Smoothie veraniego

Hoy os dejo la receta rápida de un rico smoothie muy sano para consumir fruta en verano sin tanta pereza que nos da tomarla en su forma habitual.

Solo necesitamos:
- 1 litro de leche de avena o coco.
- 2 plátanos maduros.
- 1 taza de frutos del bosque congelados.
- 1 piña.
- 1 taza de fresas
-(opcional) si queremos bajar un poco la acidez de los frutos del bosque endulzar ligeramente con estevia o una cucharadita de miel.

El procedimiento es de lo más sencillo, trituramos todo en la batidora un par de minutos para que no queden trozos y ¡listo!, A servir bien frío.

Nota: Consumir la fruta de este modo no le resta propiedades ya que al triturar y no licuar no eliminamos la parte de la fibra que contiene la fruta de manera natural, que si eliminamos al licuarla.

¡Buen provecho!

Banana & Almond milkshake

Sometimes it's get hard to have some fruit along the day, but a good way to get to that point without lazyness it's to have a fruit-milkshake ready to drink on our fridge.

Today we have a very hot day here in Spain so I decided to have myself  a fresh milkshake for afternoon snack, with the sweet taste of bananas and the light texture of almond milk.

What we need?
- 1 liter of water
- 150 gr of almonds.
- 4 bananas.
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
- 2 teaspoons of dried coconut (optional, I like the "summer" taste of coconut)
- If you want it sweeter, just ad a teaspoon of honey or raw sugar.

How to?
- First of all we need to hidrate our almonds to create homemade almond milk, let them soak for about an hour.
- After that squeeze them and add them to the blender with 1 liter of water.
- blend them for about 2 minutes until it has the texture and color of milk.
- Strain the milk to eliminate all the almond parts so the milk gets clean.
- Add 4 bananas sliced into the blender, cinnamon, and coconut and blend it with half of the almond milk for about 3 minutes.
- And you're done. Let it cool on the fridge, it will taste better.

And enjoy it while you sunbath yourself on a sunny afternoon.

Lavender lemonade

Here I gave you a fresh recipe for this hot summer. An original lemonade with the taste and smell of lavender.

What you need?

- 2 tablespoons of lavender

- 3 lemons juice

- 1/2 cup of sugar or honey

- 4 cups of water.

How to?

- Heat the water with the sugar until it starts boiling.
- When ready, add the rest of the ingredients.
- Boil 5 minutes and let it cold.
- Enjoy!

Almonds & Oats cookies

Hello!!!!

Today I'd like to share with you a recipe I've done lots of times because of the flavour of that cookies.

What we need?

-1 Bowl of almonds.
- wheat flour.
- Oat flakes.
- 2 eggs.
- Honey.
- Yeast.

How-to:

- Grind almonds on you food processor.
- Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl: Yeast, flour, oat flakes and almonds.
- Add honey, eggs and create an easy to handle dough.
- Create the cookies on a baking sheet. If you leave them fatty they will have a soft texture.
- Cook them until they look darker.

You're done!!

enjoy them.

P.S: Preserve them on a plastic bag so you can enjoy them for more days.

Cabbage rolls

Today I'm sharing a new way to cook cabbage leafs.

Hope you like it and enjoy it! P.S: don't forget to share if you liked it.



Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/M53HrmgqAm4

Ingredients:

- Cabbage leafs
- 250 gr of meat
- 1 cup of Quinoa
- Garlic
- Ginger & chile.
- Soya sauce.

What to do?

- Chop the onions and garlic very small.
- Cook the quinoa for 2-3 minutes on boiling water and squeeze it.
- Mix the meat with garlic, quinoa, 2 tablespoons of ginger, 1 tablespoon of chile mixing and 3 tablespoon of soya sauce.
- Fill the cabbage leafs with the mixture and put them on a baking dish.
- Add 1/2 cup of soya and 1 cup of water.
- Cover with aluminium foil.
- Cook it on the oven 35 minutes at 250ºC.

And voilá, it's very tasty
Cheers,
V.

Leek & apple puree

It's time for winter crops so today we show you an easy recipe made out with seasonal products.
It's a puree with apple and leek that has a soft taste and keep you warm on those cold days.

Hope you enjoy!

What we need?:

- 3 Leeks.
-2 Apples.
- 1 or 2 potatoes (optional).
- 700 ml of water (you can use vegetable broth instead).
- 100 ml of milk.
- Olive oil, salt & pepper.
- Sesame seeds (optional).

How-to:

- Chop the leeks ands apples (peel them off first). And if you want to add potato chop them too.

- Add some oil into a pot and saute the leeks for 3 minutes. After that add apples and potatoes and stir it while cooking for 4 or 5 minutes.

