fruit and sesame smoothie

With the summer and good weather, surely many of you will try to refresh yourself by drinking sparkling or sugary drinks, but you will surely be aware that beside of those drinks there is a delicious and fruity alternative: we're talking about smoothies. This drink is nowadays very popular in America and Europe because it is considered to be an healthier version of the famous milkshakes. A smoothie is fresh fruit mixed with soya (or regular) milk or yogurt and ice. Occasionally it may also contains peanut butter or even chocolate. The final result is similar to a fruity granita or an italian ice, but more creamy, and that's why it's called "smoothie". It may have a milkshake-like texture, but it differentiates from it because smoothies have no ice cream in their recipe making it lightier. We published also other recipe about healthy and fresh drinks, like our carrot and lemon juice here.

Smoothies are often confused also with frappè, that is a Greek drink very popular in the Mediterranean and easter European area. Frappes are made with coffee espresso, and it is characterized by its foamy consistence, similar the one of a cappuccino.

In the lasts years, with the increasing of the interest in healthy food, smoothies have become more and more healthy, containing super light ingredients. They've become an authentic icon of healthy food lovers. We can find the word "smothee" for the first time in a 1940 advertising for a food mixer. The modern concept of smoothies has been developed in the health addicts world of 1960s California, and from then on it has been a symbol of an healthy and tasty drink without added sugar. It is now much loved by the ones who criticises the omnipresence in America of the commercial sparkling drinks containing lots of sugar.

Today we'll bring you our own version of a classical New York-style smoothie that you can change the fruit we've used according your tastes, and of course you can decide to use peanut butter. We decided to to a different and lightier version, using the tahin sauce instead of the peanut butter. The tahin sauce is made with toasted sesame, and it's very frequently used in the eastern mediterranean cultures, as it's essential to prepare the famous hummus. We decided to change the cow milk with rice milk, which makes it perfect for those with a lactose intolerance, for the vegans and so on!

C'mon, try this recipe, not only because they're so popular right now, but also because they're so healthy, simple and easy to do, and they're perfect for any time of the year too! These drinks will make your sons enjoy all the taste of the fruit and their so important vitamins. This recipe will take no longer than 5 minutes of your time, you'll see! ;)

Ingredients: 

• 1 frozen banana (better if it's a platano de Canarias)
• 250 mixed berries
• 2 spoonful of tahin
• 150 rice milk

Preparation:

Mix in a food processer all the ingredients until you obtain a mix that it's at the same time thick and soft. We suggest you to peel the banana or the platano de Canarias before you freeze it, and to wash the mixed berries or the strawberry before you freeze them.

You can use directly fresh fruit, without freezing it, but in this case you can change the half of the milk with icecubes, to keep the texture and the freshness we're looking for. If you prefer you can add also add some honey, even if the fruit it's pretty sweet anyway. It's also perfect with a couple of dates, too!

Greetings,

AnGie

Carrot lemon juice

Today we bring you a different and delicious lemonade: the Carrot lemon juice! Lemonade are not just made with lemons, and we encourage you to try this one!
It's super healthy! Ideal for breakfast, for a morning or an afternoon snack, this drink  is perfect for this season of springtime!
 

It's known how healthy are carrots, and in our version we bring you today the carrots will be even healthier, because we do not cook them, preserving their nutritional richness.
Carrots are healthy for so many things that I don't even know where to start! They clean our liver, they help our immune system, help our skin, help keeping the correct levels of sugar in our blood, they brings lots of calcium (ideal for teeth or bones), helps with breast milk, it's a natural counter measure for acne and literally other thousands of things! And now that summertime is getting closer, helps us tanning faster! Start with carrot juice a couple of week before sunbathing, and you'll see how tanned you'll get! Yes, carrots are really helpful for a lot of things!

Ingredients: 

5 o 6 carrots
2 lemons
500 ml of water
Honey, you choose the how much (optional)

Preparation:


1º- Peel the carrots and the lemons.

