Sarah Wilson

Everyone has got a little excited about kale. Every time I write about it I get stacks of emails. So I thought I’d post a great kale pesto recipe. Healthy as. And you can freeze it...which I’m radically into right now.

There’s a lot of recipes out there. I like this one.

1 bunch kale
2 Tbsp hemp oil
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
2 Tbsp fresh basil
1 lemon, juiced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp Celtic sea salt

Add the ingredients to a food processor and whip with an S-Blade until finely chopped.

This one for quinoa with walnut kale pesto from glutenfree girl also looks good.

It’s ugly and lumpy and mostly people don’t know what it is when they see it at the shops. But I love turmeric. Even if it does stain every device in my kitchen a bright yellow.

Know this: more and more studies are showing it beats inflammation. And fights cancer. I eat it as often as I can and it’s made major inroads into my puffiness from that damn ole thyroid disease. SO MUCH SO, MY RECENT TEST RESULTS WHICH I GOT BACK YESTERDAY SHOW I’VE REDUCED MY ANTIBODIES TO NORMAL LEVELS. It wasn’t just turmeric. But it was from diet! Yes. It can be done. PLEASE be heartened by this. Read more about how I heal my auto-immune disease here.

Turmeric has been called one of nature’s most powerful healers.

I know this seems like a really daggy post. But stick with me, at least until the jump. It gets really interesting. See this quinoa recipe below, from 101 Cookbooks, an amazing resource for super healthy food ideas…I challenged myself to make it entirely from stuff pulled from my freezer. There are tricks and things to know…read on…

A full freezer is a green freezer

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman is a mad freezer nut. He wrote recently in Oprah magazine that storing food in the freezer is actually economical because freezers work more efficiently when they’re full…something to do with solids stay cold longer than gases, so keep the whole lot at a more consistent temperature. Rad. Mark pretty much stores everything in his – flour, lemons, fruit, bacon. I’m not far off.

Some stuff is better frozen

Frozen tofu, for instance, stirfries better.

You eaten quinoa yet? The high-energy, gluten-free grain that everyone’s talking about right now? The stuff is unreal, beyond healthy and is a happy food at this time of year when our bodies need lots of protein and warm comforting textures. Consider this a bit of a cheat sheet on how to cook and eat it:

* For starters, pronounce it right: KEEN-wah. You can get it everywhere now…health food shops, Coles etc.

* DUK? Quinoa has the highest nutritional profile and cooks the fastest of all grains. It is an extremely high-energy grain and comes from South America.  It contains all eight amino acids to make it a complete protein and has a protein content equal to milk, and is super high in B vitamins, iron, zinc, potassium, calcium & vitamin E. It’s gluten-free; easy to digest

* When quinoa is cooked, the outer germ surrounding the seed breaks open to form a crunchy coil while the inner
grain becomes soft and translucent. So it has this double texture, which is fun.

To Cook the Stuff

* VERY IMPORTANT: before cooking, quinoa must be rinsed to remove the toxic (but naturally occurring) bitter coating, called
saponin. Saponin, when removed from quinoa, produces a soapy solution in water.

This popped up in Shop Till You Drop this month, prompting an urge to share a recipe with you (below):

As it happens, I cooked a meal last night using ALMOST all the ingredients above. In rough terms, this is it:

I’ve mentioned kale before here. I call it kale. Foodie types with an Italian affection call it cavalo nero. It looks like a more rustic, crinkly version of spinach, and is ssuuuuuuuuuper nutritious. Actually, here’s a fact: Kale’s one of the most nutritious superfoods on the planet, packed with chlorophyll, calcium, iron & vitamin A. Et-a-cet-er-a.

On Saturday I had breakfast at Sopra (if you’ve never been, you must….the one at Danks St Waterloo is the most divine space in Sydney, I think). I skipped the breakfast bit and had the shaved brussel sprouts with kale and poached egg. That’s how much I love the stuff.

I’m not about to venture into the food bloggosphere, but I’ve been asked to share the recipe for the muffins I took to this morning’s brunch. I’ve kind of made it up.  Apologies to all home economists everywhere…I know this might horrify you.

So, five bodgy steps:

1. turn oven to 180 or so (my oven doesn’t have a dial)

2. beat 2 egg yolks, 1/2 cup honey and some grapeseed or camelia or just plain olive oil (2 tbls?) with a stab-mixer

3. add this glug to a bowl containing a cup each of grated pumpkin and almond meal, 2 cups of gluten-free flour (I used buckwheat and some besan flour), a big shake of cinnamon, 1 tsp of baking powder, a handful of chopped basil leaves and a fistful of chia seeds.

Chia seeds are a superfood – the most nutritious on the planet, according to some. They contain 19 amino acids, stacks of omega 3 and, oh, the fibre…when added to liquid they get a glutinous coating that makes one’s bowels work somewhat smoothly.

4. then stir in enough water (I don’t really know how much) to get it to a thick consistency (I use the stab-mixer again) and stir in egg whites that you’ve whipped up a treat

5. finally, spoon into muffin trays that are lined with little squares (10cm x10cm?) of baking paper and POP into the oven. After about 5 minutes I sprinkle with some pepitas and then bake for another 10 minutes or so.

Trust me, these will work out. Don’t worry about exact measurements, so long as the consistency is cakey. Bear in mind the chia seeds soak up stacks of liqued. So if you end up with a runny batter-like stodge, add more chia seeds.

*Get fancy and sprinkle with fresh torn basil and some flowers flogged  from the neighbours garden when presenting to friends at brunch when you’re 25 minutes late.

Yum.