Vegan banana "milk"

This is one of the simplest and fastest recipes I know, but it's very tasty, energizing, refreshing, and particularly great after exercising. It's like a banana milk without the milk, but when you try it you will see that it needs absolutely no milk or anything else to make it creamy - the bananas alone make it creamy.

I recommend this in particular to people who have just started to be vegan and are looking for a milk substitute - it's quickly made and, in my opinion, it beats every processed milk substitute you can buy in terms of taste and nutritional content.

(Takes about 3 min)

You need:
- a blender
- 4 large ripe bananas (with little black spots like in the picture)
- 500ml of water

You do:
Put the water and the bananas in the blender and blend until smooth. Enjoy.

Michael

Reference: I can't claim ownership for this recipe (I guess it's not much of an invention to start with) and it's probably not possible to figure out who made this for the first time. However, I know I saw it for the first time on my friend Olivia's website in a list of things you can do with bananas (the page is in German).

Omega Thrice-Cream

Walnuts are one of the foods richest in omega-three fatty acids. Why not combine them with some frozen fruits and make some HiFi sugar-free vegan ice-cream?

You need:
- 1 cup of walnuts
- 4 frozen bananas
- 3 oranges
- 500g of frozen mango pieces

You do:
Peel the oranges and blend them until smooth. Add the bananas and blend again.  Stir in the frozen mango pieces and let it sit for a few minutes so that the mango can defrost and doesn't ruin your blender. Add the walnuts. If you like some walnut chunks, blend it only for a moment. If you want smooth ice-cream blend longer.

If you eat a quarter of the ice cream you just made, you have your daily requirement of essential omega 3 fatty acids, so dig in - it's good for you!

By the way: the powder used for decoration is carob powder and ginger powder.

Michael

P.S. This ice cream hasn't been engineered to be smooth right out of the freezer, so if you keep it in the freezer, you need to take it out about 10min before you eat it.

Spiced Rooibos Latte

Are you a vegan and you wouldn't consume anything with caffeine, but you like a hot frothy drink once in a while? Try a spiced rooibos latte...

You need:
- a blender
- 500ml of boiling water 
- 3 tea bags of rooibos or the equivalent amount of loose tea
(my preferred version uses two bags of green and one bag of red rooibos)
- half a cup of dates
- a large pinch of cinamon
- a large pinch of ginger powder
- if you like you can also add a small pinch of any of those: cloves, nutmeg, cardamom

You do:
Brew the tea. Let it steep for 5 to 10min (make it strong). Pour the tea in the blender. Add the dates and the spices. Blend. Enjoy :)


Michael

Basic Principle of the HiFi Diet

A Simple Principle:

The basic idea of the HiFi diet is that people feel bad, have bad digestion, gain weight mainly because they eat food that has its fiber removed and not because they eat too much or too many calories. Consequently, the basic principle of the HiFi diet is you don't watch out for calories, but trust your appetite to determine how much of what you want to eat, as long as your food is HiFi. If you eat natural food, you can learn again to trust your intuition. This also means that you can and you should eat a lot of HiFi Food, because if you eat high fiber food you need a larger volume of food.


What's HiFi Food?

HiFi Food is a very simple concept. It's all plant-based (vegan) food that still contains all its fiber. Here are a number of examples: A banana, eaten straight out of the peel is 100% HiFi - all the fiber is still in there. A banana blended with some water into a banana smoothie is still 100% HiFi, since all the fiber is still there, only water has been added. Adding water has no effect on the HiFi status and neither has removing water (through drying, for example). The same smoothie pressed through a strainer, however, is no longer a HiFi food. Consequently, dried fruit are HiFi, fruit juices are not. Fruit smoothies (blended fruit and veggies) are HiFi, unless they contain fruit juices.

Peanuts eaten straight from the shell, are 100% HiFi, even if they are roasted in the shell. They are no longer a HiFi food if they are fried in oil, because oil has been pressed and filtered and is, therefore, no longer 100% HiFi. Adding a non-HiFi food to a HiFi food makes the resulting food non-HiFi.

Sugar is not a HiFi food since it's basically crystalized juice. Hence, everything containing sugar is not HiFi. White wheat flour and things made out of it are certainly not HiFi.

You don't need to eat 100% HiFi all the time, but it's important to understand this principle: Fiber is not an ingredient of food, but something that comes naturally with it. The only way to get not enough fiber is to remove it from the food by processing. Unfortunately, almost all food people buy these days is processed and has most fiber removed. Therefore, I recommend eating a 100% HiFi diet for a week to become aware of
- which foods are HiFi
- how you feel if you eat 100% HiFi foods.
I bet that after one week, you don't want to go back to processed supermarket food ...

