Hey all!

Remember May, when I was all stressed out about moving, but took comfort in dinner with my friend Sarah (aka Mama Pea)? You may remember how our friendship inspired me to bake these vegan fig bars, which remain among my proudest baking accomplishments:

Now Sarah’s inspiring me again, with the triumphant and fun-filled publication of her cookbook, Peas and Thank You. It’s a fantastic resource for Moms who are trying to help their families transition into more heavily plant based diets, and it’s filled with fun tips for the home cook (pea points) as well as the intimate stories and images of family life that make Sarah’s blog so touching and fun to read.

The book is also full of mouth-watering photos, which happen to have been taken by another dear friend: Ms. Ashley.

Sarah’s food is accessible, healthy, and 100% family-friendly. If you’d like a chance to discover her recipes for yourself, look no further! At Sarah’s generous behest, I’m offering one lucky Choosing Raw reader a copy of the Peas and Thank You Cookbook. To enter, you can do any or all of the following. They count as separate entries, so please leave a comment on this post for each:

1) Follow Choosing Raw on Twitter.

2) Like Choosing Raw on Facebook.

3) Tweet the following: @choosingraw is giving away a free copy of the @Mama_Pea cookbook. Enter here! http://bit.ly/qsTouL

4) Like Peas and Thank You on Facebook

5) Leave me a comment telling me why you’re excited to own this book.

I’ll announce the winner precisely 1 week from today, on August 23rd.

Tomorrow, expect another Choosing Raw baking venture that’s pea-worthy. And goes really nicely with raw whipped cream.

xo

Have you heard of Julie Morris? If you haven’t yet, you should make a point of getting to know her. She’s one of the most talented, innovative, and charming personalities in the business, and by “business,” I mean the world of men and women who love to talk about—and to prepare—whole, plant-based, semi-raw food. Julie’s recipes epitomize everything I love about food: they’re healthy, flavorful, and simple. The flavors are vibrant, but light and bright. And they combine an intense interest in health science with an epicurean’s love of the sensual pleasures of eating.

I got to know Julie about a year ago, all via email, and we quickly established that, if we weren’t separated by the US mainland (she’s LA-based) we’d probably be spending a lot of our time together. As it is, she’s one of my funniest and most effusive penpals. When I learned that Julie was at work on a book about superfoods, I was both excited and conflicted. On the one hand, I’d read anything this woman wrote. On the other, I spend a lot of time debunking the idea of an elite and magical class of food labeled as “super.” (See this post for a summary of my thoughts on the idea of a “superfood.”)

Additionally, it’s hard to spend any time in raw circles without growing weary of the obsession with exotic South American berries and mysterious powdered blends of…stuff. Because the term “superfood” is unregulated, it’s hard to know which claims are bogus and which aren’t, how subjective the criteria of food manufacturers are, and whether these foods are really “super” at all. To me, it’s always seemed as though most superfoods are simply food that are on the healthier side, dressed up and priced as if they’re poised to perform miracles.

Julie Morris has singlehandedly changed my mind. Her new book, Superfood Cuisine, is probably the single best resource out there for anyone who’s curious about superfoods, but also allergic, as I am, to unscrupulous scientific claims. She’s researched the benefits of superfoods meticulously, and she writes about them with the enthusiasm of a nutrition nerd (which I’m guessing all of us here at CR are) and the rationality of an educated consumer. Her approach to superfoods, in the end, isn’t the typical raw foodist extremist’s position that, if we reduce our food intake to these foods and these foods only, we’ll live to be 219, but rather that adding superfoods in small quantities to our everyday cooking can only enhance the health benefits of what we make. That’s Superfood Cuisine in a nutshell: use superfoods not as a replacement for regular food, but rather as supplementary parts of an already sumptuous and flavorful diet.

To help you along, Julie has teamed up with Navitas Naturals—my own personal favorite source of cacao nibs, chia seeds, hemp seeds, lucuma, and cacao powder—to make an entire book’s worth of delicious soups, spreads, grain bowls, salads, desserts, and mouth-watering photos to match. And I’m giving a copy away to one of my readers.

