Carbs! We Need Carbs!

This week we are experimenting with another chocolate dessert. It seems like desserts is the thing people miss the most when they change to a healthy diet. Dr. Doug Graham would say this is because we aren't getting enough fruit in our diets. I think it is because we aren't used to the volume of fruit needed to provide our full load of carbs; desserts provide a more concentrated form. As long as we know this, perhaps we can concentrate on eating more fruit until we get more accustomed to what our particular bodies need. Healthy desserts certainly help bridge the gap.


That being said, this is a great time of year to eat more fruit. We try to eat only fruit in the morning and into the afternoon. When we feel like we need something more substantial, we'll go for the salad or main dish entrees. Even having fruit that large part of the day, we still find we need more many days. The human body is designed to be fueled by the simple sugars in fruits. Please read Dr. Graham's work for a better explanation of this.

Back to the new dessert. Historically speaking, one of Darius' friends (Thanks, Steven) critiqued us when we first got started by telling us that we needed more desserts, especially chocolate. At the time, we didn't have any chocolate anything, so we got busy. Every couple of months, we've come up with a new one. First was our chocolate cheesecake, and we've been working on that consistently since we started. Then we came up with our rawky road which is a chocolate coconut confection that reminds me of a mounds bar. We worked on perfecting our chocolate pudding and
chocolate pie after that. We decided to add coconut meat to our avocado mousse, and that did the trick. The chocolate pie is a nice chocolate crust (almonds, coconut, dates, & cacao) covered with sliced banana and topped with the chocolate pudding. I love making vegan desserts. It is a great challenge to make these without any dairy, flour, and eggs, not to mention the fact that they're uncooked.

I've been thinking that we needed something more "cakey", so I've been working on this chocolate mousse cake. The cake part is absolutely just like a cake mix before baking (one of my former pre-vegan favorites), so I am hoping it works up nicely in the dehydrator. The mousse is a no-brainer with cashews and coconut meat much like an ice cream custard before it's frozen. I have big hopes for it!

We also have some chocolate snacks we've worked on; Alicia is better at that than I. I do like the chocolate macaroons, but most people like Alicia's coco bites better. We're also working on a nice chocolate truffle and a date candy filled with chocolate ganache. We'll put them out there when we get them right.

I'll try to take step by step pictures of the mousse cake and post them on facebook. No promises though as I have a hard time remembering to stop and photograph everything when I am "creating".

This week we've got elotes con crema and tomato salsa to make some mega nachos with chili lime corny chips. Also making some yummy Mexican Rice. How about some unfried no-beans?. We're going to make more Mexi-Cali wrappers as these are really good wrapped around some elotes for our alternative tacos. We're also going to use the unfried no-beans to make some cabbage wraps. The wrappers would be good wrapped around the no-beans too.

We're also going to make a green lasagna for next week. We sliced some zucchini thinly long-ways. We topped this with marinated broccoli and queso verde. Then we served some marinated mushrooms and chopped tomato on the side topped with a little crema. It was better than yummy.

Since we've got the marinated broccoli, we're going to have some more broccoli cheese soup. I didn't even get any last time! I'm going to take mine out first this go around!

Hoping everyone has a yummy week. Good food makes the hard times easier to deal with, don't you think? Good, healthy food makes hard times not involve health issues, and that's a great thing!