today on cooking raw a visit from healthy Indian flavors Alamo Lou Bava hello everybody I'm Caroline Carter and welcome to cooking raw where we eliminate the heat and put all of our energy into preparing healthy and delicious meals using natural food shanina's not with me today but we have a treat for you we have a special guest joining me Alamo Lu Vera Vaughn the host of healthy South Indian cooking right here on public TV today we are going to make a cucumber tomato yogurt salad cauliflower curry rice curry carrot soup welcome elem aloo Thank You Caroline I'm so happy to be here on your show thank you for having me you're so welcome so today Alamelu you are going to make us a cucumber salad is that right right I'm going to be making to convert tomato yogurt salad and this is a sure winner with anyone and what I have here is the chicken burrs and when we buy the cucumber we want to buy the cucumber that is long and thin so it doesn't have that much seed in it so we are going to just take the cucumber you slice it you slice the cucumber and the way we do it in India we like to do everything in small size so I'm just going to cut it like that that's what I'm doing right here and you already have some already cut so this is a good refreshing salad the kids really enjoy having this even after school as a school snack and then we have the tomatoes here tomatoes on the vine so we will slice the tomatoes and it's so nice and juicy and it will make a great salad and tomato has a lot of lycopene in it and it's an antioxidant so when you use the tomato in its raw form it's really very healthy so I'm just going to put the tomatoes in here and then you're going to take some red onions the reason why I'm using red onion is because it's it is sweetened and it is also crunchy err in the salad and it blends so well with chicken bar and tomatoes so I'm just going to chop some red onions and I'm going to put it in here and once when we have all these three ingredients in the board what am I gonna do is Caroline I'm going to show how to make a wonderful spice blend okay spices are my favourite and spices have intrinsic health benefits and so we will clay will put this here and in this plate what I have is two different spices okay one is black peppercorn and another one is the cumin seeds and so what we do is this is the only special spice blend that I really do it at home and you combine these two equal portion and that's what we are gonna do this is a spice grinder I have two grinders one for coffee and one for spice okay so I'm just going to take a teaspoon of black let's do two teaspoons two teaspoons yes right and black black peppercorn actually pepper is known as the king of all spices and it it it takes the it's a great salsa not coarsely but nice and powder still it's kind of course I'm going to give it another see when you're grinding it can you smell the aroma yes yes yes and that's wonderful so what we are going to do is we are I'm gonna unplug it here and I'm just going to use this powder and it is a great salt substitute not only for the salad but also in the morning when you're making your fried egg are making your omelette instead of using the salt you can use this wonderful blend okay and this is a non-fat yogurt plain non-fat yogurt that I'm using okay so we are just going to blend this and if you don't want the yogurt you can easily just put this powder and just toss it when the spice powder without the yogurt okay so I'm just going to take this and smell this and it's not a hard spice it just enhances the taste and black pepper is an appetite stimulant and also it is an antioxidant and cumin is known as digestive spice its antioxidant and anti-cancerous so it's like food and medicine all in one and you're avoiding this song and so there we have the salad wow that looks beautiful we have all of our colors yes we have red right so in order to make it you know prettier you can also take let me do this and you can do some red onions over here and you can serve this like a side dish with the meal or you could also use it like a snack in between meals that is beautiful alamelu's i am going to try this yes let's take a spoon and try this okay and won't tell me what you think it looks delicious mmm-hmm very good very good how is this spice I love this way I'm a spicy person mm-hmm so I would add a little bit more spice to it okay but but you don't necessarily I don't miss the salt yes and and if you if you would like to add more according to your taste you can add a little bit more yeah and then mix it up and that gives a great taste together and it's very refreshing and a fresh salad yes very easy to prepare and for those of you who are lactose intolerant you can make your own sauce using almond milk and an avocado put it in your blender blend it up and then spread it on here so you have a non-dairy creamy sauce to add to that sounds good I have to go try it at home please do this is beautiful thank you you're very welcome that cucumber salad Alamelu made was absolutely delicious now I am going to make a curried cauliflower waar rice there's about three cups of cauliflower