Along with a bag of my favorite Navitas trail mix: goji berries, cacao, and raw cashews:

I’ll go ahead and call this an essential giveaway for anyone who’s curious about the health properties of such things as maca, mesquite, or mulberries, all of which I tried for the first time (and loved!) thanks to Julie:

Am I a little biased here? Sure. I helped to edit the book. But I wouldn’t have helped out with it had not read it and loved it. I don’t change my mind easily about things, and it says a lot about the power of Julie’s voice (and food!) that I have totally reconsidered how I feel about superfood.

In her acknowledgments, Julie says: “To Gena Hamshaw, for all the articulate feedback and premium supply of sass.”

Sass? Moi? Anytime, Julie. Anytime.

To win 1 free copy of Superfood Cuisine by Julie Morris, you can:

1) Comment on this post, telling me how you feel about the idea of “superfoods,” and why!

2) Tweet the following: @choosingraw is giving away a free snack & superfood cookbook by @greenjules! Enter to win: http://bit.ly/qbPyvT

3) Like Superfood Cuisine on Facebook.

4) Like Navitas Naturals on Facebook

5) Follow me on Twitter

Please leave a comment for each entry (so if you tweet, comment back to say you did; each of these four entries counts separately).

I’ll announce the winner on Friday, August 12th!

In light of this super giveaway, I’ll be posting my first ever self-entitled “superfood recipe” tomorrow!

xo

Ah, Sundays.

I’ve just gotta say it: I kind of hate Sundays. The malaise, the anxiety about the work week ahead, the frantic attempt to catch up on editorial deadlines and reading. Blech.

But it’s not all bad. A couple of nice things manage to squeeze into the picture: extended and leisurely morning workouts, early dinners with my Mom, the occasional Sunday night movie. Most importantly, Sunday is my kitchen day: it’s the day I put aside to cook, cook, and cook some more. I prep meals, dressings, pates, vats of hummus, soak and boil beans, wash and chop veggies, etc. Few things give me more pleasure or sense of calm than preparing a good meal, and the chance to do that definitely helps to chase away the Sunday night blues.

Yesterday, Kristin asked what everyone’s foodie highlights were this week. I know what mine were. The first was this:

As part of my Best of Raw 2009 prize, I received a gift basket from the incredible Vivapura company. Makers of wonderful coconut, cacao, and fruit/nut mixes, Vivapura is an amazing raw resource. One of the treats they sent me (in addition to some amaaaaaazing, life changing cacao paste) was this wonderful coconut vanilla creme. The ingredients?

Coconut and vanilla. Period. The result is a vanilla infused coconut butter that’s sweet and rich, but also low glycemic and all raw. Methinks my friend Heather–maker of homemade coconut butter and critic of all things sugary–would looove this stuff (and inspired by Heather, I’ve also given homemade coconut butter a try lately, with awesome results!).

So, what to do with this magical stuff? Yesterday, I woke up with a crazy craving for oat bran, and I had a hunch that it would be all the more wonderful with some coconut butter melted atop.

And oh, it was.

Other stuff I plan on doing with Coconut Vanilla Creme? I think it would be mighty tasty atop roasted yams or squash. I think it would be delicious on banana soft serve. I think it would be tasty in any avocado pudding combination, or atop Ezekiel toast.

Or how bout straight up, with a lick of the spoon?

Other highlight of the weekend: revisiting an old friend:

Re-discovering beloved cookbooks is without a doubt one of every home cook’s favorite pleasures. I’ve always loved Veganomicon–it’s a bible among vegan cookbooks–and often serve up simplified or modified versions of its grain dishes, soups, and dips/spreads. But it had been a while since I flipped through its pages, and today, unsure of what I wanted for dinner, I decided to consult my girl Isa for recipe advice.

I settled on her red lentil and cauliflower curry, a simple, savory, and one pot dinner recipe. I love curries: they’re tasty and spicy and filling, and the leftovers are always awesome. I followed this recipe (red lentils, cauliflower, parsnips, celery, spices, c’est tout!) pretty much to a T, omitting onion and garlic. It turned out beautifully!

Along with a fresh salad, it was food for the Sunday soul.This was definitely inspiration for me to yank out some other favorite cookbooks and uncookbooks, and get re-inspired!

I hope you all had lovely weekends of your own–and if there were any special culinary highlights, I’d love to hear about them!

xo