2º- With a food processor, get the carrot and lemon juice. Add water and/or ice cubes, if you want a densier juice, then add less water.

3º- I usually drink it as it is, without adding any sweetener, but if you don't dig sour and the lemons you've choosen are actually sour, then I would advice you to add some sugar or some honey, according to your taste. I recommend for example sunflower honey, that can sweeten your juice with just a little amount of it. It's a very dense honey, but we can melt it easily warming it up a little bit. In this way, we would sweeten our juice in a much more natural way than we would using sugar. It's preferable to always choose the purest and the most ecological of all honeys. We can have also an orange juice, adding oranges instead of lemons, of course! ;).
Furthermore, adding lemon or oranges, we will retard the oxidation of the carrot juice.


This kind of juices or lemonades are really healthy, and it's very recommendable to change often the kind of fruit we choose, in order to have a larger variety of nutrients. The more coloured is our food, the best!

Angie

Cabbage Wrap

Today we bring you a fast and easy recipe, great for a light dinner. In our house we eat it a lot, since you can prepare it in zero time, and furthermore is an healty and funny way to eat this great veggie, the cabbage.
The cabbage is a superb vegetable, healthy and rich, as others products like cauliflower or broccoli, in vitamine C, fibers and potassium. It's a well know anti-cancer vegetable and as a plus it gathers neither calories nor fats, and helps us lower our cholesterol and helps our cardio-vascular system....what else? Put more cabbages in your life!

   
This is a recipe that has fibers, vegetables, proteines, carbon hydrates and fats (olive oil), and therefore we can consider it a single course dish. We invite you to try it! We can also consider it a Vegan dish, by only adding the seitan instead of the tuna, and if we change the what tortilla with a corn tortilla, we can have a coeliacs dish!



Ingredients: (for 3 people)

- Half middle size green cabbage
- 1 onion
- 1 tuna tin ( you can change it with seitan)
- 15 ml aprox. of soy sauce
-Mexican wheat tortilla (the ones for fajitas)
- salt ( optional )
- olive oil




1º- Wash and cut à là julienne the cabbage, and put it aside. Cut the onion into dices, i like little dices.

2º- In a very hot pan, we put some olive oil, about as much as a dessert spoon, and when the oil will be hot, put in the pan the onion and start stirring. In this step, you can add a pinch of salt in order to fry the onion faster, but we advice you: do not add too much salt, the soya sauce is super salty too!

3º- When the onion starts to becomes transparent, put in the oven the cabbage. Stir every now and then, in order to perfectly incorporate the cabbage and the onion, and prevent them to stick to the bottom of the pan. Let it cook at middle-low heat. Do not overcook the cabbage, since the cabbage lose all its healthy properties when  cooked too much. You can cook it with steam too, but in this case we suggest you to fry it lightly.

4º- When we see that the cabbage starts to be enough fried, we add the tuna and we stir it all together.

5º- Add the soy sauce to our filling. You choose the quantity you like best, but do not add too much soy sauce, because it might be super salty. We usually use 15 ml.

6º- In another pan we prepare out tortillas, each side must be cooked. In just a matter of seconds, they will be ready to be filled with our mix, we fold them and there you have them!

- This filling can be adapted to diced zucchini, and it's excellent too! If you want to try it, just add it after the onion, fry it a little bit and then add the cabbage. You can add other veggies too, like peppers or eggplants, or champignon mushrooms too. You can add pieces of avocado in the last filling mix. You can add also some sauces in the folding step, but it won't be necessary, since you'll see how moist it will be!

Another option is to add the caramelized onion, but in this case I would not add soy sauce. Nothing else changes in this case.

I want to precise that this recipe must not be taken as a burrito recipe, since they are no related at all, and we just don't want to bother any of our Mexican friends and their gorgeous gastronomy! But, that said, you have to try it!  
Saludos!

Angie