In a food processor bowl, combine the following (organically grown) ingredients:

One can (approximately 15 ounces) drained garbanzo beans (or 2 cups boiled or pressure-cooked garbanzo beans, very soft) Set aside the water you drain off the beans in case you want to use some to thin your chummus.
1/2 cup tahini (finely ground sesame seeds, thinned with sesame oil)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon pressed garlic (puree) 3 small cloves or 1 large clove, halved but unpeeled – which makes the garlic press much easier to clean afterwards
Sea salt or pink Himalayan salt to taste (start with 1/4 tsp)
Cumin seed powder – one or two teaspoons (to taste)
White pepper 1/2 to one teaspoon (to taste)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Blend until smooth. Correct the proportions according to your taste, if necessary. Serve in a beautiful dish, garnished with a pinch of paprika dusted on top, plus a drizzle of olive oil, and maybe few pine nuts and/or whole garbanzos, and maybe a sprig of parsley. Accompany with any or all of the following: kalamata (black Greek) olives, toasted pita triangles, peeled sliced cucumber, sliced bell peppers, freshly washed and drained romaine lettuce leaves.

Variations: add one of the following before blending:

one quartered, seeded, roasted red bell pepper
one tablespoon sundried tomatoes soaked over night in olive oil
freshly washed and well drained basil leaves (about 1/2 cup)
freshly washed and well drained cilantro leaves (about 1/3 cup)

Substitutions:

One cup really soft cooked red lentils for half of the garbanzo beans (adds to the color if you’re using the red bell pepper or sundried tomatoes in it)

Movie to enjoy with your chummus:

West Bank Story, a twenty-minute Oscar-winning musical comedy about peace in the Middle East, created in 2005 as a master’s degree project by Ari Sandel, then a film student at University of Southern California. The only problem with this choice is that you might spray chummus all over yourself from laughing.

Lilikoi are ripe when their shells wrinkle.

In tropical jungles, passionfruit, aka granadilla, aka lilikoi, vines drop their yellow or purple oval fruits in the late summer, summoning wild pigs, fruitarians and gourmet chefs to a wet-footed Easter egg hunt. This latter group will use the juice to create Lilikoi Chiffon Pie, Lilikoi Vinaigrette, and bright yellow Lilikoi Sauce to drizzle onto plates on which desserts and main dishes are served.

The name passionfruit does not refer to any aphrodesiacal qualities, but to the extra-terrestrial looking flower of the same vine, which has a three pronged pistil that someone decided harkened to the Holy Trinity. The vine itself is brewed as a sedative. The fruit is rich in vitamin C.

Here’s how to extract the perfumed essence of these fruits for gastronomic purposes.

Take your freshly harvested lilikoi to a tap, rinse off any dirt or vegetable matter, and let them drain in a collander. The ones with obvious flaws (soft spots, cracks, etc.) should be set aside and opened immediately to check the viability of the contents (throw out the bad-smelling ones; eat the good-smelling ones). The others should be left at room temperature to ripen, which occurs when they wrinkle.

The lilikoi has a firm (but not brittle) shell with a shiny exterior, with many tiny small black seeds inside, each in a tiny membrane sack full of sweet, sour, fragrant juice. You can eat the pulp with a spoon, crunchy seeds and all, from the little cup of its shell.

To make juice, cut the fruit in half with a sharp serated knife and scoop the seed pulp into a blender jar. When you’ve got two cups of seed pulp, put the top on the jar and pulse the blender for a second, three times, max. You don’t want to grind the seeds; you just want to break open the membrane sacks. Pour the blended pulp through a large wire strainer into a bowl, stirring the pulp in the strainer with a wooden spoon until you have nothing but black seeds left in the strainer and pure juice in the bowl. Discard the seeds. Compost the shells.

Lilikoi Fizz: Pour a half cup of lilikoi juice into an eight ounce tumbler, and fill it the rest of the way with chilled sparkling mineral water. Sweeten to taste with stevia glycerite; stir well.

Ensalada de Noche Buena, as prepared on December 24th, 2023.

Pomegranate: One of my paintings from 2005 in Phoenix.

 

Pomegranate ripens in the late autumn, and possesses many healing compounds.

I look forward to preparing this red, green and gold salad, with its signature combination of sweet, savory, and spicy ingredients, for friends and family at some point in December each year. Like many holiday dishes, it’s a time-consuming production, but, unlike most holiday foods, it’s light and refreshing. It’s traditional for Christmas Eve in Mexico, hence the name.

Ensalada de Nochebuena

Eight to sixteen romaine lettuce leaves, (the number depends upon the size of the leaves and the size of the salad bowl) washed, dried in a salad spinner or by shaking the water off them into the sink, and arranged around the sides of a large bowl with the stems in the center.  You can shorten the stems to make the leaves fit the bowl better, if necessary.

Dressing: juice of one orange and/or one lemon, mixed with liquid honey or agave syrup.

