Tag Archives | sea salt

Lemon Coconut Truffles

Published on in Freeze-able, Fruit, Keto-friendly, Nightshade-free, Nuts, Raw, Sweet-ish By |
0 Comments

Lemon Coconut Truffles

I wanted to do something Easter-y this year, but I wasn’t totally sure what that meant to me. We covered chocolate pretty thoroughly for Valentine’s Day (check it out) and what really tastes like Easter to me in a nostalgic way is simply steamed artichokes (also my very first post ever) thanks to being lucky enough to spend Spring break in Southern California during artichoke-season (swoon).

Lemon Coconut Truffles

Then I started thinking of all of those beautiful pastel colours that represent spring and Easter so well. I know this should apply to flowers, but remember Trolls? My Mom had a kids clothing store when we were growing up that was also known as Troll headquarters because she sold such a big collection of them (one of my younger sisters had like a million of them while the rest of us settled for Westbeach sweatshirts).

(more…)

Hydrating, Natural Electrolyte Drinks

Published on in Drink, Freeze-able, Fruit, Nightshade-free, Raw, Snack By |
0 Comments

Staying hydrated isn’t always convenient at the best of times. Sourcing good quality water, avoiding plastic bottles, carrying a water bottle around with you, needing to pee ALL THE TIME. As the summer heats up it becomes more important to stay on top of your fluid intake. Did you know that by the time you feel thirsty, your body is already dehydrated? As they say ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’, so drinking a glass of water upon rising, and regularly throughout the day is a great idea for general dehydration avoidance.

But sometimes things happen: a crazy hot summer, a sweaty run/walk/hike, long world cup games with a couple of beers, you know, life. And then there are the less fun ways that dehydration can sneak up quickly on us: fever and excessive sweating, vomiting and/or diarrhea caused by cancer treatment (or the flu, food poisoning, pregnancy etc).

Natural Electrolyte Drinks

Regardless of how we become dehydrated, it is important that we replace those fluids and minerals lost. Fluorescent-coloured sports drinks are easy but they’re also filled with chemicals, food dyes and general non-foods that should really be avoided (I get that bright yellow looks more appetizing than my homemade brown lemonade, but let’s face it, sometimes healthy things are just brown). When it comes to giving your body an extra boost of hydration and the electrolytes it needs (sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphate & bicarbonate) a few more fluorescent-free tricks can be very helpful.

(more…)

The Salt Conundrum (Seaweed Salt)

Published on in Condiment, Nightshade-free By |
2 Comments

Of all of the foods that are considered ‘bad for your health’, the one I find the most challenging to avoid is not chocolate. It isn’t refined sugar or bacon either. It doesn’t even have a flavour all its own, but selflessly gives a small boost to all other flavours. It is salt, the high heel shoes of the culinary world. Much like heels, salt needs to be used in moderation. If you use it too often, your taste buds adapt, and you will require more salt to avoid your food tasting bland (or feeling short in a pair of flats….).

By avoiding processed foods and cooking from scratch, you are able to avoid added sodium (and so much more). Clearly we are big proponents of cooking from scratch, here at TCCK, but we also want the food you make to taste delicious, so that you WANT to eat it. How else are you going to get all of those cancer-crushing, bio-available nutrients into your body?

So maybe small amounts of high quality, mineral-rich, additive-free sea salt would be ok. Derived from the cleaner oceans of the world, where the air is warm enough to evaporate the water off naturally, so that no de-mineralizing boiling needs to take place.

(more…)

Fermented Cabbage & Golden Beet Sauerkraut

Published on in Condiment, Fermented, Nightshade-free By |
2 Comments

image

While working in a small upscale French restaurant 10-15 years ago, someone accidentally ordered 4 litres of pre-peeled garlic. It promptly started to go off from a lack of use, and stink up the walk-in, and I remember worrying about the smell attacking the rest of our mise en place and fruit, cheese etc. A fellow cook who I worked with had spent a few years working in South Korea, and she was the only one embracing the fermented garlic cooler-stench wafting around our small kitchen. She had eaten her fill of (intentionally) fermented foods while there, and loved it enough for some rotten garlic in our walk-in to be causing her nostalgia. I found this hilarious yet oddly intriguing at the time, and have never forgotten it. Little did I know….

image

Fermented is now the new green, which is great for people like myself, (enthusiastic, but needs to see it happening to fully understand it, as opposed to reading about it in great black and white detail a trillion times while absorbing nothing) because there are now plenty of colourful pictures and videos out there happily spinning our right-brained minds into action.

(more…)