Eternal Cheesecake

Coo-coo for Coconuts!

What would be your reaction if you were challenged to come up with a coconut-themed recipe and you couldn’t crib someone else? Now self-constrain it further by desiring to keep it raw and it begins to get interesting.

You may be thinking, that’s… unusual. Well, it would be if it wasn’t part of a contest sponsored by one of my new favorite produce shops called The Coconut Hut Grocery.

For years, I’ve been looking for organic young Thai coconuts and The Coconut Hut has them! I was thrilled when I discovered that they were as passionate as I was! To help understand this obsession, the young Thai coconuts that you can buy in the store (even if you shop at smaller markets), the ones that look like a cylinder shaped into a cone, are supposedly dipped in a sulphate along with a fungicide. The sulphate is used to prevent them from browning and the fungicide is a known probable carcinogen. No thanks, do not want. I’d like to enjoy the sweet coconut water knowing that it hasn’t been poisoned.

On the other hand, the Young Thai coconuts from the Coconut Hut Grocery have the outer cone already stripped away and just the inner pod exposed. It looks like a softball. But the best part is that they’re tangibly fresh! I was driving home the other week after buying a stash and my car actually filled up with the sweet smell of live coconuts! That’s never happened with the other conventional ones. And drinking them? So tasty!

As for the coconut recipe contest that the Coconut Hut Grocery was putting on, I thought that it could work, or it may not, but with raw food, things tend to err on the “work” side of the equation, a huge bonus for a raw newbie like me.

So here’s my first-ever public recipe for one of my food creations. I’ve been craving a banana cream pie, and so I thought, why not coconut-ize it? In this concoction, the fat of the coconut meat gives the cream and the filling some body, and the fibrousness of shredded coconut gives the crust a density. I added some coconut oil to give the filling a bit more of a roundness. All in all, this is quite the treat.

Ingredients

The Coco-Bana Creme Pie has three, count ‘em, three layers: the whipped cream topping, the creamy banana filling, and the “crust.” That’s in quotes because it’s not really crusty, but rather crust-like. We’d have to work in an extra dehydration step to give the crust a crunchy, crispy bite. Maybe that will be in the 2.0 version of this recipe….

This will create one personal-sized 5″ pie, which is enough for two people, assuming you want to share it. For a 9″ pie, this recipe will need to be tripled.

Whipped Cream

½ of one medium young Thai coconut’s “meat”
½ small, ripe banana
2 tblsp maple syrup, raw agave nectar, or powdered sugar (powdered sugar will make it thicker and hold its shape better)
¼ tsp vanilla
flax gel: ½ tblsp ground flax seeds soaked in 1 ½ tblsp water for 4 hours

Filling

½ of one medium young Thai coconut’s “meat”
1 tblsp coconut oil
3 ½ small, ripe bananas
5 soaked Medjool dates

Crust

1/8 cup shredded coconut
1/8 cup almonds, soaked for 8-12 hours
1/8 cup cashews
5 soaked Medjool dates
flax gel: 1 tblsp ground flax seeds soaked in 3 tblsp water for 4 hours

Instructions

This is so easy to put together. You’re basically blending each part separately and then bringing it all together in the end.

Whipped Cream

Puncture your Young Thai coconut, drain the coconut water and have a refreshing drink. (No, the water’s not needed but don’t throw it away!) Scrape out the coconut flesh, the “meat”, and put half in a bowl with the small, ripe banana; the remaining half will be used with the filling. Add your sweetner of choice, vanilla, flax gel, and then blend, blend, blend until it becomes light and fluffy. My hand blender makes this quick, but you can use a food processor. Chill in the fridge.

Filling

Blend all the ingredients, the remaining half of the coconut meat, coconut oil, the bananas, and dates, with a hand blender or food processor until it’s creamy. If you’re not licking the bowl, then adjust the sweetness with more dates, but it should be fine. Chill in the fridge.

Crust

Again, blend all the ingredients, the shredded coconut, almonds, cashews, dates, and flax gel with a hand blender until it’s sticky. The cashews will give it a creamy richness, the shredded coconut will help give it form, and the flax gel will bind it together. Press into a small 5″ pie tin. Chill in the fridge.

1 + 1 + 1 = π

When the crust is firm, add the filling and top with the whipped cream. Viola! Pie!

More photos coming….

When was the last time you felt like a whole new world was opening up in front of you? Hmm?

