September, 2008

Its time to talk some more about juices and what makes ours superior!

First of all, fresh juices are absolutely chock full of vitamins and minerals. They are simply whole foods that have had all the pulp and fiber removed leaving only the high nutrient water content that is contained within each fruit and vegetable. As nature has a way of putting groups of nutrients together that complement each other, and that when consumed, work synergistcally to repair, cleanse, heal and rejuvenate, drinking juice is a great and natural way to get your vitamins!

When you drink juices they go directly into your blood stream with the nutrients actually feeding your body cells within ten to fifteen minutes, whereas solid food takes many hours of digestion before its nourishment can become available to the cells and tissues of the body – so drinking fresh juice really does provide instant rejuvenation! (Please note that regular store bought juices do not offer the same benefits as they have been pastuerized therefore all the enzymes and most of the nutrients have been destroyed)

Not all juicing machines are the same and we chose our Norwalk Juicer because of its ability to extract the highest quality juice using a method of extraction that produces a minimum mixing of air therefore resulting in very slow oxidation. This means the juices can be kept in the fridge for over 72 hours with no loss of the vital nutrients.

Laboratory tests have been done to prove this, and samples from the Norwalk Juicer (the one we have) after being refrigerated for 72 hours were found to be essentially the same as when they were first made, whereas juices from other machines had deteriorated to the extent that a test could not be properly made. In a similar test it showed that the Norwalk produced approximately 64% to 70% more juice than other machines – therefore 64% – 70% more nutrients!

So what does all this mean? It means:

• We can extract our juices each morning and bottle them ahead of time without any loss of vitality – no more waiting in line for someone to make your juice, its fast and convenient for you.
• Even though we prepare our juice ahead of time you will still be getting 64-70% more nutritive value than other juices made to order.
• Drinking one of our juices will provide instant rejuvenation and an abundance of vitamins and minerals to feed your body and is a great way to introduce more fresh fruits and vegetables into your diet.

I never thought trash could be such an exciting subject but as I have been thinking and researching about our trash options at the restaurant this excitement is certainly growing! For instance if we carefully recycle and compost everything we can, we should be able to reduce our actual trash to just 10% of what we throw out, meaning 90% can be recycled. That’s exciting!

The US is the number one trash producing country in the world throwing away on average 3.5 pounds of trash each day. And really once their trash is out on the street for collection how many people actually give it a second thought? However all that trash is going somewhere and it is gradually filling up our landfills at an alarming rate. Unless we take action at some point in the not too distant future we will be faced with the question of, what next?

Here are some interesting facts I found when researching this topic:

• One third of all garbage thrown away by Americans is packaging and much of this packaging takes years to fully decompose.
• Estimates suggest that the average American office worker uses up to 500 disposable coffee cups each year.
• Styrofoam and plastic containers take one million years to fully decompose.
• A disposable diaper takes 550 years.
• Cigarette butts take 12 years to decompose.
• Plastic carry bags decompose in 15 to 1000 years.
• Aluminum cans decompose in 80 to 100 years.
• It takes 90% less energy to recycle aluminum cans than creating new ones
• The energy we save by recycling one glass bottle is enough to let one light bulb burn for 4 hours
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers!

Anyway those are just a few fun facts I found while browsing the internet but there are many and this site here has a whole list of them – http://members.aol.com/Ramola15/funfacts.html

What we are going to do for our part is set up our trash system to make it easy and convenient for us to recycle and compost and hopefully be an example for others to use. I am talking with one company who is doing great things in bringing awareness to our trash problem in Key West and will come and set us up with a simple system www.freewebs.com/trashedinthekeys plus another person who will use our compost for the new community garden that is being built. And all our cups, straws, cutlery, to-go containers and grocery bags are made from compostable materials so can be put right into the compost bin and will biodegrade within 60 days.

As soon as we have our system in place I will post some pictures!

