Monday, March 8, 2010 at 12:30 PM
Hey everyone
How was everyone’s weekend?? We had a long one over here, but worth it ; ) Did anyone watch the Oscars?? We took the night off from work and enjoyed some wine and good entertainment. We just enjoy the awards shows…all the pretty dresses.
We enjoyed some good eats over the weekend…featuring some new recipes (which we will share ; ) )
Enjoyed a very large breakfast Saturday morning before we headed to the farmers market.
Buckwheat apple porridge. We have not had this in sooo long, it used to be our breakfast every Saturday morning last year before our Saturday markets. It is so simple and very filling, which is what we need for our long market days.
Sprouted buckwheat, apples, yacon, cinnamon, bee pollen
Our dinner was a lovely simple salad
mixed greens with avocado, kraut, and fermented veggies
Sunday morning we finally made some raw pancakes in honor of Heather’s Pancake Sundays.
These were not our best ones, it is pretty much just mashed up bananas. But we will share the recipe if you all want.
Yesterday we did our longest run yet since the marathon in January. Honestly we really have only ran 3 other times since the race, we just have not been wanting to run. We have been enjoying other forms of exercise.
Our goal was a 30 minute run, but it turned into a 9o minute run. We went up to the local park and got on a trail and did not know how long it was….but that is okay it was 60 degrees out and sunny!! We will take it!!
Pre-workout snack:
Cocoa date ball
We have been testing out new workout snacks for our cookbook, yep having a whole chapter dedicated to what we eat for fuel and recovery ; )
And then dinner and dessert were both new recipes!!
Dinner:
Fermented Kelp Noodles
With a side of kraut sprinkled with dulse
Perfect Sunday dinner!! We think kelp noodles will become a regular Sunday dinner ; )
And dessert took 2 trials. We have been wanting to make raw carrot cake since forever!! There are tons of recipes out there, so we of course wanted to create our own. We wanted to make it out of carrot pulp, so the first attempt failed….ended up in the trash compost. Second was beyond perfect….way better than we were planning, it honestly tasted like real carrot cake!!!!
Can you tell the difference?
Not only was it raw but free of gluten, eggs, dairy, peanuts, corn, soy, and NUTS!!!
We had seconds…it was that good. I think I could eat this every night. It was beyond words!! I know you all are thinking, do we plan to share the recipe….YES!!! We will expose this tasty easy to make dessert sometime this week ; )
Not a bad way to end the weekend.
We also tried a new product
Pure2raw Product Review
We bought this the other day at the store because our older sister loves it, so we had to try for ourself.
Verdict?
Different. It was very sweet compared to other coconut water, even though it claims to be unsweetened.
Maybe it is their types of coconuts? Or maybe it was due to being chilled and out of can? Who knows but it was bothering me that it was so sweet, a mental thing I guess. But we drank it all. Not sure if I would purchase it again. Just maybe when I need something cold to drink. Lori did not mind it too much, enjoyed having something different.
For more information check out the company’s website, amyandbriannaturals.com.
Finally review : one thumb up
Have you tried this coconut drink?
Do not forget to get your orders in while the sale is on for St Patty’s Day, it ends Wednesday!!!
And for more great news our Twin Cakes Bakery website if finally up. It still has some tweaks but overrall we are just happy to have it up. We have been waiting a year for it ; ) So we will take it!
Till next time,
Michelle
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: Fitness, dessert, gluten free vegan nut free recipe, product review
Tags: buckwheat, coconut water, farmers market, kelp noodles, raw carrot cake, raw pancakes, sauerkraut, Twin Cakes Bakery
Monday, March 1, 2010 at 01:04 PM
Hello Friends,
Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend 
We did though it was a busy one. Michelle and I were in the kitchen a lot prepping food and creating a bunch of new recipes!!!
We took Saturday off from working out, which it is always nice to take a day off. Although on Sunday we did about 30 minutes of a mix of things for a workout like yoga, jump rope, stairs, and some calisthenics plus a 20 minute run outside. It felt nice to get outside for an easy run 
Looking forward to Spring for sure! We both just felt like doing a bunch of different thing yesterday instead of the same old thing. It was great to mix things up! Keeps the body guessing.
Made this quick and easy post workout pudding
And of course we ate well over the weekend. Here are just a few highlights!
We had some carrot coconut wrapper left so we decided to create sauerkraut arugula wrap out of it stuffed with some pumpkin seeds
Heavenly!!! YUM YUM!!!
Easy, simple and sooo satisfying. Loving the carrot coconut wrapper!