- Add the water (or vegetable broth) and let it boil for 30 minutes with low heat.

- Triturate it with your mixer until it has the desired texture.

If it's gonna be consumed at the moment, you can now add the milk and cook for 5 more minutes.
If you're going todeep-freeze it don't add the milk. Freeze and when you are going to eat it add the milk and cook for 5 minutes.

We have added some sesame seed, so they give texture to our meal and also to add mucilage to our meal, which are so useful to our intestine for protecting our moucus and to prevent irritations of our digestive apparatus.

Suscribe to our channel, like & share!

Cheers,
V.

30 minutes cheese, easy & tasty.

Today I would like to share with you an easy recipe of home made cheese. It's called "acid precipitation system" and you don't need any special substances or machines to do it at home.

What we need?
- 1.5 liters of fresh milk (the one that it's refrigerated on the markets, the other one that comes on tetrabricks has an UHT treatment that destroys so many proteins so it doesn't work).
- 1 cup of lemon juice (it acts as the coagulant that gives this method it's name).
- Salt and herbs.

How to?

We leave here as always, a link to our youtube video with the how to procedure. We encourage you to wacht it and suscribe to our channel for more news. But as always we leave you also some written instructions, so it makes it easy to follow the video.

https://youtu.be/QRgljnHuZ40

- First of all we need to heat up the milk with low medium heat.
- Stir it so it doesn't burn, beacuse that could give our cheese a bad taste.
- When you see some small bubbles on the edges and some smoke, turn down the heat and let it cold for about 3 minutes.
- Touch the pot, and when it doesn't burn your hand, it's the moment to add the lemon juice.
- Add it slowly and continuosly stiring so it mixes well.
- When you see that it starts coagulating, stop stiring and let it rest for 5 minutes.
- Use a colander to discard the liquid.

I used a metallic one because I wanted a fresh cheese that can be served spread on bread slices, but if you want a harder one that can be used in salads, I recommend you to use a fabric colander so you can squeeze it more.

- Add some salt and herbs before squeezen the cheese. And then squeeze until it is tight as you like.
- Let it rest on the fridge to cold and dry for at least 2 hours.

If you have no patience for that, you can eat the cheese when it's completely cold without waiting that time, but it would be softer.

Hope you like this tutorial, and if you have some comments, doubts, sugestions let us know!
Write us here or in our youtube channel or facebook. Suscribe, like & share!.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sustainablelivingdiy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/greenlifeandDIY

Cheers,
V.

Cold-preventive brew

Hi everybody!

Today I would like to share a recipe that can make us feel better when we have a cold, of course it doesn't heal us completely but can help on calming throat irritation or reducing mucus to breathe way better.

What do we need?

- Thyme twigs.
- Lemon juice.
- Raw honey, if it's possible rosmary one.
- 1 cup of water.

How-to:

- We need to boil thyme twigs for 2 minutes in 1 cup of water, after that time, let it rest and cold for 10 minutes.
- Add 1/2 lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of honey.
- Drink it slowly.

You can also use this recipe to gargle and to reduce throat pain.

In our next chapter of tips and tricks we are going to explain a homemade recipe of cough syrup.

*This recipe is from Mariano's Bueno book.

Almonds: How to grow them and some uses...

The almond tree (Prunus dulcis Bach) its a tree that belongs to the Rosaceae family, so easy to grow in Mediterranean dry areas. Having 2 or 3 trees of this type on our garden can give us a big harvest every year, and also we could enjoy their smell and flowers during the bloom.

It's a very sylvan tree that survives very well even dry events or hot summers. It's best it's Mediterranean climate beacuse it tolerate, but not to well, the frosts.
The best way to plant it it's by grafting.

Talking about plagues, personally we have observed just the attack of a little beetle that creates galleries under the cortex, making the trees bleed. Also some aphids, the frist symptom its the curving of leaves. For the second ones we recomend potasic soap when you see those first symptoms.

For the curious ones, I'd like to talk about it's wild parent: the bitter almond (Prunus amara). It's bitter taste it's due to benzaldehyde, that comes out from the decomposition of amygdaline.
Functionality of amygdaline it's to prevent the almonds from being eaten by predators and in consecuence to preserve the species.
When you eat a bitter almond amygdaline metabolizes with some enzymes decomposing in glucose, benzaldehyde and hydrocyanic, that's why a big amount of this almonds could be toxic.

After all taht, I'm gonna leave you a recipe to do with you almonds, almond milk. It's healthier, cheaper and it contains way more almond than the supermaket ones.

We need:
- 200 gr of almonds.
- 1 liter of water.
- Vanille or cinnamon (optional).

