Chocolate Chia Porridge (Dairy Free)

WOW! It's been a CRAZY hectic mad whirl of work, study, family, illnesses, more work and study here the past couple of months! I've been totally delinquent in my blogging! So sorry all!

So I've enrolled and started studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition - soon I'll be ready to take on clients as a qualified Health Coach - its SUPER exciting!! :) But extremely time-consuming! There's so much to learn and I'm loving every minute of it. If any of you are interested in a career where you help people live their best lives as your job, check it out at: http://www.integrativenutrition.com/ and tell them I sent you! Or contact me. I've also met an amazing amount of wonderful new friends through this course and am constantly learning from my co-students! A list of some great new blogs and pages I've discovered will be at the bottom of this post.

For those of you who are interested in all the health and nutrition information, I will be starting up a website and a blog very soon for the Health Coaching business, so when that's ready I'll let you know. From now on Chookie's Cookin' is going to be solely healthy Thermomix Recipes. Other tips and tricks and info will be on my other blog and site.

But the good news is that I'm back with something really easy and super delicious and sooooo good for you! ;)

I first saw this when we were doing our Thermomix stall at the Atherton Show this year when Jo from Quirky Cooking showed me how she makes her version. She found the original recipe at Homemade Healthy Happy here and following is my version.

Chocolate Chia Porridge with Strawberries and Bananas (single serve)

Ingredients:

2-3 TBSP Chia seeds

1 cup almond milk + extra to pour over (I use Quirky Cooking's Rice Almond Milk)

1 tsp cacao powder

1/4 tsp maca powder

1/4 tsp vanilla bean paste

Sliced strawberries

Sliced bananas (mine were from the honey farmer - organic local sugar bananas!)

Small handful raw cashews

1-2 tsp raw organic honey (from the farmer up the road! :))

Method:

Stir together the Chia seeds, almond milk, cacao powder, maca and vanilla bean paste, and leave to soak for 45m-1hr (if you leave it longer its not a problem).

Slice fruit and stir through with nuts, and top with extra almond milk and honey drizzled over.

There really is no limit to how creative you want to get with this. You can sprinkle with goji berries, add cinnamon, cacao nibs for crunch, other nuts and seeds such as sunflower seeds and pepitas, drizzle with coconut cream. Or you could soak the seeds in fresh apple juice, and stir through shredded green apple, silvered almonds, sultanas, some kefir or CoYo (coconut yoghurt) and honey for a Bircher inspired wet Chia muesli (which I plan to have VERY soon!).

Some awesome new blogs/pages I've recently started following:

Co-Inside Wellbeing: http://co-inside.com.au/ - Curtis and Candice Aiken are just so fantastic and vibrant, love this page!

Happy Healthy Abundant: http://jianiteo.com/ - Jia is amazeballs!!! She's so inspiring and enlightened.

Nourish Co: http://nourishco.com.au/ - Rebecca's company is just beautiful - taking care of companies with heart who are taking care of others! Mindful marketing at its best! 

And a beautiful collection of inspiring pictures at The Love Yourself Challenge: http://theloveyourselfchallenge.tumblr.com/

Have a fabulous weekend!

Love and Health, 

B xxx

Deep Breath, Push Reset!

I've been facing some challenges just on a personal level this week......

Firstly everyone in our family got sick, Jon, myself and my husband with a cold, then Saana (my 6 year old girl) had a bout of gastro so we were up all night Sunday night with her being sick, poor thing! I've had KILLER hayfever every day all day this week :(, and Jon had his immunisations this week which made him a little grouchy and have a slight fever also! Here's a pic of him looking not so impressed with the world LOL!

He's still super-cute though! (I suppose I could be a little biased, hehehe)

So, with all that, I felt tired and lousy most of the week, so I didn't get out walking, and I ate comfort food (bread and risotto and pasta etc), and then I didn't have any energy, so i didn't go out walking, and I ate comfort food.....etc etc etc - you get the picture!

Are there any of you (women in particular) out there who get into these sorts of cycles as well? Or is it just me who falls into these bad habits and finds it hard to kick back into gear again? If you DO get into these kinds of ruts, have you discovered any tricks or ways of motivating yourself that really WORK to get you back into the groove of eating right and exercising? Cause as I've said before I KNOW I'll feel so much better if I make that extra effort to go for a walk, and to resist those cravings, but knowing and doing are very different things!

