Category: Recipes

My Healthy Chocolate Cake

The challenge I put to myself was to make a chocolate cake that was actually health-promoting. I use organic rolled oats instead of wheat four. I don’t add any sugar but sweeten with stevia, which has zero calories. The chocolate is from 100 percent pure cacao powder.

I’ve discovered that the chocolate taste is enhanced with blueberries. But what makes this chocolate cake really health promoting is the dandelion powder, which is full of minerals and vitamins but neutral in taste. Dandelion like kale is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet.

Another version of this is to replace the blueberries with cinnamon. Cinnamon and chocolate also enhance each other. I can also add crushed walnuts and/or add almond powder.

So these are chocolate cakes that have virtually no sugar but are very sweet, and are packed with vitamins, minerals, and good fats. One version is chocolate/blueberry, the other is chocolate/cinnamon.

Coffee

Recipes

The trick to putting together delicious and nutritious recipes is knowing one’s own particular tastes. Most people have a vague sense of the tastes they like, but if you have a very detailed sense of the tastes that please you, you are in a much better position to put together ingredients in a dish that ultimately will be very pleasing.

For instance, I’ve discovered that I really really like the following: garlic, onion, slight and subtle curry, fennel, sour/sweet combinations, cooked tomato, walnut/almond/pecan, lemon juice on leafy greens, mint, basil, vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon.

Before I got into learning how to cook, I had no idea that these are the tastes that I crave, so that eating various dishes was at best a haphazard experience.

But now, I can use this self-knowledge to create recipes that, generally speaking, will be outstanding from a taste perspective — not because I got this outstanding recipe from a book but because I created a recipe that matches my personal taste profile.

Favorite Recipes

Favorite Recipes

Veggie-intense casserole with vegan cheese — vegan cheese basically cashews and nutritional yeast. Baked Stokes purple sweet potato (keep the skin on for its nutrition) with cinnamon that sticks because of a coating of Tahini (tastes like cake, not potato, and can sweeten even more by adding a little Stevia). Veggie stew with a garlic/curry blend for predominant taste. Overnight oatmeal with vanilla flavoring (vanilla extract and vanilla powder) and blueberries and walnuts — almost like eating blueberry flavored vanilla ice cream.

You want to bake the Stokes sweet potato just long enough so that the skin on the outside is dry and crisp, but the inside is moist. 400 degrees for 55 minutes with large, buy-sized pieces.

The healthy fat in Tahini is perfect for potatoes because potatoes are naturally extremely low in fat.

After you bake the potato, put it in the refrigerator because this will cause the starch in the potato to turn into resistant starch. This resistant starch will feed your microbiome but reduce the calories you actually ingest.

When you want to eat a serving of the baked sweet potato, take it out of the frig and warm it up first at room temperature to eat it later. The resistant starch will remain resistant starch.

The two purple sweet potatoes that you MUST absolutely try are the Stokes purple sweet potato or the Okinawan purple sweet potato. Whole Foods has the former; you can order the latter from a Hawaiian company.

Purple sweet potatoes have amazing nutritional value, in part due to that color.

None of the other sweet potatoes compare favorably to the purple sweet potato, but always buy organic, as potato is always one of the Dirty Dozen.

Favorite Stew Flavoring

First Pie Attempt

My first attempt at a purple sweet potato pie was absolutely delish — I could have eaten the whole thing at one go, it was so tasty — but it hardly look anything like a pie. The crust part was a complete disaster. But I am undaunted. Next time, the crust will really resemble a pie crust. I’m furiously reviewing youtube videos on how to make a pie crust.

I didn’t have the right equipment for doing the pie crust. My roller pin was way too small and never got to use it because I didn’t have a suitable surface for rolling and powdering the dough. So the dough ended up this gooey mess that I spooned into the glass pie dish. The only thing that worked was the sweet potato filling with a heavy dose of cinnamon and some stevia. That worked perfectly. The filling tasted like cake, not potato.

I want to make a pie crust with a mixture of various non-wheat flours (oat, chickpea, walnut, quinoa, lentil) that are held together with the gel formed by chia seeds and almond milk, plus baking powder and arrowroot powder. I want to make it so that the crust is thicker and a more substantial part of the pie, as these flours have excellent nutritional value. 

Sugar and Salt

Sweet Potato Salad

Attempting to make a salad where the main ingredient is roasted cinnamon-coated purple sweet potatoes, but with a sweet, not a vinegary, dressing.

Discovered this dressing from Birch Benders called Keto Syrup that uses Monk Fruit sugar and attempts to imitate maple syrup but with no sugar at all.

Will probably add some apple sauce and raisins — despite the sugar.

I’m all about reducing sugar as much as one can. Sugar is poison and a cancer-promoter. Cancer cells love sugar.

Salad has a wide variety of vegetables and leafy greens for the nutrition.

Lifelong Health

Cinnamon Sweet Potato Recipe

I take Tahini and vegetable broth and blend in a blender. Then put the solution in a large bowl with a little nutmeg and allspice, cut up the sweet potato into bite-sized pieces with the skin left on (the skin has a lot of the potato’s nutrition), and tumble all the sweet potato pieces so that they are coated with the solution. Then I put in a large amount of cinnamon so that the sweet potato pieces are heavily coated with the cinnamon.

Roast for 40 minutes at 400 degrees.

The best sweet potato for doing cinnamon sweet potato is the purple sweet potato. I swear it is like eating cake, not potato. Only issue is that this is SO delicious you can’t stop eating the cinnamon sweet potato — the dopamine rush is so intense.

Nuts

Roasted Sweet Potato, Oil Free

Chop up the sweet potato into bite-sized cubes but definitely keep the skin — it has a lot of the nutrition. First, coat the cubes with a very liquid Tahini. Then, sprinkle on a generous amount of Ceylon cinnamon — the best cinnamon because it doesn’t contain a pathogen common to the other cinnamons.

Cook in the oven for 40 minutes at 400 degrees. Delicious both warm or cold.

Cholesterol-Free Scrambled Eggs