Chia seeds — tiny, smaller than sesame seeds, and colored black to light gray or white — are so often a component of recipes for vegan or plant-based drinks and puddings. The seeds offer great health benefits, such as a high protein and Omega-3 content.
Did you know that chia seeds come from the plant Salvia hispanica whose leaves and light purple flowers innocently resemble a garden herb? This Salvia (there are many, with a multitude of health attributes for us humans) was native in Mexico and Central America, and was used by humans back in the shadows of history before Europeans arrived in the New World. Native civilizations used this Salvia and likely others growing about in their region because it gave them a kind of food in the form of tiny, crunchy, rather hydrophilic seeds. Mesoamericans may have discovered the gel-like substance the seeds make when chewed and they likely ingested it along with berries or bits of leaves, what we today would call a “chia bowl”. Soaked chia seeds produce a jelly-like primal desert or breakfast that provided them sustenance, as it does for us these days.
Read how to blend chia with coconut water for a high-powered drink, or mix chia seeds with blended dates and orange-flower water for a lovely pudding in The Blender Girl’s book, reviewed below.
The Blender Girl: Super-easy, Super-healthy Meals, Snacks, Desserts and Drinks. / Tess Masters. Ten Speed Press, 2014. 217 pages, color illustrations, resources, bibliography, index.
From “the lowdown” to “the recipes”, “resources” and “great reading” you cannot fail by creating 100% purely delicious drinks and meals, desserts and snacks in your blender. An extension of the kitchen counter, appliances such as a blender, food processor, dehydrator, and assorted hand tools, make that space work as diligently as your stove or refrigerator for your gustatory pleasure, not to mention superior health benefits. Instead of cooking every bite and swallow, consider raw or combination raw and cooked ingredients as Masters suggests in many of her recipes.
After having conquered debilitating digestive issues and the Epstein-Barr virus, Masters created The Blender Girl online to share her resources for lifestyle suggestions and healthful food. This book The Blender Girl is patterned after her website. In both she relates that trying a range of healing diets and following the protocols of a variety of nutritionists from body ecology to nutritionists were helpful only to a degree, and yet there remained persistent, nagging issues to be dealt with in order to achieve sustained health.
Masters would have been well equipped to distill an optimal, healing diet from these sources. Yet it wasn’t until she realized that listening to her body, rather than following rules prescribed by specific protocols, led her to realize health. Thus her diet consists of the range of raw and cooked foods, blended and cut but not-blended, whole foods.
In The Blender Girl: Super-Easy, Super-Healthy Meals, Snacks, Dessert & Drinks there are very few exotic ingredients, and yet some items like chia seeds, maqui berries (what Masters says is a “niche ingredient”), chickpea flour, kombu (sea vegetable), kudzu-root (powder) add variation and originality to familiar stand-bys. Raspberries, pineapples, apples, and vegetables like kale, cauliflower, green onions, celery, romaine, baby spinach – and others – are those whole foods you pile into your blender to make soups, smoothies, drinks, sauces. They are nonetheless fantastic simply cut or chopped for salads, cooked for main dishes, desserts, condiments, but with a punch of wow! when sauces and creams, blended up to match the dish, are poured over them.
Recipe ideas abound in The Blender Girl, yet it’s the techniques that bring out health benefits in select ingredients and make these foods unique. Some recipes are baked, sauteed, yet her emphasis is on taste combined with nutrition, so there is likely a raw component to any dish. Raw makes the whole process feasible for quick dinners, desserts, smoothies, and you gain valuable enzymes for health and well-being.
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