Autumn Quinoa + Spiced Apple & Avo Salad

I took these pics for the Beautiful Plate Challenge and wanted to share the recipes—especially for the Autumn Quinoa, since it is so yummy!

In general, I find plain quinoa can be a little, shall we say, blah-tasting on its own. But cooking it in veggie broth with seasonings makes it taste great! For convenience, I like to use plain water and a powdered veggie broth mix but feel free to use boxed (or your own homemade) vegetable stock or broth instead.

Quinoa is a high-protein seed-like grain and very easy to digest. It is one of the grains that is most well tolerated by people with IBS and those on a low-FODMAPS, GAPS or SCD diet.

Enjoy Autumn Quinoa topped with a lightly cooked pastured egg (as shown above) or keep it vegan with a drizzle of lemon-tahini dressing and a sprinkle of sesame/hemp seed or raw cashew pieces. 

You can also pair this dish with any salad of your choice (as in the Spiced Apple & Avo Salad, shown below).

Autumn Quinoa

1 cup yellow quinoa

2 cups water

1 tsp Seitenbacher's Vegetable Broth powder

1 Tbs toasted onion flakes

1/4 tsp smoked paprika

1/8-1/4 tsp minced fresh hot red chili pepper, or chili flakes to taste

1 tsp minced green onion tops 

Combine the first 5 ingredients in a small saucepan, bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes until all water is absorbed. Stir in minced hot pepper and green onion tops, recover and let sit 5 minutes. 

Spiced Apple & Avo Salad

1/2 Honeycrisp apple, diced

1/2 ripe avocado, diced

1 teaspoon lemon juice

cayenne sprinkled to taste

Stir all 4 ingredients together. The lemon juice keeps the apple and avo from turning brown; the cayenne turns up the heat and makes this a warming dish, even though it's raw. Eat at room temperature for best flavor and to help beat the chills.

Lemon Coconut Buttercream-Stuffed Medjool Dates

Medjool Dates stuffed with raw, vegan Lemon Coconut Buttercream.

As I write this post with Summer Solstice just a week away, the pretty violets photographed above have given way to buttercups and roses... Still, it's not too late to share a spring-born recipe.

I invented these Lemon Coconut Buttercream-Stuffed Medjool Dates last month as part of my ongoing quest to deliver delicious, digestible, low-sugar sweets to my mouth and yours. Raw, vegan, gluten-free and out of this world scrumptious, this recipe can be made either SCD/GAPS-friendly with raw honey, or low FODMAPS-friendly with maple syrup to sweeten. (I don't know how it would be with detox-friendly stevia, but if I ever dare try it, I'll make a note in the comments below. And please let me know if you do!)

My Lemon Coconut Buttercream is made with raw coconut butter, a naturally sweet, nutrient dense nut butter produced by grinding whole, mature coconut into a smooth paste. Don't confuse coconut butter with coconut oil. Coconut butter is to coconut oil as peanut butter is to peanut oil—totally different!

My number one favorite brand of coconut butter is Sacred Foods. Their low-temperature, super slow stone grinding method creates the silkiest and best-tasting coconut butter I've ever tried, by far. Sacred Coconut Butter is a gourmet product with a premium price ($21.95 for a 16 oz jar) but I highly recommend it if you can manage. Amazing just on the spoon, and in recipes like this one.

Lemon Coconut Buttercream

1 c coconut butter
1 Tbs coconut oil
3-4 Tbs maple syrup or raw honey
2 Tbs lemon juice
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp Himalayan pink salt

Make sure coconut butter and oil are at room temperature to begin. Add all ingredients to a food processer fitted with the S-blade and process until smooth, using the pulse function. Add more lemon juice or sweetener to taste.

In an 8X8 Pyrex dish, press buttercream into a half-inch thick "loaf". (The loaf will not fill the entire area of dish! But pyrex is a good, non-reactive holder.) Chill for about one hour to firm up, for easy handling.

Stuffed Medjool Dates

1 batch of Lemon Coconut Buttercream
12 or more plump, soft Medjool dates

To stuff dates, gently remove and discard pits. Slice off a rectangular portion of buttercream, about the size of the date middle, and nestle it into the center of the pitted date. Press and shape to fit as needed (buttercream will soften in your fingers and become very easy to mold). Proceed until you have as many stuffed dates as you want. This recipe will stuff at least two dozen dates at a time, but unless you're feeding a crowd, it's nice to work in smaller batches, and the buttercream keeps very nicely in the fridge for several days (although it's hard to keep it around that long ;-).