There are of course a few other principle you should take into account when choosing what to eat, that are not related to the fiber content of food, but I will discuss them in another post. For today, I just want to state that I don't eat and don't recommend:
- Salt (unless I had a sweaty workout)
- Psychoactive substances: caffeine, alcohol, THC, etc. This includes chocolate and green tea.

"Drinking the Green" - Orange Banana Rocket Smoothie

Most smoothies have a juice as a base ingredient. Juicing is a process that removes most and sometimes even all of the fiber. Hence, these smoothies are not 100% HiFi - they contain the fruit sugar, but not the fiber that regulates and slows down its uptake.

In this recipe, I create a 100% HiFi smoothie by blending the whole (peeled) oranges, instead of pressing or juicing them. Hifi orange smoothies, which are already nice refreshing drinks on their own contain (in contrast to pre-packed or even freshly pressed orange juice) all the insoluble fiber of the orange. Insoluble fiber regulates your blood-sugar level, and cleanses your colon.

As a side note: For leafy greens, it is particularly important to buy organic ones (if you can afford it), because they have a very high surface to weight ratio, so the non-organic ones are likely to be loaded with pesticides.

You need:
- a blender
- 400ml of water (or more if you want your smoothie to be more liquid)
- 3 (medium-size) oranges, peeled.
- 70g organic wild rocket
- 5 ripe bananas

You do:
If you have a high powered blender, you can just throw all ingredients in there and blend them. If you have a cheaper blender, I recommend the following procedure:
Put the oranges into the blender with about 200ml of the water and blend until smooth. Add the organic rocket and blend until smooth. Add the bananas and the rest of the water and blend until smooth. I usually add my daily dose of B12 in the end and blend it in for like a second.

Green smoothies are so much a part of my daily life that I dedicated a series of artworks to them.

Enjoy,
Michael

Mousse au la la! - Vegan Carob "Mousse au Chocolat"

I love carob. Carob powder is just the dried (and sometimes roasted) fruit of the carob tree ground into powder. It's very high in fiber (also very high in calcium and potassium), naturally sweet and, unlike cocoa, it doesn't contain any psychoactive substances like caffeine or theobromine.

This recipe is a sweet and creamy (and yummy) mousse without sugar, and also without milk or cream.

You need:
3 table spoons of fine carob powder
1/4 cup of soaked roasted almonds (roast them very lightly in a pan without oil or in the oven and soak them for a couple of hours in water and discard the water)
2 ripe bananas
1 small tea spoon of cinnamon
1 small piece of fresh ginger or 1 pinch of ginger powder
1 vanilla bean (scrape the inside of the bean with the edge of your knife to pull off all of the tiny black seeds that are found inside and use only them)

You do:
Mix all ingredients really well in a food processor! Chill! Enjoy.

Michael

NEW: If you like sugar-free carob recipes, check out my carob cookie recipe.

GULP (green breakfast pulp)

A good breakfast is essential. This one provides good carbs, proteins, and also gives you your share of dark green leafy vegetables and omega 3 fatty acids for the day. It's fresh, cool, and nice for the summer. The amount is for one person like me. Feel free to eat less ;)

you need:
- 3 bananas
- 3 oranges
- chunk of fresh ginger
- handful of almonds
- 1 tablespoon  of flax seeds
- massive amounts of fresh spinach
- 2 kg of water melon (chilled)

you do:
Grind flax seeds in a coffee grinder and almonds in a food processor. Press the oranges. Then process all the ingredients except the melon with a food processor into a green pulp. Chunk the watermelon and pour the mixture over the fruit. Enjoy.

Michael

Carookies - Carob Bean Cookies

This recipe for sugar-free gluten-free bean and date-based carob cookies was inspired by my friend Annika's outstanding work on other bean-based cookies (which you can find here). They are similar to chocolate cookies, but rather healthy with tons of fibre and a good amount of protein. I use them like energy bars, in particular after workouts when no fresh fruit is available. Carob has been shown to protect against colon cancer.

You need:

2 dl of dried adzuki beans, soak over night or for at least 8h
250g of dates (make sure you get the stones out)
5 big tablespoons of carob powder (available in most organic food shops).
mark of 2 vanilla beans

1 dl of almonds
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger (depending on how spicy you like it)
3 oranges (blended)
1 big chunk of orange peel
2 ripe bananas
baking paper

You do:

Cook the adzuki beans for 1h or longer until they start to disintegrate. Cook the beans so that the water is gone when they are done, but make sure you always have enough water in the pot so that the beans don't burn. Put in the dates and the oranges. Cook for about another 5 to 10 minutes until dates also start to disintegrate.

Afterwards, add all other ingredients except the almonds and process until smooth. Add water if necessary, but the dough should be easy to form with your hands and not be too liquid. Add almonds, either ground or chopped, depending on your preference (you can also do a bit of both). Form into cookies on baking paper and bake for about 30 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. The recipe is for 2 large trays.

Enjoy.

Michael