Inspiration can come from anywhere…

Last week I sat looking at a list of over 30 recipe ideas for the blog with no desire to make any of them. I like to cook what I crave, and though the ideas I had already were good, I just wasn’t craving any of them at the time. I decided to poll followers of my blog’s Facebook page for what flavors you guys are loving right now. There were lots of good suggestions, but the one that immediately got my recipe-inventing wheels turning was… Sriracha sauce!

As soon as I heard the word I knew I wanted to make a chicken salad with lots of fruity spicy sriracha! I often mix sour cream and sriracha together to make a dipping sauce for panko-crusted chicken, so I knew this same concept would work perfectly in chicken salad form.

Sriracha is a Thai hot sauce made from chili peppers, distilled vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt. You may have heard of it referred to as Rooster Sauce, due to the giant rooster that appears on the bottle of the most popular brand. Whatever you call it, it’s a mild, fruity sauce that tastes great on almost anything. I love it on a burger or squeezed over fried rice.

Spicy Sriracha Chicken Salad

A spicy Thai take on chicken salad with the fruity flavor of hot Sriracha sauce.

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 40 minutes

Total Time: 50 minutes

Yield: Just over 3 cups

Ingredients

• 2 skin-on bone-in chicken breasts (makes about 3 cups shredded roast chicken)
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 heaping tbsp. Japanese mayo (or other thick style mayo)
• 2 tbsp. Sriracha sauce
• 2 scallions (sliced thinly)
• 1 tbsp. sesame seeds

Cooking Directions

1. Dry chicken breasts thoroughly with a paper towel and rub all over with a bit of olive oil. Bake on a parchment-lined baking sheet at 400F degrees for 40 minutes. Allow to cool completely.
2. Remove and discard skin. Use your hands to pull the chicken from the bone and tear into small pieces.
3. In a large mixing bowl, combine shredded chicken with all other ingredients and mix thoroughly. Serve on bread, a croissant, or over a salad as desired. Store in an air-tight container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

I ate that sandwich for lunch right after photographing it and was in spice heaven. It’s definitely got a kick to it, but I didn’t think it was overwhelmingly spicy. If you’re sensitive to spice though, feel free to dial back the amount of sriracha you add. Start with just one tablespoon and taste it to see if you like it as is. And if you’re a lunatic, add even more!

Thanks again for all the awesome recipe inspiration. Anyone else wanna chime in with a flavor you’re loving right now? Who knows, maybe it’ll end up inspiring my greatest recipe creation of all time! A recipe to crash Pinterest! If only in my dreams…

May 1, 2013 Alayna Discussion, Recipes 10 comments

It may come as a surprise to some that I actually consume a fair bit of raw foods. I don’t follow a raw food diet at all, but I do try to get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and healthy fats into my diet as often as I can, and in as close to their natural states as possible. It will come as a surprise to no one though, that I love sweets. LOVE sweets. I could subsist on sweets alone if it wouldn’t eventually kill me.

Discovering raw foods has been like finding a massive loophole in the system. Cake for breakfast? Don’t mind if I do. Oh, and it’s healthy, you say? Well that’s a horse of a different color!

Raw food desserts really are both delicious and healthy, as long as you eat them in reasonable portions. Like any other food, too much of a good thing can be bad. But, if you get a mid-afternoon craving for a sweet snack and reach for a raw whole food treat rather than a processed cookie, you can get all the satisfaction of a decadent dessert without feeling guilty.

I actually discovered blogs when I found a few vegan and raw food sites through StumbleUpon many years ago. Health and food were not really even on my radar back then, but I was drawn in by the beautiful and colorful food I saw on these first few blogs. It spiralled out from there as I sought to find more and more interesting blogs on the topic of food.

One of my early favorites was Almost Vegan, written by Amber Shea Crawley. Amber’s refreshingly offbeat personality and her enthusiasm for healthy but delicious food was infectious, and I’ve found myself excitedly following her career over the last few years as she’s transitioned from eager home cook, to professionally trained raw chef, to a twice-published cookbook author with a successful self-titled vegan blog, Chef Amber Shea.

I already have and love Amber’s first cookbook, Practically Raw, so I was thrilled when she announced that she was writing a follow-up cookbook focusing entirely on desserts. Practically Raw Desserts is just as lovely as Practically Raw, and I couldn’t wait to try a few of the recipes immediately.

The recipe that caught my eye first was the one for Strawberry Blondies. Amber is kind of famous for her original raw blondie recipe, which I reviewed on the blog a few years back (please excuse the terrible photos in that post, I hadn’t gotten into photography yet.) Those raw blondies were so satisfying as a real dessert, with their buttery richness and golden flavor convincingly mimicking the flavor of a baked blondie. Of course, I couldn’t wait to try them with the addition of my favorite fruit.

