first bowl took me half an hour because I wasn’t sure what to do, but the second bowl took me about seven minutes. You want there to be enough of the cabbage juice to cover all the cabbage once you pack it down in a jar, which is precisely what you’ll want to do at this point (unless you’re easily amused and want to keep squeezing the cabbage).

Make sure the cabbage is packed down as much as it can be in the jar so that the juice level stays higher than the cabbage level. Any cabbage which isn’t covered runs the risk of developing bad bacteria. Now you close the jar and you wait. I suggest doing other things while you wait, like going to work and sleeping, because you’ll be waiting a while. For me, that was four days. Some people say it takes longer though. Open the jar once a day to release the (foul-smelling) gasses. If your house/apartment/unspecified dwelling is too warm, you may start to see mold. You can remove a thin layer of sauerkraut without having to discard the whole batch, if that happens.

When it’s done, the finished product will be a different colour than the cabbage was when you bought it (or stole it, not that I encourage this). A few days after it’s started fermenting, taste it once a day to decide when it’s at the point when you like it. When it gets to that point, you’ll want to transfer it to the fridge.

Because I dislike the taste of sauerkraut, I add a generous amount of olive oil and black pepper when I dish it out, and it actually turns out to be quite tasty. You can cook it or fry it or whatever it is that people do with it, but that gets rid of the probiotic benefits.

Apple Kale Salad (vegan, paleo)

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When I buy kale, I start dreaming about all the meals and green smoothies I’ll be able to make. There’s only so much I can make with one bunch of kale though, and I don’t buy more than one bunch for fear of wasting it. This time, I went for an apple kale salad.

Apple Kale Salad

This salad is wonderful for so many reasons. It’s detox friendly, especially if you use organic raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar and fresh lemon juice. It’s high in iron and other essential nutrients. It’s easy to make on a student budget. It’s filling. And most importantly, it’s tasty.

Apples are the #1 item on the Dirty Dozen list, and kale is about to make its way onto the list (update 03/31/16: kale is on the 2015 list). If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you have a look at this. While this is the US version, it’s not very different from what you should expect in Canada. If you can use organic apples and kale, I highly recommend it. If not, wash your kale really well and peel your apple.

Apple Kale Salad

Ingredients
About 6 large leaves of kale
1 granny smith apple
Pumpkin or sunflower seeds to taste (I used about a handful)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp dijon mustard
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp raw apple cider vinegar

Directions
Cut up the kale leaves, removing the ribs. In a small bowl, mix the wet ingredients together. Cut up the apple into bite sizes when you’re ready to pour the dressing on the salad. The lemon in the dressing will stop the apples from darkening. Sprinkle seeds and toss well. The kale leaves will soften up a bit after a few minutes. Serve right away.

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Christina Najjar - Natural Nutrition

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