The last time was six years ago when I gulped and went to Mexico to be with my Mexican girlfriend for a year not knowing what I was getting myself into. Before that was learning to meditate 13 years ago. Right around then, I also was introduced to salsa dancing, which excited me because of my comparatively passionless family. And then before that was when I learned the precise mathematical formula to make a 3-D cube appear on my computer screen. That one little formula was the seed for my next business, a computer animation programed called Animasia 3-D.

I remember when I was a monk in training and there was this handsome guy from Switzerland who always raved about how good his homeland’s food was and how much he missed it and how he’d be sneaking bites of Lindt chocolate every day and I how much of an addict I thought he was. I never understood that. But now I do. I’m realizing that I’m having another one of these openings where possibilities seem limitless and I get a prickly excitement on my skin when my mind edges toward… food!

Raw food in particular, which I’m finding I can make some intensely tasty foods in ways that I never thought about before. I get so excited planning my next meal. This is significant. Why? Because growing up on TV Dinners created a condition in my mind where I wished there was an equivalent to rabbit pellets (“Human Pellet Food”) that you could just pop into your mouth to get the ordeal over with. Food was a chore, not a delight.

My new favorite kitchen gadget is my $10 dehydrator that I bought off Craigslist. I never realized that 85% of fruits and vegetables are water and if you dehydrate them, their true taste comes out in bold letters upon your tongue. Even better is that the nutrients aren’t destroyed when the heat is kept below 118°F. The food is still alive even though it’s taste and texture have been transformed into something new.

Experiment #1: blueberry bliss

My first recipe out of my dehydrator came from a YouTube video of this strange girl demonstrating how to make raw blueberry pancakes in her dehydrator. When I tried it, I couldn’t believe how every bite was exquisite–the flavors were so intense, and as a bonus, I got energy from it, unlike the up/down energy spike from a traditional pancake.

From an engineering perspective, what was more thrilling to me was that the ingredients and the process were simple to understand. It all just made sense. Nothing about the food’s nutritional profile was being destroyed, only preserved. The geek in me loved that.

Apple pie eureka!

Lately, I’ve been having some smashing successes in the kitchen. The first was figuring out on my own how to make raw apple pie. The trick was to dehydrate two sliced apples, sprinkled generously with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. This reduces the apples, giving them a nice solid bite, and also brings out their natural sweetness too. Then blending them up slightly with a banana to create the filling and adding that to a crust of mashed dates with shredded coconut was all that was left. To firm it up, I chilled it to make it stand at attention, and man oh man, was it bright and tasty. I thought of photographing it, but… uh… it didn’t last that long. (I didn’t mind that it didn’t have a flaky crust. That wasn’t my goal. I could always bake one with vegan butter some other time.)

Edible air

The next hit was kale chips. These were simplicity itself to make and yet the payoff was big fun. I just tossed in some ripped-up bits of kale into my $10 dehydrator, sprinkled in some salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Several hours later, I had a killer treat. Imagine that you are eating air that had magically become crispy, and at the same time taste like the thinnest, lightest potato chips you’ve ever had, except for being exceptionally nutrient dense. Incredible. And to think I’d have to pay a premium for something so trivial to make.

Best transformation of a watermelon, ever

The last creation I have to mention is not raw, but it is unique. Google could only find a few mentions of it, which says something. Awhile back, I read that eating nothing but watermelon for one day is an excellent natural cleanser for the kidneys. So I tried it. But after trying to chow through just a quarter of a watermelon, I thought I would never finish my formidable green and pink opponent before me in one day. So I juiced ‘er, and thought to save the pulp. Yet for the next few months, every time I’d open the freezer door, I’d see that pulp and think, “what the bleep am I gonna do with watermelon pulp?” And then I’d close the door and forget about it.

But now with berry season upon us, and me needing more freezer space, I pulled it out and plopped the pink ice cube into a nearby pot and slowly started to simmer it. Many hours later, I had this bright red, thick, sweet-but-not-cloyingly decadent goo. This time I took a photo (yay, me!), but gobbled it up while trying to think of where it fit on the sweet/sticky spectrum and what kinds of neat things I could do with it. Maybe use it as a unique vegan cupcake frosting? I knew I’d have to try this watermelon reduction (or watermelon molasses) again, as it was simple and yet so rewarding.

What’s next?

As you can tell, I’m super fired up about experimenting with food, especially raw, finding how tasty it is, and how much energy it gives me. There’s more discoveries I could share, but when was the last time you felt like a whole new world was opening up for you?