All of the seeds of a medium to large pomegranate

All of the sections of two navel oranges, left whole or cut into bite-sized pieces

One large jicama, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces

One small can of mild green chiles, diced

One small sweet Bermuda or Maui or red onion, peeled and diced
The diced chiles and onions can either be stirred into the dressing or into the salad.

4 ounces of soft (not tough) dried fruit, diced (papaya spears, apricots, mango, peach, pear, etc.)

The smaller inner leaves of the same head of romaine lettuce that you used to line the salad bowl, washed, dried and sliced or torn into bite sized pieces.  Use more lettuce if you like.

Lightly toss together all of the ingredients except the big romaine leaves lining the salad bowl. Pour the tossed salad into the romaine lined bowl and serve immediately.

I love the combination of contrasting flavors in the recipe above. However, as folk traditions often do, Ensalada de Noche Buena varies from household to household. I have seen or used a variety of ingredients in this recipe, including the following:

Sliced ripe avocado

Sliced cucumber

Roasted peanuts or pinenuts, sprinkled whole on top and/or chopped and mixed into the salad

Peeled, cored, chopped apples

Peeled, sliced beets, steamed and chilled

Peeled, sliced ripe bananas

Fresh pineapple, peeled, cored and cut into bite sized pieces

I encourage you to invent your own Ensalada de Nochebuena based on what is most easily available and pleasing to your palate.

Check out this short, wordless video for the easy way to cut open a pomegranate:

I painted this prickly pear in Phoenix last year.

I forgot one more great hot weather fruit: prickly pears. Their flesh has the colors and flavors of melons, and this time of year they show up in the flashier produce departments (or at funky openair farmers markets, if you’re in their biome), all de-thorned and ready to eat. All you have to do is make an incision with a knife along one side and slip the skin off.

I’ve been on a prickly pear picking expedition with my friends George Wright and Rose Momsen, on the slopes of Haleakala, Maui, back in the ‘80’s. George wore electrical gloves, heavy boots, jeans and a long sleeved shirt, and he might have had something protective on his face. Prickly pears don’t just HAVE thorns. They EJECT them. So, thus attired, did George approach the cactus with a machete and a large bucket of water. The theory is that when you cut the fruit off the cactus into a bucket, it ejects its thorns into the water instead of the air. It works.

Prickly pear cactus is part of the opuntia family, and not only do its fruits taste like melon; its leaves taste like green bell pepper, and are known in Mexican cooking as nopales (noh-PAH-lez).

Here’s the killer nopales recipe page, with grilled nopales, nopales omelette, nopales salad and nopales salsa. Desert Lil has a page of prickly pear recipes, too, but they’re all about cooking the fruit with sugar. Why bother, when they are divine served raw and unadorned?

As if that were not enough, the nopal cactus enjoys a wide reputation as a medicinal plant. 

Particularly cooling foods to nibble, slurp or sip during a heat wave:
Watermelon
Other melons: honeydew, cantaloupe, casaba
Watery tropical fruit: papaya, pineapple, passionfruit
Cucumber
Celery
Jicama
Radish or daikon
Fresh mint leaves or iced mint tea
Young coconut water
Raw non-starchy fruits and vegetables (sliced or as salads)
Raw vegetable or fruit juices

Avoid: Alcohol and caffeine (they dehydrate you), dairy, meat, nuts, spices (warming)

Drink lots of pure water, of course. That’s your main line of defense against heat exhaustion.

What’s cool and refreshing, high protein, low carb, quick and easy to prepare, organic and vegan, something simple but tasty for dinner on a hot summer night? That would have to be edamame salad.

Have you never eaten edamame? Imagine tender and buttery young lima beans, only better. They are green soybeans, usually sold frozen, either in their fuzzy peapods or shelled. Japanese restaurants commonly offer edamame heated in their shells and served in bowl as an elegant snack food. (Of course, in these days of herbicide-soaked genetically modified soybeans, you must buy all of your soy products organically grown.)

I bought a package of frozen organic shelled green soybeans (edamame) this afternoon, and this evening I prowled around the Internet, looking for recipes that spoke to me.

I found several, and here are the links:

Edamame Salad with Baby Beets and Greens
Marinated Edamame Salad (features greenbeans, bell peppers, cranberries!)
Edamame Salad (with corn kernels, red bell pepper, red onions and parsley)
Edamame and Sesame Salad
Edamame and Orange Salad

 

 

Tonight I had dinner with my godmother, Godeane Eagle, an author, vocal coach and speech therapist, and a fine natural foods chef. Here’s what she made:

Spinach and Cabbage Salad
A refreshing blend of sweet, pungent, acid, and slightly bitter flavors.

In each bowl, a couple handfulls of well-washed baby spinach leaves, and an equal amount of grated green cabbage, and one or two red radishes, with ends removed and cut into eighths.

Sprinkle with sliced almonds and raisins. Dress with fresh lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil.

Polenta with Scallions and Celery
A very light, delicate, and flavorful polenta!