Ginger-Lime Soup with Scallops, Spinach & Carrots

A splash of fresh lime juice in this gingery seafood soup adds a welcome bright note.

What follows is a recipe for a very delicious Ginger-Lime Soup with Scallops, Spinach & Carrots. While anyone may enjoy it, this soup also has a special target audience in that it is appropriate for people following the GAPS Stage 1 Diet. 

GAPS, which stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome, is a grain-free, anti-inflammatory, gut-healing nutritional program developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride that I currently am experimenting with to address IBS concerns. The GAPS protocol is also recommended for the treatment other conditions, including Autistic Spectrum Disorder. (Read more about GAPS here on Dr. Natasha's website.)

Stage 1 on GAPS consists of a very plain menu: bone broth (fish or meat stock), and soups made with bone broth, to which one may add well-cooked non-starchy vegetables, and fish or meat.

Fortunately, I love soup. I made this one using a cup of the 8 quarts (!) of homemade bone broth I made yesterday in a clearly productive, all-day endeavor. (You could say I was stocking up, yuck yuck.) Fish, chicken or meat stock made with bones is a major component of all stages of the GAPS diet, but only in the early stages does it completely dominate the menu.

You can learn about the numerous reasons for consuming bone broth (plus recipes) here, but to sum it up, the take-home message is this: Bone broth is abundantly rich in essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, glycosaminoglycans (cartilage building blocks) and collagen components, including gelatin. These elements are necessary for the healing and repair of any protein-based tissue in the body, such as an inflamed or "leaky" gut lining. So to heal the gut, heal inflamed or damaged joints, heal a wound, heal after surgery, etc, bone broth can be an extremely beneficial food.

This is why I have been recommending bone broth to my non-vegetarian clients for more than ten years. But I will admit that having spent the past year as a strict vegetarian (after following a high raw pescatarian diet since 2005), it took a lot of deep, painful self-searching and self-questioning for me to decide to start eating bone broth myself, and to decide to introduce seafood into my diet—not to mention chicken, an animal of whom I am quite fond. (A shout out to Mary Vance, west coast holistic nutritionist, who kindly shared with me her wise thoughts about considering the use of bone broth as a gateway food for recovering vegetarians.) This is my first post since evolving my nutrition in the GAPS direction, and I expect to write more about it in future, as well as to share further discussions on apostate vegetarianism and evolving one's own personal, nutritional diet-lifestyle over time, in accordance with one's needs vs beliefs (not always easy).

For now, let's talk soup. I used plump, sweet, wild-caught scallops in this recipe. Wild scallops are a shellfish species that passes the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch sustainability test but, surprisingly, the consumer awareness group gives farmed scallops an even higher score. Good to remember that although wild-caught is generally the preference for most edible sea species (think salmon), sometimes farmed fish is the better choice.

Ginger-Lime Soup with Scallops, Spinach & Carrots

Serves one.

3 thin slices of ginger, chopped

½ to 1 teaspoon coconut oil or butter

2 smallish carrots, thinly sliced (about ½ cup)

1 cup broth (chicken, fish or, if non-GAPS, vegetable), preferably homemade

1 cup packed, roughly chopped spinach leaves, stems removed

6 scallops, rinsed in cold water

1 scallion, greens only*, minced

juice of 1/2 fresh lime (about a Tablespoon)

pinch of sea salt and black pepper to taste

Heat oil or butter on medium heat and sauté ginger for about a minute, then add carrots, stir, and continue to cook for two or three minutes. Add broth to sauteed ginger carrots, bring mixture to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for three to five minutes, until carrots are soft. Add scallops, spinach, salt and pepper and simmer for five minutes. Check scallops for doneness and simmer longer if necessary, but be careful not to overcook! (Center should be tender, white and almost flaky, not translucent or rubbery.) Add scallion greens last and cook until soft, another minute or so. Transfer to soup bowl, add fresh lime juice and a finishing sprinkle of black pepper. Stir and enjoy!

*It's fine to use the whole scallion if you can eat onions, in which case separate the white from the green, and add the white into the soup at the same time as you add the scallops and spinach. I'm avoiding onions due to FODMAPS (another story!), so I just used the greens.