Asian Cucumber Salad

If you're looking for a side dish that is perfect for summer, packed with flavor and super refreshing, this is it.  This is a modified (barely) version of a recipe I learned while doing the Beachbody Ultimate Reset (which I highly recommend). It takes all of about 5 mins to prep and is ready to eat right away!

Ingredients:

1 Cucumber, diced

1.5 tbsp Wakame seaweed, rehydrated

2 tbsp Toasted sesame seeds

1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar

2 tbsp Fresh lime juice

Braggs liquid aminos, to taste

Dice up the cucmbers and then add everything together in a bowl and mix. Seriously, it's that easy! The longer it sits the better it tastes, as it has time to soak up the vingear, juice and aminos, but it's really great right away too.  I generally eat it all in one sitting (the above is one serving!). It's the perfect addition to some homemade sushi, or, as you can see below, two eggs over easy and 1/2 a cup of raspberries for breakfast :)

Incredible Zucchini Bread

In my forever attempt to use the insane amount of vegetables we have this summer from the CSA, I found a recipe for a zucchini bread from Danielle Walker at Against All Grain. I did modify it however so below is how I made it.

Ingredients:

2 cups of Almond Flour

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp Nutmeg

3 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup Sugar

1 ripe Banana

1 cup Shredded Zucchini

So I combined the wet ingredients and sugar in my mixer and mixed until the banana was homogenous.  Add the zucchini and then spices until everything is mixed well.  Finally, I added the flour 1/2 a cup at a time until everything was well mixed.  It's going to be really wet, like completely liquidy, but it works! I didnt have spray to grease my bread pan so I put about 1 tsp of vegetable oil in the pan before I added the batter (which is probably what made the outside of the bread so crispy and delicious.  Finally, add the batter to a bread pan and cook on 350 until a toothpick comes out clean (~35 mins). 

This bread is seriously delicious.  To make it truly paleo you would need to use 1/4 cup of honey instead of sugar, but I didn't have enough honey.  It's slightly sweet, but savory, and perfect for breakfast in my opinion.  Even better is, 1/10th of the bread is only 150 calories! I had two pieces (toasted) and 1/2 cup of raspberries for breakfast this morning!

Now....if you're thinking "paleo baking is gross" (which, in all honesty, it usually is), think again! This bread is so good, I want to eat it all. It's really moist and SO tasty! In order to really convince you (and myself, Josh and Knute) that this was a good recipe, I made a second recipe with "regular" ingredients.  As you can see, I definitely wasn't low on the zucchini department.

Ingredients:

1 cup Flour

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp Nutmeg

2 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup Sugar

1/2 cup Butter (softened)

1 cup Shredded Zucchini

I cooked everything the same way as above except I creamed together the eggs, sugar and butter prior to adding the other ingredients.  I also decided to make muffins instead of bread this time.  I'm sure I could adjust the recipe to make them better, but they were a bit dry and just not as tasty as the "paleo" style bread.  I was really impressed. Plus, tweaking the recipe will just make them more unhealthy, so don't fix something that isn't broken, right?!

Creamy Salsa Verde!

One of the things I miss the most from Texas is the incredible Mexican food.  Do you know how hard it is the get a good salsa verde outside of South Texas?! Either way, we got a bunch of tomatillos from the CSA this week and made an awesome salsa verde!

Ingredients:

10-12 Variously sized tomatillos cut in half

1 Jalapeno diced 

1/2 Large onion diced

3 Cloves garlic

1 Avocado

1 Tbsp Olive oil

Salt to taste

Add the tomatillos, jalapeno (seeded to taste), onion, garlic, oil and salt to a large sized ziplock bag and shake.  Lay everything in a single layer on a baking sheet and cook until soft (~20 mins at 350F). Take everything and add to a food processor with the avocado.  Blend until smooth.  Traditionally you would chill it before serving, but we had to try it and it was delicious even hot hahaha.  My only regret is the chips we ate it with werent salty enough :) This makes a TON of salsa.  Probably around 4-5 cups.