Experimenting glögi

I miss Finland!
So I made glögi myself...Well, not so sugary and goodelicious than from the shop, but worth a try and definitely more healthy!

I had only:
Concentrated cranberry juice
Cinnamon
Cheap red wine and
Some nuts and raisins

So I prepared 3 portions for my friends and me by adding 1,5 classes of water, 0,5 class of concentrated cranberry juice, 1 table spoon of cinnamon and finally some red wine to spice it. Use as you please ;)

Boil it, pour to mugs and add some nuts and raisins!

Then some X-mas cookies...Hmmmm!!!

X-mas cookies and apple jam! (updated)

Hmm... I can eat these all year around!
Easy, healthy and delicious! What else can you wish for a guy.. mean cookies?
Full of fibers with cinnamon and apple taste, on top some honey to sweeten it more if you wish!

About 15 cookies to go with self made glögi or green tea.
All you need is:

2dl of oat flakes
1,5dl of flours ( for example rice flours or quinoa flours)
About 3 table spoon of cinnamon
(1 tea spoon of baking soda)
1 1/3 tea spoons of stevia sweetener (be careful or your cookies will have a bitter taste)
almost 2dl of water
about 5 table spoons of butter

Optional, but so goooooood topping to finish the cookies:
Home made apple-cinnamon jam!
Almonds and coconut flakes to decorate the topping
After baking some honey to make it sweeter

All you need to do is mix the dry ingredients, add melted butter and the water with stevia drops in, mix it and take about one table spoon of the dough to make a cookie!
Then bake about 15min in 200 Celsius.

Now if you want to add the topping, do it before putting the cookies in the oven. Except for the honey, which you shouldn't cook.

Apple jam:
4 apples (you can also try mixing blooms with apples or making only bloom jam)
Cinnamon

Peal, chop and put in the oven until they are soft enough to be smashed. (About 30min in 225 Celsius) I would smash them only a little to have some texture in it. Add 1 spoon of cinnamon and if you want it sweeter add about 5 drops of stevia. (Remember that without sugar the jam doesn’t last that long, so if you want to preserve it, put it in the freeze.)

Add some apple jam on top of the cookies, decorate with almonds and coconut flakes.
Same deal; put in the oven and when they're ready, add some honey!

It really isn't as hard as reading the recipe!
And you will have enough apple jam for the next batch of cookies as well...or to bake traditional joulutorttu's ;)

Merry X-mas! Hyvää joulua! Feliz Navidad!

Miso soup a'la vegetables

I got this recipe from my homeopath and dried to make it a full dish.
First some info: Miso soup has many healthy ingredients to your body. In Japan they know it, eat it, love it.
Now I quote, because it's more reasonable than writing it twice: " The good: This food is very low in Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin K and Copper, and a very good source of Manganese.
The bad: This food is very high in Sodium."
"The nutritional benefits of miso are incomplete on their own... with ingredients such as tofu, dashi, scallops, katsuobushi and other vegetables, miso soup can provide a very complete meal."

So I thought to expand my love for spices and Asia into a love for not using spices in this Japanese cuisine. And it turned out to be quite tasty!
Although at fist I tried to compose a spicy version to my poor salsa teacher in my little experimental kitchen. Little hint: do not experiment with food while you're trying to make an impression!
So here's my version of a miso soup.

About six full portions:

1 onion
1 celery
1 turnip
1 parsnip
3 carrots
½ cauliflowers
About 2L water
100g of tofu
Fish powder
Some miso paste
Some thymus to decorate the portions

Peel and chop all the vegetables as you please, add them into a big pot of boiling water and boil about an hour.
In the end add about 100 g of tofu and boil a minute.
Add a little spoon of fish powder and the miso paste in the end, but do not boil it, it alters the flavour "There is some belief that cooking the miso "kills" it and reduces the health benefits of biologically active miso paste."

For one full plate add ½ table spoons of miso paste. Decorate with thymus if you please. Enjoy! It's not the heaviest dish in the world, but might be one of the healthiest!

Quotes and more about miso soup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miso_soup
Some more information about Japanese cuisines available for example in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cuisine

Apple-oat breakfast-dessert

Simple, fast and delicious!
Great mysli for breakfast with rice milk and good relief for your hunger for sweets with some honey!



Just add
1-2 apples
2-6 dl of oat
2-4 table spoons of cinnamon

...Maybe also:
handful of sunflower seeds
some almonds, cashew nuts and coconut flakes

And composing is advisable =)
But remember that nuts, almonds and coconut have fat and you wont be needing that so much during the summer.

Mix them up, put them in the oven for 175 degrees for some minutes and that's it!

Serve warm with some honey as a dessert or cold as a breakfast with rice milk!

Apple cake (no, it's not a pie)

Take a cake base recipe and modify it into a pastry for your apple-cinnamon loving fellows! And the best of all: ya wont feel guilty after eating it! It's quite healthy! I've tested this recipe all over from Finland to Spain and proud to say it's been enjoyed everywhere! Even in Sweden :)

Quick pastry recipe for 4-6 fellows

2 organic eggs (CANT USE EGGS? TRY mixing 1 table spoon of soy flours with 1,5 table spoons of tepid water. Leave it for 5min. Equal to one egg)
1,5 dl Indian sugar OR stevia *(see below)
½ dl soy flours
½ dl almond flours
½ dl baking soda
(about) 3 table spoons of cinnamon
1 organic apple

First whisk the eggs a little to make it foam, then add the sugar and whisk some more.
Mix up all the other dry ingredients and throw them in the same bowl with the foam. Mix it up gently.