How to:

- Peel off the almonds.
- Leave them with water (so they hydrate) for at least 2 hours.

 - Take off the water and put the almonds with new water in the blender.
- Blend them.

- Strain them so there are no pieces of almond floating.
- Add vanille or cinnamon.

Chapter 2: Pisto

Today we show you another way to can tomatoes and other vegetables from your garden so you can taste them in winter.

It's Pisto, a Spanish recipe, a vegetable stew to serve warm or cold, perfect as a starter or as a side dish.

So let's start cooking.

What we need?
- Tomatoes.
- Zuchinni.
- Garlic.
- Onions.
- Peppers.
- Salt.
- Olive oil.

How to: (Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjvtPQvJKZQ)

- Clean and cut in small pieces all the vegetables.
- Put some olive oil on a pot and let it heat up.
- Add some sliced garlic.
- When you see it's changing it's color add the onions and peppers.
- When onions look transparent, it's moment to add the zuchinni and some salt.
- After that, let it heat until you see the zuchinni is not as hard as in the begining. And in that moment you can add tomatoes.
- Let it cook for an hour, and you are done.

- Before storing them, you have to sterilize the cans you're gonna use, for that boil them into some water and let them dry upside-down.
- Put Pisto on the cans, and then you have to vacuum them to take out all the air inside. Introducing the cans on a pot covered with water, let them inside for 30 minutes counting on when water starts to boil.

And that's it.

Any doubt, suggestion or whatever, just let us now.
Suscribe to our youtube channel.
Cheers,
V.

Chapter 1: Sun Dried Tomatoes.

This is not a new technique is as old as earth.

Using the sun to dry fruits or vegetables is a very good way to preserve them for winter.
This time I'm drying some tomatoes, because it's a vegetable we don't have in winter and we miss so much.


Tomatoes this way can be used in many forms, salads (they have intense flavour), pizzas (so good matching with cheese), salsas, etc.

Here you have the video: https://youtu.be/bMuAsVaCi5w

First we need to clean very well the tomatoes, to be sure there is no sand on them and no bacterias left.

After that, I cut them in two (four if it's too big) parts.

Then I put them in my self-built "dehidrator machine" (How to build it: http://sustainablelivingdiy.blogspot.com.es/2015/08/how-to-build-solar-dryer.html),
that you can see is easy to make and prevent the attack of flyes, mosquitoes, ants, etc... Also it concentrates the sun with poplipropilene on top.

After 2 weeks, with a lot of sun, you took them out and can store them on glass jars or as I did in vacuum bags.

Pickled Red Cabbage

// Old post transalted (01/01/2015)

Today we have picked the last red cabbages from our vegetable garden. Since we have had so many this year we wanted to preserve/pickle some so they don’t go to waste and also so we can use them when we don’t have any fresh ones. The following recipe is ideal for food preserving and it can add an interesting twist to our salads. It might seem like an odd combination but trust me, it works and we encourage you to try it out.

We are going to preserve 7 red cabbages! But below you will find the ingredients and amount you need to preserve just one. If you don’t have a vegetable garden you can just buy a red cabbage and try the recipe out.

 

Ingredients:

• 1 red cabbage
• 60gr of salt
• 150gr of panela sugar
• 500ml of apple cider vinegar
• 2 bay leaves
• 10gr of thyme
• 10 peppercorns
• 2 cloves
• 10gr of cardamom seeds
• 10gr of star aniseed

Directions:

- Shred the red cabbage and put it in a bowl with the salt to help it soften, leave it for 5 hours.

- Put the vinegar in a pot and add the rest of the ingredients to it, you can put the herbs and spices inside a muslin cloth if you want to infuse the vinegar and don’t want them to set on the bottom of the jar.
- Add the cabbage to the pot and bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes.
- Put the mixture into the sterilised jars. Put the filled sealed jars into a bain marie.
- Fill the pan containing the jars with water until just a couple of inches below the lids, and bring to the boil. Then cover and leave for 20-30 minutes.
- Finally, remove the jars from the water and leave to cool slowly.

Enjoy!

Watermelon Smoothie

Today I'm going to show you an easy, healty and refreshing recipe for those hot summer days.

What do we need?

- A small watermelon.
- 400 ml of plant-based milk (I used soy milk but you can change it for coconut milk or almond milk).
- Oats.
- Honey 2-3 tablespoons (or sugar).

Here you have the video:
http://youtu.be/UuUSLAz1TCE




First we start re-hydrating oats with a small amount of the milk.
Then we get the watermelon out of the fridge and cut it into small portions.
We add all the ingredients to the blender and blend it until it has the texture you desire.

Serve it cold.

And that's it, it's easy to do and perfect for the morning or as a natural snack.


Cheers,
V.