Healthy vegan ice cream

I gave this on a potluck last weekend and it was a HIT!! :P
Ingredients:
1 liter full fat coconut milk
600 gr amazake (2 bags)
pinch of salt
2 1/2 tablespoon of arrowroot
2 tea spoons of agar powder (about 2 grams)
250 gr ripe banana
40 grams 100 % pure dark cacao powder (depends on your taste)
put all  in a blender, and then in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring to a simmer
over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and can coat
the back of a wooden spoon.
Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. Cover and chill in an
hermetic box at least 3-4 hours, or up to 24 hours.
every two hours , get it our of the freezer and stir so the air can get in, do
this about 4 times ( so better start it on a  weekend in the morning :).
You can change the amount of amazake to make it sweeter , and add more cacao powder if you want it rather strong, but please do not change the amount of agar: not enough agar and you have an ice cube, too much agar and you have a kind of gelatine :P

Vegan Ice Cream without sugar

This is very easy to make, without ice cream machine.
Take 4 small bananas, very ripe, so the peel should look brown, but the inside not too brown.
Peel the bananas and put them in a bag in the freezer for a few days.
Take 250 ml 100 % coconut milk, I use Chaokoh, and a bag of  amasake (fermented sticky rice, available in every supermarket in Thailand under the name "kow maak"{ข้าวหมาก}, it is the best form of natural sweetness, 40% maltose). Put both the amasake and the coconut milk 10 minutes in the freezer, and then put the bananas , coconut milk and amasake in the food processor, add 3 table spoons (or more, depending on personal taste) of pure cacao powder and blend for a few minutes till very smooth. Put in an airtight container in the freezer (the less air in the container, the better) for at least 5 hours. I did not use cacao here, I used carob powder as I had still left, so the color is a little bit lighter.  
Bon  apetit!
If you leave it overnight in the freezer, it gets a bit hard: move from freezer to fridge 4 hours before consumption.

Arrowroot: as a medicine

I promised someone of the Thai Health Food Society to write about arrowroot: you can buy it at Foodland and it is the only starch (except for Kudzu, what is impossible to find in Thailand) that belongs in a healthy kitchen. When you have stomach problems or a cold, just dissolve one table spoon in a cup of cold water, put it in a pot , heath it up, add umeboshi (for sale in Lemon Farm, they call it buay cheen, Chinese plum), add shredded ginger, and a table spoon of healthy soy sauce (I only use Sun Chaw Wong, you can find it in Fuji Supermarket  of at Lemon Farm).
You will feel much better soon :)

3-MCPD

We easily go for less healthier choices, not knowing what is in the products that we buy. Soy sauce is one of those choices, as when we shop in our supermarket, we rather buy soy sauce there than in our health food store. The "commercial" soy sauce has nothing to do with the "traditional" soy sauce from our health food store. Most commercial soy sauces contain sugars and also 3-MCPD. 3-MCPD or (3-monochloropropane-1,2-diol or 3-chloro-1,2-propanediol) is an chemical compound which is carcinogenic and has male anti-fertility effects. It is created in foods by protein hydrolysis by adding hydrochloric acid to speed up the reaction of the (soy) protein with lipids at high temperatures. It has been found far exceeding health standards by in some cases thousand of times in many Chinese and Southeast Asian sauces such as Oyster sauce, Hoisin sauce and Soy sauce, but Korean or Japanese sauces do not utilize hydrochloric acid in production and therefore do not produce 3-MCPD. This does not means that Korean and Japanese sauces are healthier, it means only that they do not contain 3-MCPD. I once had the honour to speak with the 85 years old cook of Hirohito, the former emperor of Japan, and he told me that at the imperial court, they only used Kikoman soy sauce, but not the commercial one, which is made in only one day, but a brew only made for the emperor, fermented for more than one year. Using hydrochloric acid is a far cheaper and faster method but inevitably creates carcinogens, which is why artificial soy sauce can sell for far cheaper than traditionally fermented soy sauce. One good soy sauce available in Thailand is the Sun Chaw Wong soy sauce, made from GMO free ingredients, rich in amino acids, fermented for up to one year. This brand has 3 different soy sauce , one is without sugar.

2) Toxins in our environment

I wrote in August :

In the coming weeks I will write a series of articles about toxins:
1) toxins in the air
2) toxins in our environment
3) toxins in our food
so soon I will try to find the time to publish some more about point # 2.

my best pickle ever!!! Papaya!!

2 weeks ago I got an email from Bill Hettig, my pickle teacher, about a papaya pickle.
http://www.perfectpickler.com/using-your-noodle/ . As I did not have the Rogan Josh, I mixed with the scallions, garlic, grated ginger, kosher salt, 2 crushed Thai chilies and a tablespoon of the unripe papaya seeds. Papaya seeds are very healthy and a little bit of peppery taste. They are anti malaria, can be used as an antibacterial agent for Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus or Salmonella typhi, and is nephroprotective (protect the kidneys) in toxicity-induced kidney failure.
Qua taste, this is probably one of the best pickles I have ever made :D
For your info, in Asia you ll find the ripe papaya with the fruits, and the unripe papaya in the vegetable section
The first week, the pickle is a bit slimy (can probably be solved by adding a crated carrot) but after 2 weeks the slime disappears. I can eat much more of this pickle , than e.g. from my kimchi and saurkraut, it is much easier to make, it is much more orginal, it is MY perfect pickle!!

With the orange tool, I peel my vegetables, with the blue one, I shred my vegetables.
Another variant: 1 kg shredded unripe papaya + 1 shredded carrot (160gr)+ 3 crushed chili's + 3 gloves garlic, crushed + 1 table spoon grated ginger + 70 gr finely cut scallions + 24 gr kosher salt (2%). Mix all with your hands, let it rest about 10 minutes and crush everything during 10 minutes with a mortar, in order to break the cells open , to facilitate the merger of tastes and the release of the natural juices. Put afterwards all in your pickle pot, if necessary add water till the pot is full, and close the pot. As I live in the tropics, I keep this pot 12 hours in room temperature (30 Celsius) and put then my pickle pot in a reversed "au bain Marie", in a pot with chilled water, and cover this with a lid. Twice a day, I add some ice cubes, to maintain the temperature (approx 25 degrees C), till I can smell clearly the fermentation, and then I put all the pickled stuff in a glass jar in my fridge, where it can stay up to one month.

Before I continue with toxins....

I want to present you Eric Lechasseur, one of the best macrobiotic Chefs of the moment.
Click here for his videos.