Find a casserole and lubricate some butter on it.
Heat the oven in 175 Celsius. Wash the apple (and peel the skin off if it's from a foreign country) and cut it in thin slices.
Pour the dough in the casserole and set the apple slices on top of it. Sprinkle some cinnamon to finish it and put it in the oven for about 10min.

A little hint: to make the cake more moist, cover it with plastic while it cools down a bit.

Eat it with whipped soy cream and ya fellows.. or by your self while watching Friends for the seventh time.


* INDIAN SUGAR: Full cane sugar. Brown, naturally produced sugar made by squeezing the sugar from the sugar cane and therefore it has all the minerals and vitamins left that are vital for humans. In Japan it's called kokutoa and has been produced over 400years. Indian sugar is a commercial name.
* STEVIA: Is actually healthy and also used for medicinal purposes. Unfortunately I have to study and cook with it to be able to tell ya how to use it. Of course some info is always available in other websites like wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia
and recipes: http://www.stevia.com

Zuccini and garlic pasta-stew, that my friends named Kat's Ratatoutille

Once upon a time one hungry girl with two even more hungry travel buddies who wanted her to cook them some pasta after a long day of sightseeing in a colorful September day somewhere in Switzerland.
Now, what can you do when pasta is not an option and you need something quite fast...

For 3 hungry buddies

Go to a vegetable market or to an organic food store on your way and get these ingredients:

Olive oil to cook the vegetables
5 zucchinis
4-6 garlic cloves
Don't be shy to spice it up with sea salt and black pepper

These are basically the main ingredients. To make it a full meal add also some other vegetables.

4 carrots
0,5 liter of mushrooms
About 4 tomatoes to stew it up
Some oregano to finish it

Now, what to do with some vegetables and spices?

Wash carrots, cut them to small pieces.
Throw them in a hot boiler with olive oil and cook about 10 minutes.

Peal the zucchinis, take the inner part out and cut them to small slices, almost like a pasta but thicker because otherwise you spend one hour slicing. You don't want to do that, trust me!
Then, get a garlic pressure! Or at least a shredder to give more flavor to the zucchinis. If there is non of those in the kitchen, I guess you have to satisfy to the knife! Remember to use a lot of garlic if you are planning to go out on a hot date after so you can put your date in a real test.
Throw the zucchinis and the garlic in the boiler and add more olive oil. Spice them up with sea salt and black pepper and cook about 5 more minutes.

Chop the mushrooms or cut the olives into half and add in.
Take the green top off from the tomatoes because it's nasty. Chop and squish the tomatoes in the boiler with some oregano and let it be couple of minutes.
Taste it, not all of it! Add some salt and pepper if it needs it.


REMEMBER: from the left overs of the zucchinis you can make a side salad. Just add some olives, lettuce and sunflower seeds, or what ever you have, pour some olive oil, squish a bit of lemon and of course add some salt and pepper!

Enjoy it with your buddies! They are waiting and indeed very hungry! Once they've eaten they will do the dishes because they really liked your pasta! Now, enjoy the rest of the night, wherever you might be!


And, please tell me anything you think about the recipe, it might still need some improvement!

What and why?

Hi, ya all who stumbled on this blog!

I am extremely interested on cooking healthy alternative food because I like to be healthy and eat as organic food as possible in the modern society. Basically the best would be growing your own food so that it wouldn't be so far produced and you would know what is in your food. But because I don't have my own garden and I travel a lot, I try to find organic food shops for now.

Why did I start paying more attention on the food that I put in my mouth?

Simply: My health was going worse slowly but steady. I have spend a lot of time in the doctors without getting any permanent help for sickness. So I decided to actually do something for myself. I studied a bit of "alternative" treatments: naturopathy, and found out more about food and alternative ways to cure myself than I ever imagined.
About food, I found out the food we eat today is very well produced and there are actually very little micro nutrients which are vital for human. Those are for example vitamins. So basically I start of by eating very little or not at all carbohydrates, like sugar and white flours and no yeast at all (so white bread and buns are definitely the worst food) and putting more green vegetables, herbs and spices on my plate.
And of course I try to variate my plate, not eat too much of anything, dance a lot of salsa, sleep like normal people and keep my mind open for new ideas. Simply keeping in balance of mind, body and nutrition!

Short guide to start of with ( this guide is from http://karppaus.info/ ):
1. Reduce / stop eating the bread, replace it by using oil in salad or use dark bread which has no yeast of white flours (hard to find, but once you do, you get used to it and it'll keep the hunger away a long time)
2. Minimize pasta / rice / potato use, or stop it completely. Use vegetables with oil or prepared in different ways with steak / fish / chicken
3. Replace margarine with butter
4. Replace light creams with real creams (whipping cream)
5. Remember that eggs are a excellent food (in my case not at all since I am trying to eat only little eggs)
6. Instead of sugar candy try dark chocolate (70% cocoa), you can also try sugar-free candy, but start gently

Women also have a lot more yeast infections than men and yeast infection is a reason for a lot of other illness as well. By following a simple diet like this will definitely help! At least for me it did... So far so good!

More of this you will find in Finnish on http://karppaus.info and in English for example http://lowcarbdiets.about.com

I am also avoiding milk products and replacing them with others like sesame oil, rice milk etc.
Milk is increasing my allergic reactions and I have heard great stories about getting rid of asthma and allergy by just by quit drinking milk!
And I have seen the difference in my own body!
But I do always say that what might suit for me, might not suit for you. Just try it out and you will know!

So, by paying a little bit of attention on the food I eat, trying to listen my homeopaths great advises who really knows a lot more about food than me I think I might have started a new chapter in my life!

And because I really enjoy experimenting new receipts that I come up with and I'd like to share my knowledge (which is increasing bit by bit) and cookings I started of this blog!

Enjoy your kitchen!