here about two tablespoons of jalapeno pepper about a cup of cilantro a cup of red and green peppers we have some onions garlic paprika red tomatoes sea salt a little thyme avocado curry lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil now just want to let you know you're asking Caroline where's the cooked rice there is no cook rice we have this cauliflower we're going to use that as our rice cauliflower is really good for you has vitamin A vitamin K and a lot of fiber so what we're going to do is just put everything in here here is jalapeno peppers be careful because they are hot also our cilantro put that in there look at all that wonderful chlorophyll red and green peppers onions that are very good for you we have a lot of stuff that's filled with on vitamins and nutrients antioxidants garlic as much as you like I love garlic a pinch of two of sea salt I need a little bit more I'm going to use about a teaspoon of paprika this is about a cup and a half or so of red tomatoes doesn't that look delicious a little thyme I'm gonna take this and just rub this together looks put that there and one two three I love spice and I've got a tablespoon of lemon juice 1/4 cup of olive oil dah dah dah and last but not least the avocado put that in there and mix mix it all together I wish you could smell this it smells absolutely delicious and you can't go wrong if you want it to you can do the same thing you can make Spanish rice use Mexican seasoning Wow with flavors just smudge them in really good I love this color okay now the big reveal the taste get a little bit of everything in here a little avocado hmmm this is really good if you need to add more salt sea salt more curry do so one of the things you're learn about cooking raw is that it makes you chew and chew and chew so there you have it the curry cauliflower raw rice there's just kind of been this whole renaissance feeling that people have kind of going back to the basics back to the way things used to be probably because we want to capture our recapture our health we want to you know learn from some of our mistakes and learn what really should we be eating and I think that's really where this movement came from and and really where it's headed is that people are realizing that okay maybe we should be eating a little bit more raw food some people eat all wrong some people are at least starting to experiment eating a little bit more raw but raw food is really actually a pretty healthy food to eat we just get many more people who come in here to buy because we have lots of local food because we have lots of whole food because there's lots organic food because we've CSA is because we eat right now we're seeing a huge number of people getting on board with taking care of themselves because they don't want the kind of diseases to set in so early so our ticket is to provide as much local clean easily absorb food as I can make in my Thank You Louis but so you know as much fresh stuff as I have room for as many lacto-fermented products as I can you know our ancestors all knew that you needed to eat healthfully in order to stay alive they planted gardens they maybe they were trying to plant different crops that they could get that garden extended as long as possible but then they would harvest their plants they would bring them in and they would process them many times they were fermenting them they used lactic acid fermentation this is something that's a lost art among our generations I mean our children have really lost this even my generation we were not really raised my grandparents my great-grandparents did this and they knew that if they did not eat these lactic acid fermented foods they would not be as healthy and we kind of forgot this and I think that this is one of the missing pieces that one of the reasons why yogurts and all of these you know every commercial for yogurt is is on television now because people are finally realizing this lactic acid bacteria is so important to good health and so by processing and preserving your bounty your harvest and making sauerkraut or any a number of fermented vegetables you're going to be able to eat very healthy bully all winter long until the spring until you have your shoots coming up and you're gonna be able to eat from your garden again many people in my family are gluten intolerant that was the first ticket when we found out my son was and I made everything at home buying things was really hard I would give you PC codes to pick and save and they started a little section for us and now they have a huge section in all of their stores so the need is growing and growing and growing a lot of people getting diagnosed as of the recent years it used to take 20 years to get diagnosed and now it takes 12 but we're still way behind the rest of the countries that are industrialized they check every kid in Italy by the time in second grade because they're seeing such a huge problem developing because the food is so processed what was just a genetic possibility is the presentation many many many more times than it ever was celiac disease is actually most severe form of gluten intolerance