Lily Flower soup

Now £1.70 may not seem a small fortune, but at first impressions you may think this expensive for a bag of dried lily flowers. Let me try and persuade you otherwise.
Lily flowers are good for the winter season as they support the lungs and have been used in chinese medicine for thousands of years for coughs. A bag of lily flowers from your chinese supermarket probably contains about enough to make at least 20 batches of this soup so should see you through the winter months. My final decree on the virtues of lily flowers is that they taste so wonderful that if you didn't know it you'd think they were some exotic mushroom.

The following recipe is a fusion of my healthy seaweed soup and a recipe using Lily flowers from Bobby Chinn which I left Jane to put together. The great thing about the hundreds of traditional chinese soup recipes is that they are so adaptable to a vegan diet, are inexpensive to make and all come with a prescriptive health benefit.

Jane's Lily flower Soup

1. Soak a good pinch of dried lily flowers from your chinese supermarket for 30 minutes in hot water.

2. Rinse the Lily flowers in cold water and chop off and discard the hard ends.

3. With the remaining lily flowers spend a little time tying each into a knot as they look so pretty this way in a soup.

4. Take 2 medium potatoes and slice thinly into about 3mm slices. Place in a pan with a chopped onion and some oil and sweat off for a few minutes.

4. Add your knotted Lily flowers and a litre of water with either two desertspoons of miso or a good measure of yeast extract.

5. Bring the broth to a boil and add your seaweed, either kelp strips or laver. You want enough to boost the soup flavour so about a good sheet of kelp broken up or a handful of laver.

6. Continue cooking until the potatoes soften but stop before they break up.

7. Serve and enjoy.

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Sunday Carrot and Lemon Corn Cake

I spent the last 3 hours revising as we have hit exam time again and I needed chocolate, coffee or cake whichever came first or in whichever order. Finding my cupboards bare of all I decided the next best thing was to make cake from some carrots, fine cornmeal and half a lemon leftover from Jane's adventures in soup on Friday.

What better way to have a Sunday afternoon break than with a pot of tea and cake. Also this end of the season local carrots are getting beyond best so putting them in a cake seems to make perfect sense to use them in style.

heres how its done:-

1. Grate 3 medium carrots into a bowl with a cup of sugar and half a cup of vegan margarine

2. Blend your sugar, carrots and margarine together until blended.

3. Seperately blend two cups of fine cornmeal with a heaped teaspoon of baking soda

4. Add your cornmeal and soda to your blended carrots, sugar and margarine. Stir in well.

5. Now ,this is where you need to work fast and get your oven on Gas mark 6 and have a greased baking tray prepared as once you add your lemon juice and liquid it goes "Chemistry 5".

6. Once your oven has reached temperature, squeeze into your cake mix the juice of half a lemon and half a cup of soya milk. Mix briskly and pour into your prepared tray.

7. Cook in the oven for about 10-15 minute or until firm and golden brown.

8. Once cool top with some sugar icing and serve.

Now where's the Assam!



International 'sprout-a-lentil' day

I'm officially declaring today as International Sprout a Lentil day. Why?
Well its a great time to enter the new year and get some of that New Year extra nutritional boost and healthy crispy salad-ness you can only achieve from sprouted seeds.
If you start today by the time you've recovered from celebrating you are ready to munch down on some sprouting healthiness.
The other bonus is that you don't need many seeds or lentils to make a start so its good on the budget.

Here's my top seeds, beans and lentils to sprout:-

- alfalfa
- sunflower seeds
- green lentils
- brown lentils
- mung beans

Soak your beans, lentils and seeds overnight in a little water. You can mix your seeds and beans but as some sprout at different rates I find its best to keep them seperate then mix when youre ready to eat.
You will need about a desertspoon of your chosen seed.

After soaking, rinse and place in jam jar covered with a piece of breathable material held in place with an elastic band. Give the jar a shake to distibute your seeds and place it on its side somewhere not too cool or hot. On a daily basis refresh your seeds by rinsing in water until you have happily sprouted seeds.

Creamy Sprouted Houmous

This was a raw food version of houmous I developed when I spent a month on raw food. Its just as creamy but has that fresh taste and all the nutrition of sprouted seeds. I think sprouted sunflower seeds is best for this but any sprouts will do.

1. Take two cups of your sprouts, clove of garlic and put in blender with a pinch of salt.

2. Add a good desertspoon of oil and blend until smooth.

3. Stir in a desertspoon of tahini and a squeeze of lime or lemon.

4. Serve with pitta, falafel or on toast.

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