Okay, now for the fun and positive stuff! :D

This week my TMX has been busy cooking up all sorts of delicious things as per usual! I've had some wonderful smoothies this week as always. I have a lot of apples so they've been featuring heavily in my smoothies, and I also had a few nectarines. One smoothie I made turned into a kind of sorbet as I put some banana, nectarine and a date in the freezer ready to take out with me, and then forgot them, so in the afternoon I blended those up with some baby spinach and it turned into this rather lush ice-cream treat:

There was heaps of this so I had one bowl then and there and froze the other, and I'm just having that with my breakfast smoothie now! :)

A few nights ago I experimented with the standard thermomix risotto and made up a Bacon, Chicken and Leek Risotto that turned out so delicious I just had to share this photo on FB, so as promised here is the recipe:

Ingredients:
1 medium leek roughly chopped
1-2 cloves garlic
1/2 onion (cut in half)
2 shallots with bases and tips trimmed, quartered
Handful Parsley
2 rashers of bacon with rind removed
200g chicken
40g Olive Oil
300g Arborio Rice
2 TBSP TMX Chicken Stock Concentrate
1100g Water
*Salt, Pepper and Parmesan to taste if desired

Method:
Place leek, garlic, onion, shallots, and parsley into the TM bowl and mince for 2-3 seconds on speed 7.
Add Bacon rashers and chicken and chop for 5 seconds on speed 4-5.
Add Olive Oil and saute for 3 minutes on reverse and speed 1 & 1/2.
Add remaining ingredients and season with salt and pepper, then cook for 17 minutes on reverse and speed 1 & 1/2.
Pour into Thermoserver or large bowl, mix through about 50g of grated parmesan cheese (grate your own in the TMX) and leave to sit for 5 minutes, then serve and enjoy! :)

Thursday afternoon Saana and I felt like whipping up a sweet treat so we made the Torte Caprese (flourless chocolate almond cake) from the TMX Everyday Cooking for Every Family Cookbook. This time I made it exactly as the book said and it turned out really nice, although a tiny bit dry, so next time I will cook it slightly less on a slightly higher temp. Also the topping in the book is delicious, but I found it a little too rich, so next time I will just whip about 100g of cream until its nice and thick, and grate some chocolate in the tmx, and just top it with the cream and sprinkle with the grated choc. Warning: this pic is soooo delicious you will probably want to make this cake right away! ;)

A note on 30-in-30 - we have just a few days left and we're still only at 22 people who've joined me, so if you've been doing it and you didn't tell me, or you can just get a friend or two to join in before the 6th of March, that would be great! I'd really like to reach the target of 30 people!

My smoothie this morning was Pink Perfection! 2 S-M Red Delicious apples, approx 100g of watermelon, ice and water:

Lastly I discovered some things about my TMX this week that I hadn't even THOUGHT of in regards to baby stuff! So next post will be all about baby food and bottles etc, you can't say you haven't been warned! ;)

Until next time, Love and Health! B xxx

I'm so Proud of ME!

I just quickly wanted to share with you all a picture that I just found of myself from two years ago (January 21st, 2010 to be exact), and one of me taken by my daughter today........

 

WOW! Just WOW! Go me! I'm so proud of myself!!! I've lost 36kgs (that's about 80lbs for those of you in the UK and the States) over the past two years through small sensible changes over a long period of time - the biggest ones being simply eating more fresh fruit and fresh raw vegetables and doing some light exercise! There's no going back from here, I'm just going to continue getting healthier and slimmer until I reach my ideal weight (I'll know it when I get there!)!!

So apart from that little shout-out to myself (LOL), I just wanted to share with you a few things about my day: Firstly today was my first 100% raw day ever! It feels really good!

Secondly I managed to do my walk this morning so another pat on the back to me for acheiving that small goal. :D

Thirdly I have a quick recipe to share and a pic of my daughter enjoying our Cashew Milk "Warm" Chocolate!

So here are some Raw Vegan Choc Malt Bliss Balls that I made today:

Ingredients:

350g Raw Walnuts

300g Fresh Dates - Pitted

80g Raw Cacao Powder

40-60g Rapadura 

1 and 1/2 tsp fine sea salt

1 and 1/2 Tbsp Vanilla Extract

2 tsp Maca

(Rapadura is to taste - I know this is not raw but I don't have Agave syrup or other truly raw sweetener yet and Rapadura is minimally processed so I figure its not so bad!)

*If using Agave Syrup or other liquid sweetener, reduce Dates by 50-80g or this will be too moist.

* If you don't have Maca you can just leave it out and they'll be plain choc instead of choc-malt flavour.

Method:

1. Put Walnuts, Cacao and Rapadura into your TMX bowl and combine on Speed 6 for approximately 1 minute or until really fine.

2. Add remaining ingredients and process on Speed 6 for about 30 seconds, then increase to Speed 7-8 for a further Minute or so - until it all sticks together into a kind of smooth but stiff paste - it will be quite oily, don't worry that's just the oil from the nuts and the cacao.

3. Pinch small amounts (about the size of a large grape) and roll them into balls, store in the fridge for a few days or in the freezer for up to about a month.

*This recipe makes a huge batch so feel free to halve the ingredients and reduce the processing time by about 20% if you don't want that many!

*Originally these were from Quirky Cooking's recipe found here.

Saana and I also enjoyed a late afternoon Cashew Milk "Warm" Chocolate (I only heated it to 37 C so it was still raw) made with Cashews, Rapadura and Raw Cacao powder:

I have to get to bed now as I have another big day planned tomorrow! Happiness and Health to you all, til next time! XXX