And to go along with this lovely wrap was more sauerkraut and arugula (fresh from the local farmers market)
And as I mentioned before about what we had in store for our dessert!!! Well we got the inspiration from the lovely Jessica who is so creative with her desserts. Once we saw this cookie pie we just knew we had to make it with our twist on it
Here it is Pure2Raw’s Gluten free Vegan Raw Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie
And this cookie pie is also nut free and only sweetened with stevia!
AMAZING! There are no words to describe this mouth watering dessert. Not only did it taste great and like cookie dough but knowing that there were no nuts and no sugar was even better A truly guilt free dessert! Thanks Jessica for the inspiration!!!
And dinner last night was a glorious salad
Watercress, spinach, nutritional yeast, fermented veggies, turmeric, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and topped with quinoa and cinnamon and coriander seeds.
Once again heavenly! Not a bad way to end the weekend eh?
We are also making our own compost and growing some cabbage… more on that tomorrow! Fun stuff over here
Have a glorious Monday evening!
Till next time,
Lori
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: dessert, gluten free vegan nut free recipe, ingredients
Tags: coconut wrap, compost, cookie pie, fermented veggies, gluten free vegan desserts, post workout puddings, quinoa, raw dessert, sauerkraut wrap
Monday, February 15, 2010 at 11:33 AM
Hey luvs
Hope your Monday is going well. We have had a not so typical Monday morning here. Had to run some errands, deliver an order, and then received an unexpected order. We have been out of the house all morning, but did manage to make a small juice before heading out the door.
This juice was some beet tops, carrots, fennel, and ginger. We are giving juicing a try again. We are seeing how our bodies like juicing time around now that we are feeling stronger. Hopefully we will not get too many detox symptoms.
So glad to see everyone enjoyed our overnight buckwheat groats!! Simple, yummy gluten free breakfast!
How was everyone’s Valentines? We had a nice surprise yesterday.
Red Roses?? But from whom? And for who?
Not for me ; ( But Lori. Her wonderful boyfriend surprised her with roses. She had no idea, I had no idea. We actually first thought is was from our parents, but then as we opened the box, we both saw Love Gary. Her boyfriend is currently studying abroad in Paris, so this was a very nice surprise for Lori.
We enjoyed some good eats yesterday as well. Began our Sunday morning with a perfect cup of hot cocoa, then followed by a green smoothie.
Had a great workout. We have been doing Tracy Anderson’s Mat workout and love it!! We love her (more on that later). And we treated ourselves to Vega shake afterwards. It was perfect!! We have not had Vega in so long. I know there are some that do not like the taste of Vega, but I love it. I made it thick like pudding, yummy…
Vega Health Optimzer with a little bit of water...makes perfect pudding in my opinion.
And then dinner was inspired from Everyday Raw. One of Matthew Kenney’s cookbooks that we just love. Also I learned to make this while at 105 Degrees
Raw Pizza with a P2R twist
The Crust: Before
After dehydrating
Not only is the pizza raw and gluten-free, but also we made it nut-free!!! So it was very light. We made a few changes to his recipe, and it came out great.
The Cheese that we made for Superbowl party.
First Layer
Second Layer – arugula, got to have greens ; )
Next layer some more avocados, we love our fats!
Final Product
SO good!!!!
Want a bite?
And we had left over cheese sauce and arugula so made a warm wilted salad
Coat arugula with sauce and then we placed it the dehydrate to “warm” up. YUM!
Now for dessert
We did not have anything chocolate, GASP, I know I know it was Valentines Day, but actually for me it was just another day.
We decided to take a spin on one of our old classic recipes, Key Lime Tart.
Pure2Raw Key Lime Cookie Sandwich
Heavenly!!!
A perfect ending ; )
Time to get back in the kitchen….got orders to fill!
Till next time,
Michelle
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: Miscellaneous, dessert, gluten free vegan nut free recipe
Tags: 105 degrees, cheese sauce, gluten free, juice, Key lime cookie sandwich, Matthew Kenney, nut free, raw pizza, Tracy Anderson, Vega
Monday, February 8, 2010 at 07:11 AM
Hey everyone
Congrats to the Saints for being Superbowl Champs!!! Michelle was cheering for them as I was for the Colts!!
Anyways we wanted to share want we enjoyed yesterday for the big game. Even some of our friends took some nibbles and approved ; )
First up:
Pure2Raw Kabocha Lime Guacamole
Yes we still had some leftover roasted Kabocha squash that we thought why not add it into our guacamole?? We enjoyed this with some of our Pumpkin Seed Kale Crackers…Perfect match!
It was soooo good!! Creamy, limey, & a little bit of sweetness from the kabocha squash, Heather inspired appetizer!
We are loving this squash…in everything!!
