Buckwheat groats: O-tay!

Buckwheat is common to many people as a character from Little Rascals. Seriously, check out the actor Billie Thomas’s Wikipedia page – the guy won a National Defense Service Medal. We also know buckwheat as a popular flour product. I use it to make buckwheat crepes and galettes when I’m cooking. But everything comes from somewhere, and buckwheat flour starts out as buckwheat groats, pictured to the left. Buckwheat is super-high in fiber, manganese, magnesium, and protein; it is, therefore, good for you.

Like any seed, you sprout these little buggers using accepted techniques. Rinse your groats off, soak them overnight (8-12 hours), rinse again, and let them sit. Rinse every 8 hours for about the next day and a half. The groats are ready to be breakfast-ized when they’ve got little bitty white tails coming out the bottom.

Throw your groats in a bowl and add enough cinnamon or pre-mixed chai spice (or both) to the batch to change their hue from groat-colored to cinnamon-colored. This is not an exact science, so do it to your taste and depending on how big a batch of groats you have.

The next step is to throw in some agave syrup as a sweetener. You don’t need much, but mix it up all nice and moist. Throw your spiced, sweetened groats on a dehydrator sheet and let it ride. You’ll need to scrape up the groats every few hours – they’ll stick on account of the agave – and rearrange them for quicker drying.

Once they’re nice and un-wet, they can be enjoyed dry or with some kind of almond/soy/cashew/hemp/whathaveyou milk. BINGO BANGO BONGO GROAT POWER.

I recommend making an assload of these things and storing them in bulk. Awesome. Alternatively, you can skip the dehydrator and munch them down as-is. Try putting on southwest spices or something, too. You really can’t go wrong with GROATS.

Beautiful shot of buckwheat groats by awesome Flickr user Christaface.

One of the most inspiring purchases I have made in my raw food journey was a package of nori sheets. It happened while I was at the grocery store looking for flour tortillas. These, on the other hand, are much healthier and can be used in a similar manner. Nori is a source of vitamin A, B, C1, iodine, protein, fiber, and carotene. Flour tortillas are primarily salt and carbohydrates.

I spent about 30 minutes preparing this dish but it could have been done more quickly. You can throw just about anything you’d like in a nori sheet and roll it up, however, in order to make sushi you need to be a little more strategic. It is important to have an item in your sushi that fills the nook and crannies. In this recipe I used the same dill summer cheeze that I used in the summer sandwich post. You’ll also want to pick something that has a little crunch to it, like carrots. The rest is up to you.

I chose to throw some anaheim peppers and chard into these sushi wraps. Spread the cheeze or other dip-like ingredient onto the nori sheet, lay your carrots, peppers, etc. along the whole sheet. Start with one end and tuck the sheet in tight, being rolling it much in the same manner that you would a yoga mat. Keep all the ingredients tight and make sure you don’t rip the nori sheet. You may need to apply a little water to the end of the nori sheet to get it to stick. You are now ready to cut the roll into 1 inch thick bites. A sharp knife makes this part of the process much easier.

I didn’t have any soy sauce around the house so I mixed some balsamic vinegar with a little lemon juice and salt for a nice substitute. The final product was even delicious enough to feed my 20-something, ex-marine, meet-eating, highly active, mountain man friend and he was satisfied. Now that’s practical!

I was generously gifted a slightly used dehydrator from my brother and sister-in-law. Over the weekend I put it to the test. I used one of Ani Phyo’s recipes to create a sesame sunflower bread and made a few modifications based on recommendations from Tim. The recipe is as follows:

• 1 1/3 cups ground flaxseed
• ½ teaspoon sea salt
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 2 tablespoons onion, minced
• 1-1/3 cups water
• 2/3 cups sunflower seeds
• ¼ cup white sesame seeds

In a large bowl, mix ground flax seed, salt, garlic, onion & water. Mix well and add sunflower & sesame seeds, mix well.

Spread the mixture on the trays of your dehydrator and depending on what type you have, it may take anywhere from 4 to 10 hours. Phyo recommends 4 hours with the Excalibur dehydrators and with mine, 10 hours. Be sure to flip the mix after 3 to 8 hours to ensure both sides are properly dehydrated. The bread should last up to 2 months depending on the climate and where you store the pieces.

This is a very functional piece of raw food. It can be used as a cracker or bread but in this recipe I chose use it like a patty of beef in a hamburger.

In this picture, I spread some summer dill cheeze (made of sunflower seeds, garlic, lemon juice, and water), laid a few pieces of fresh lettuce, and a juicy tomato on top of the bread. However, after I shot these photos, I chose to wedge a few more slices of tomato on the bottom. This helped to balance the intense dryness and heaviness of the bread with the juiciness of the tomatoes.

This is such a refreshing and dense quick meal for a hot summer day.

A few days ago I made a raw beet salad that changed the way I think about salads. It was the best homemade salad I’ve had to date. The recipe goes something like this:

• 4 small beets – Use a food processor tool to shred raw beets into 1 in to 1 1/2 in long pieces.
• 1 small bunch of red lettuce – shopped
• 6 small leaves of kale
• 1 small bunch of endives

• few sprigs of rosemary – whole
• 3 stalks of chives – chopped
• 2 pieces of garlic – chopped

• pinch of coarse sea salt
• few pinches of pepper

• equal amount of balsamic vinegar and olive oil
• teaspoon of lemon juice

Mix all the ingredient together well. This recipe should be enough to serve two people.

Last night my body was feeling a bit low on vegetables proteins and nutrients, so I took a walk to Whole Foods. I had looked up a recipe for a chop salad type dish. It’s basically a bunch of veggies put into a food processor and mixed around. Here’s what I bought:

• 4 beets
• 2 cucumbers
• 2 carrots
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 orange bell pepper
• 1 yellow bell pepper
• 1/2 a bunch of cilantro

I processed these foods from the lightest to the darkest (cucumbers to beets). Then I mixed them all together in a big bowl. This yielded close to 3 pounds of vegetable salad and I was in no way prepared to eat close to a portion of it before I left for vacation tomorrow. So I walked across the hall and invited my friends Levi and Cameron over to indulge.

They were good sports. After a few spoonfuls, your mouth and taste buds start to go into shock and reject such copious amounts of chewing. They humored me, we added salt and hot sauce, Cameron added some balsamic vinegar, each made it possible to get down a few more spoonfuls. However, it became unbearable. I thought to myself, juicer; and took the leftovers back to the kitchen for a change of plans.

Beets are so incredibly strong in color that they taint everything. So the juice I wound up yielding was dark red. This was much more bearable. Even though I may have lost valuable fibers, I still was able to get a healthy dose of vitamins and nutrients.

This morning I drank almost a full wine bottle of the juice and I even added a juiced apple to it to make it sweeter and a lot more tasty! The moral of the story is to know your limit with vegetables, add some flavor or don’t over do it with the variety. This was a huge amount of vegetables and could’ve wound up being a great salsa for tortilla chips or mixed in with a hummus. Alone though, I wouldn’t recommend it. Only people like Tim Brauhn can ingest such a terrible amount of living food in one sitting.