Remove roots and upper ends, and chop into 1/4 inch slices, two bunches of scallions and two celery stalks. Place one cup of polenta corn meal in a pan with four cups of pure water, bring to a boil, and reduce heat so that it simmers, and add the scallions and celery. Cook for thirty minutes, then pour out into a square sided baking pan and chill overnight so that it hardens.

Chicken or Chicken-style Seitan in Onion Sauce

Roast two chopped onions in a roasting pan. If you are an omnivore, roast them as the bed on which you are roasting a whole chicken, which yields a pan gravy. The pan gravy and the onions are chilled overnight and the hardened chicken fat skimmed off the next day. What remains is a chicken consomme with onions, which you place in a deep skillet, and inwhich you reheat the slices of polenta along with two uncooked chicken breast halves (cook them until they are white all the way through – no pink in the middle). If you are cooking vegan, make your consomme from boiling together one whole okra pod, one peeled garlic clove, and a sprig each of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. The okra gels the broth. Strain and mix with the roasted onions, use this to heat slices of chicken-style seitan. Add salt if you must. Slices of fresh ripe apricot provide an excellent accompaniment to the chicken or seitan.

I’m going to give you my fajita recipe in both vegan and omnivore versions. It’s sort of a faux Mexican stir fry. The recipe serves two, but it cheerfully multiplies to feed an entire fiesta.

If you’re using free range/organic chicken or turkey breasts, bake them slightly (microwave two minutes or toaster oven bake 10 minutes) so you can easily slice them into quarter inch slices, and set them aside. Prepare one pound per two people. You can always eat the leftovers the next day.

Vegan options: seitan (wheat gluten protein) will probably come sliced already, but, if not, slice it in quarter inch slices. Again, one pound serves two.  Or: slice extra-firm tofu, or Portabello mushrooms.

Slice thin: One large or two small onions per two people, and one red bell pepper and one green bell pepper (or yellow or orange or purple), per two people. Chop finely one peeled clove of garlic.

In a large skillet or wok over a hot flame, place two tablespoons of sesame oil. When a drop of water sizzles if dropped into the oil, add the garlic and stir briskly with a spatula so that it browns but doesn’t burn. When it’s brown, add the onion slices and stir them until they are soft and translucent. Then add the pepper slices and continue to stir/fry the vegetables another five minutes. Last add the fowl or seitan slices, and stir/fry until the chicken or turkey slices are white all the way through (no pink) or the seitan is just heated through. Add Bragg’s Liquid Aminos or pink Himalayan salt to taste.

I like to serve fajitas as part of a taco bar, which is a lovely party dinner menu when you have picky eaters (like me) coming, because people can eat only the ingredients they can bear and ignore the rest.

My taco bar layout generally consists of: freshly made tomato salsa, Amy’s Organic Refried Beans with Green Chile (or your own recipe for refried beans), grated cheese, corn and/or wheat tortillas warmed on an ungreased skilled and kept warm inside a clean dish towel between two plates, pitted black olives, cut up avocado (or guacamole), freshly washed and spun organic romaine lettuce cut into quarter inch strips, and the fajitas.

How to cut up an avocado: Press slightly on the sides of the avocado to ascertain whether it is ready to eat. It should give slightly. If it doesn’t, let it sit for another day or two. If it’s very soft, it’s probably overripe. (But cut it open and check it out before you throw it out.) Cut the avocado in half from the stem stub to the bottom of the fruit and back, and twist and separate the halves. If you are only going to use half, save the half with the seed in it in an airtight container in the refrigerator. If you are going to use the whole fruit, cut both halves in this way: score the flesh like a tic-tac-toe, then use a spoon to remove the pieces of avocado from the shell. 

How to neatly remove the seed from the half avocado:  insert a sharp knife deeply into the seed, then turn the knife clockwise.  It should lift the seed from the avocado without leaving a mark on the flesh.

Pour three quarts of pure water into a large pot. Add two pieces of fresh ginger root, each the size of your thumb, each sliced one half inch thick, so that you are maximizing the surface area from which the volatile oils can be extracted. You don’t have to skin the ginger, but be sure to wash off any dirt before you slice it.

Bring the ginger and water to a boil, and let it simmer five minutes, then turn off the heat. Add a large handful of fresh or dried stevia leaves and a half cup of pau d’arco bark and let the tea steep for half an hour (you really want to extract the essences from the herbs) and then cool for another four hours (until it really is cool).

Then strain out all of the vegetable matter, add it to your compost heap, and add the final ingredient to your tea: cranberry extract syrup (pure concentrated cranberry juice). Four ounces should do the trick. Stir well and pour into a gallon glass jar to chill in the refrigerator. Alternately, one can use one quart less water in the tea and add one quart of “Just Cranberry” juice after the tea is cool.

What you get is a beautiful cool red drink that is sweet, sour, pungent and slightly bitter, and strengthens your immune system, improves your digestion, lowers your insulin response to carbohydrates, and cleanses your urinary tract. A delightful refreshment for a hot summer afternoon.