And of course we could not go a day without our fermented foods
Mixed in our guacamole in with kraut &veggies
Next:
Pure2raw Cheezy Pepper Nachos
We poured the cheezy sauce over our Rosemary Crackers.
We just went for the plain cheez and cracker (our chip) match ; ) No fancy toppings for us, sorry we are boring.
And FINALLY
Pure2raw Club Sandwich
And it featured some eggplant bacon, courtesy of Matthew Kenney and we know Mrs. Fitnessista loves some eggplant bacon!!
Oh did we eat this??
Well it was a little messy, but that was okay it was worth it ; ) It was actually kind of weird for us to eat a sandwich…. having a raw sandwich at that! We were eating a sandwich just like everyone else The bread is some of Pure2raw buckwheat bread (we will add this product soon) Heavenly YUMMY!
Overall we had lots of good eats that we were willing to share with others. It was great day to eat some special treats!
But wait what about dessert…
Pure2Raw Snickerdoodle Cupcakes
Inspiration from Chocolate Covered Katie snickerdoodle oatmeal.
PERFECT!!!
Seriously our best cupcake yet!! Love the blend of sugar and cinnamon ; )
Our friends even enjoyed some of these
Snickerdoodle cookies. They loved them!! No one could guess they were raw cookies! We are going to have to make more.
In the news:
We are working on adding some new products to our online store in addition we will be announcing later today our Valentine’s Day Specials!!
Check back in because you are going to want to miss it, plus we will be sharing the details about our Valentine’s Giveaway!!!!
Till next time,
Lori
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: Giveaway, Miscellaneous, dessert, pure2raw products
Tags: appetizer, cheez sauce, guacamole, raw cookies, raw crackers, sandwich, snickerdoodles, squash, valentines day giveaway
Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 03:03 PM
Hey luvs
Last night as we sipped on some lovely hot cocoa and gobbled up enjoyed some of our Twin Cakes gluten free vegan chocolate chip cookies (and sent some cookie love via Twitter to our friends, Betty and Lauren), as we were getting caught up on with some of our favorite blog’s and found some amazing inspiration. One was from this lovely lady.
So while we stood in the freezing cold weather (plus some snow flurries) this morning at our farmers market we thought about all the things we could make. We love Snickerdoodles. The perfect blend of cinnamon and sugar. We made some gluten free vegan snickerdoodle cookies before last year as featured item at our farmers markets, but have not done anything since. So we decided we will create something raw….surprise right ; ) Thanks Katie, you got us thinking now!
First we had lovely breakfast:
Spirulina Coconut Kefir Pudding topped with cinnamon
The picture just does not do this breakfast justice…the color green was so pretty!! And the taste was amazing ; ) Oh and on a side note, we both got better sleep last night and did not feel tired at all this morning. So we were excited about that.
Well due to having energy, we got in the kitchen as soon as we got back from the market. And made two different snickerdoodle desserts. They are in the dehydrator, so hopefully one of them turns out. Hopefully we can make Katie proud ; )
You all remember this
Our layered chocolate cake.
We received some questions about two ingredients we used.
Pure2raw Secret Ingredients:
Sunflower lecithin. Lecithin is an emulsifier, which is the main reason we use it in a lot of our raw recipes. The more common lecithin most people and companies use is made from soy (soy lecithin), but since we try to avoid soy when possible we found this wonderful product from the Raw Food World. Thanks so much to Matt for finding this product, we love it!!
We absolutely love our sunflower lecithin for many reasons, but as I mentioned mainly for the binding property. I will admit it took some time getting used to the consistency and flavor, but now I seem to put it in everything somethings. I actually miss it if I do not put it into my smoothies or puddings. Yep our breakfast above had some of it stirred in!! See how thick and creamy it was. Delicious. Sunflower lecithin just creates this amazing texture and feel in your mouth.
We have talked about Sunflower lecithin a few times on our blog
Raw apple pie and raw ice cream
Raw green been casserole
Cranberry dressing
Please check them out for more tips and recipes.
Next up is Irish Moss
We have played around with Irish moss before. We could not find much good information about it out there, so we just kept playing around with it. Now it is NOT Irish moss powder!! There is a difference, and we have tried the powder and NO LUCK!! So please save yourself the time and money and do not buy the powder. It does not work the same…or at least to us it did not work as good as the real thing!
Then lucky for us, Michelle got to learn more about it when she went to 105 degrees. The Irish moss used in school was from Maine where Matthew Kenney lives. So let me tell you it was perfect Irish moss. When Michelle got back from school we finally got around to playing with it again and made some raw desserts.
Where can you get Irish moss?
Another product you can find from the Raw Food World. Also One Lucky Duck sells Irish moss as well.