or gluten sensitivity gluten is one of the proteins that are found in grains in particular the grains that have the gluten that that causes the damage our wheat rye barley sometimes oats and when people ingest these grains they are not able to digest the gluten the protein in those grains it actually damages their intestine so that their intestine is no longer able to absorb nutrients in general so they become very malnourished they especially cannot absorb minerals so they become iron deficient that become calcium deficient in fact one of the big problems we're seeing today is osteoporosis and the majority of osteoporosis they now feel may be related to celiac disease or gluten intolerance and so the only cure that we know for these individuals is that they must for the rest of their life stay away from gluten stay away from the gluten grains so they have to strictly avoid wheat rye barley sometimes oats the Cambodians spelt which are the ancient wheats and any product that's made with them nature is really smart and our body's really want to heal and if you just go back a couple of generations not our parents we have to go a couple generations before that to whatever your culture ate find those things out get lacto-fermented products into your body kefir you buttermilk if you can do all the dairy stuff or like ours with the coconut kombucha cheese kimchi fermented vegetables sauerkraut there's so many every culture has them you just have to find out what yours were and have some of those at each meal and life changes in there because your reestablishing good gut flora from esophagus to call it and this really Billy goes away we really want to connect with our food we want to know who's growing our food we want to know where it's coming from and there is a you know there is a certain spirituality to food not in a religious sense but just kind of knowing you know connecting with that food connecting with the earth knowing where it came from and how we are actually going to be using it and digesting it and eating it we seem to do much better on food that we have a connection with where we actually know that would we identify with that food then then food that comes in a box with it comes in a box came from how many you know thousands of miles away we don't have any idea who grew it and so we're missing some of that connection and it appears of this connection with our food seems to be an important piece two down and one more to go our last dish is going to be a soup it is a curry carrot soup it's the cold soup co soup have a long tradition thus kabocha soup is just one to mention one but our soup today is going to have carrots about three carrots cherry tomatoes zucchini raw walnuts black raisins red onions parsley carrot strips we have some ginger with garlic avocado lemon juice red onions dates curry sea salt little tahini cumin and we also have some nutritional yeast olive oil and some raw almond milk now I made this while almond milk with raw almonds not roasted or anything with sea salt and about three cups of water I wanted it sort of thick so I only use three cuts but if you want it a little bit thinner use four cups put it in your blender blend blend blend and that's it quick and easy almond milk if you want it a little bit sweeter you can add dates agave you can add a little cinnamon or nutmeg to give it a different flavor so we're going to get started on this soup and we're going to put our carrots in first about three carrots and here is this fancy Vitamix and we're going to take the lid off okay we're going to add our carrots and about one cup of cherry tomatoes for a cup of zucchini and we're gonna add some avocado and let's just start off with one little piece of ginger I love garlic so two things of garlic start off with one date just sweeten it up a little bit but 1/4 cup of red onions and 2 teaspoons of the curry a couple of pinches of sea salt I'm going to add some tahini in here this is about two tablespoons put that in there and we're gonna add some of our almond milk about a cup or maybe two put that in there nutritional yeast full of nutrients vitamin B and let's do one more it gives it a nice flavor I love that and about 1/4 cup of olive oil okay that's it let's put our lid on and a little cap and what's blend okay I'm going to turn this off for a moment to taste it see let's see hmm that's good I mean just a little bit more starting here for me and just a little bit more almond milk and let's blend turn it off it's a very thick soup put that in there and I'm going to cut that down and I'm going to taste it one more time mmm very good okay and I'm going to pour it in this bowl I love that color a mustard color that is so to give it a little texture I'd like to add if I had some and color few more carrot shredded carrots let's add some parsley flakes around there few onions and if you want reasons add a few more raisins and walnuts different texture you have you're chewing on something something smooth and here you have it so that about does it for us today people thank you so much for joining us join us again next time as we cook raw by you