They are soooo good guys. The addition of a little bit of vanilla extract really rounds out the tart fruit flavor, making it taste more like strawberries and cream. I’ve been eating one of these every day since I made them and they’ve really helped to satisfy my cravings for sweet treats.

I went ahead and whipped up a few other quick recipes from the book too. This oat milk, pictured below, was great with a dash of cinnamon over a bowl of puffed wheat and fruit. Also, I sweetened the oat milk with another of Amber’s recipes, date syrup (in the first picture up top.) I made the syrup to use on pancakes this weekend, but it worked great to lightly sweeten the oat milk too.

That leads me to one of my favorite things about the book: Amber has taken the time to list variations, substitutions, and alternative cooking methods for all of her recipes. After reading a few of the recipes and seeing the substitutions listed, I didn’t have to wonder if I could sweeten that oat milk with date syrup, it had become obvious with how versatile and interchangeable her recipes are that I could do it and that it would work perfectly. I really appreciate the confidence this approach instills in the reader, that’s it’s totally ok to just use whatever you have or whatever you prefer to make the recipe work for you.

Another thing I love is that the vast majority of the ingredients used are relatively common. The only ingredient I’m having trouble finding is coconut flour, but like I’ve already pointed out, I’m confident that I could just replace it with a nut or seed flour of my choosing and have it work perfectly in any recipe that featured coconut flour. I like that I don’t have to make a special trip to a health foods store to start enjoying the recipes right away.

So, I’m recommending Amber’s cookbook, Practically Raw Desserts, not only because I consider her a friend and want her to succeed, but because I think she’s turned out a truly quality product that can appeal to a much broader audience than just the avid raw food community. If you’re interested in making healthy desserts at home with minimal equipment needed, few hard-to-find ingredients, endless variations and substitutions, and NO baking required, then pick up Practically Raw Desserts on Amazon, or learn more about it here.

For a few of my own raw dessert recipes, try these on for size:

Raw vegan orange pistachio bars

Raw nectarine dream cookies

April 25, 2013 Alayna Discussion 13 comments

I remember when I was a kid we had blackberries growing in our backyard. They were on the corner of the property, twisting and winding out of Dad’s ever-growing pile of lawn clippings. I remember filling a mason jar with them and begging my Mom to bake them into a pie for me. She artfully dodged that bullet by instead making me a bowl of the berries in milk, sprinkled liberally with sugar.

I loved the tart berries with their sandy coating of sweetness swimming in a bowl of sugary milk- it was summer in a bowl.

I saw blackberries at the market a few weeks ago and thought they were looking ripe enough to try. Berries are one food I will never buy out of season, they’re a totally different and disappointing food when they haven’t had enough sunshine yet to sweeten them up properly. I had no idea what I wanted to do with them, but for some reason that memory of sugared berries that I hadn’t had since I was a child came to mind.

If I was going to do this I wanted to class the whole thing up a bit, make an “adult” version of my childhood treat. Green matcha tea sounded like the perfect grown-up sprinkling sugar flavor.

The flavor is still mostly sweet, with just a faint springy green flavor similar to the herbal flavor of mint. It’s not bitter at all. The best part may just be the leftover sugary green tea milk at the bottom of the bowl.

The recipe is super simple: 10 parts sugar to 1 part matcha. Easy as pie. I’d recommend using a small measure such as a teaspoon. I made mine in tablespoons and it ended up being quite a bit of sugar. I’m sure I’ll find something delicious to use the rest for.

Green tea sugar

This springy green tea sugar is great for sprinkling over fresh fruit, or anywhere a little sweetness is needed.

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 5 minutes

Ingredients

• 10 parts white sugar
• 1 part powdered matcha green tea

Cooking Directions

1. Whisk together sugar and matcha. Sprinkle on fresh fruit, buttered toast, or any way you use sprinkled sugar.
2. Store in an air-tight container in the refrigerator or freezer.

Of course you don’t have to sprinkle it on blackberries either. I think it would be fantastic dusted over buttered toast, as a crunchy topping for donut muffins, or swirled into a lemonade. Just for fun-sies, I went ahead and used it to rim a glass of strawberry milk. Mmmmm!

Matcha green tea is one of my very favorite flavors and I’m always looking for new ways to inject it into the foods I love. It seems every time I make a new recipe, I find myself wondering if it would work in a matcha flavor. If I’ve learned anything so far, the answer is always YES.

What would you sprinkle this green tea sugar on?

April 18, 2013 Alayna Discussion, Recipes 15 comments