I hope this review of our two secret ingredients helped!! If you any question please just leave a comment and we will sure to answer you.
And check back in tomorrow when we reveal of our favorite things!!!
Plus check out our dinner tonight….and yep it contains one of these secret ingredients….can you guess which one?? Actually can you even guess what our dinner is?? haha
Have a great evening!
Till next time,
Lori
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: Raw Recipes, dessert, ingredients, product review
Tags: 105 degrees, coconut kefir, farmers market, gluten free cookies, irish moss, raw desserts, sunflower lecithin, vegan cookies
Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 08:57 AM
Hey friends,
Well here is it the chocolate layered cake recipe you all have been waiting for Our easy but fancy looking gluten free vegan dessert. We try to make our recipes as easy as possible so that many of you can can enjoy these sweet and healthy desserts
This recipe came to us one day as we were browsing through our recipe collections we have gathered over the years. I am sure many of you have tons and tons of recipes that you collect hoping one day to get to. Well at least that is how it is for us We just love all types of food and re-creating dishes with own twist on them. Though half the time the recipes we make are last minute and we make things up as we go!
We like to show that even though you may be gluten free or vegan you can still enjoy a rich chocolate creamy filled layered dessert without feeling guilty and without having too many fancy tools
Today we present
Chocolate Layered Vanilla Kreme Gluten Free Vegan Cake
As you all know we love our chocolate and have always wanted to do a layered dessert. We went back and forth for awhile on how we were going to do this because we did not have all the ‘proper’ kitchen tools to do what we really wanted. Therefore we had to be creative and come up with something similar. Of course wanted the recipe to be easy to make and raw We took one of our own favorite chocolate brownie recipes to be the base and the vanilla kreme part came to us as we got going! We hope you enjoy the recipe as much as we did
Pure2Raw Recipe: Chocolate Layered Vanilla Kreme Gluten Free Vegan Raw Cake
First- the chocolate cake layer (again we used a raw brownie mix to make it, though you could use any favorite recipe of yours or you can follow ours)
Brownie layer:
- 2 cups whole cashews (or any favorite nut of yours)
- 3/4 cup coconut flour (we just grinded it up coconut flakes – though you could use store bought coconut flour – and just be semi-raw)
- 2 tbsp vanilla
- pinch sea salt
- 1 1/2 cups cocoa
- 1/2 cup agave nectar
Directions:
Place all ingredients into a food processor and blend till combined.
Batter will be a little thick and sticky.
Divide brownie batter into two sections. One for the bottom layer and one for the 3 third layer.
Kreme Layer:
- 1 cup soaked cashews, over night
- 6 tbsp irish moss paste (this is optional it just helps with texture. If you do not have irish moss than do 1 1/2 cups cashews)
- 4 tbsp coconut butter
- 2 tbsp coconut oil
- 2 tsp lecthin (we use sunflower lecthin – again helps with texture) * you could try guar gum or xanthan gum
- 2 tbsp vanilla
- 1/4 water
Directions:
Place all ingredients into a blender and blend till smooth and creamy. Set aside in a bowl.
Assemble layered cake:
We used a bread loaf and lined with wax paper
Take half of brownie batter and place in bottom of pan.
*our loaf pan was a tad too big for the size and thickness of layers we wanted so we had to be real creative and figure out a way to keep the structure we were looking for, we used a glass mason jar to help with extra space in bread pan
Pour about half of kreme layer on top of brownie layer
* classy I know, see we told you we created this dish as we were going and still wanted to make sure it was somewhat easy to create!
Let this set in freezer for about 20 –30 minutes before placing next brownie layer on
Than just repeat the same layers once more! Than we topped with some cinnamon. Place layered cake back into freezer and let set before removing from pan.
Once layered cake has set one more time in freezer you may take out of pan *very carefully!
Having the wax paper helps with clean up and helps with getting cake out with ease!
Than you just remove the wax paper off the cake and you are done! You have yourself a delicious rich creamy gluten free vegan layered cake. A layered cake that requires no baking time and pretty easy to make. And raw too! Bonus!
We have a feeling you and your whole family will love this recipe. Thanks again for stopping by for another un-cooking class with the pure2raw twins
Stay tuned we are putting together a really fun and exciting Valentine’s Day giveaway!!! We hope to share more details very soon. If you think this was a lot of chocolate wait to you see our giveaway.
Till next time,
The Twins
L&M
Posted by: Pure2
Posted in: Raw Recipes, dessert, ingredients
Tags: chocolate, gluten free vegan brownies, gluten free vegan desserts, irish moss, layered cake, lecthin, raw cake, valentines day giveaway