Luckily it seems we are going to be spared the brunt of the storm that at one time was on track for a direct hit of Key West. Nature is a powerful thing however and storms can often be unpredictable as we found out three years ago when Hurricane Rita took a very unpredicted turn in the middle of the night and caught the Florida Keys off guard. We ended up losing our boat as did many other unfortunate people. So lessons learned by everyone living here is it is always better to be prepared. Tourists were evacuated on Saturday, business are closed and most people have boarded up their properties, including us. So I guess I was wrong when I said that the next photos would be of the kitchen in place!!

at least we managed to recylce an old kitchen mat!!

I haven’t really given out too much information about the menu yet, so just for starters here are a few samples of some of the dishes we will be serving, and remember its all organic…

Quinoa Salad
Quinoa, apple, goji berries, toasted pecans, chickpeas, boston lettuce, pomegranate vinaigrette
- full of protein and anti-oxidants

Spinach Salad
Spinach, crispy shitake mushrooms, candied walnuts, asian pear, cashew cheese*, balsamic dressing

Mexican Salad
Romaine lettuce, black beans, corn, jicama, tomato salsa, sour cream, guacamole, chips, spicy nutmeat

(* i just have to tell you a little bit about this cheese as its very unique! Its made in a small artisan cheese factory in New York using all the same methods as traditional cheese yet it is made out of nut milk instead of cows milk. It looks and tastes very much like cheese and is full of great pro-biotics, yet there is no dairy in it. And not only will we be using the hard and the soft cheeses in our dishes we will also have individual packaged cheeses available for your purchase! The sour cream in the Mexican salad is very similar and a product we will be making ourselves)

Wild Salmon Wrap
Wild Alaskan salmon, jicama, cucumber, romaine, nori, sesame seeds, avacado wasabi spread

English Garden Wrap
Arugula, tomatoes, peppers, beets, scallions, cucumber, herbs, pickles, mixed greens, hemp pesto dressing, mayonnaise*

Chicken Salad Wrap
Organic chicken, celery, herbs, apple, mixed baby greens, mayonnaise*

* Our mayonnaise is home-made without using the traditional egg yolks or the soy or refined canola oil that many immitations use. It’s still creamy and tastes as good but has much better health benefits.

Coconut and Lime Curry
Brown rice, butternut squash, bok choy, spinach, broccoli, mung bean sprouts, cashews (add chicken or fish)

Oriental BBQ Chicken
Stir-fried rice, marinated bbq chicken, snowpeas, scallions, red peppers, ginger-soy sauce

We will be very particular about the chicken we use making sure we know the farm that is raising it, that it is completely free-range and raised naturally and humanely.

Crispy Tacos*
Corn taco shells filled with spicy nut meat, romaine lettuce, tomato salsa, sour cream served with a jicama, corn, avocado salad

Lasagna*
Layers of zucchini noodles, nut meat, spinach, fresh tomatoes, pesto, creamy marinara

* Both the above two dishes are classed as ‘Raw Food’. This means we create the dishes using only vegetables, nuts and seeds and no heat. So for instance, instead of baking the taco shells we use a dehydrator that takes the moisture out at low temperatures creating a nice crispy shell that looks just like a regular taco, but far more healthy! The reason for doing this is it retains all the nutrients and all the enzymes needed to help with digestion and assimilation of food that are lost through cooking, therefore providing ultimate nutrition. Its been proven that those that include more raw food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, in their diet have increased energy, achieved significant weight loss and improved overall health.

No Moo Ice
Home-made Ice cream in a variety of flavors

Now for the good part! First of all our ice cream is made from scratch by us. But instead of using milk as a base we use a home-made coconut milk, the meat of young coconuts (different from the hard brown coconuts most people are familiar with) together with cashew nuts and coconut oil (remember what I said about coconut oil? – if not click here) which makes a really rich and creamy base and then we sweeten with agave nectar which is a natural, low glycemic sweetner from the agave cactus plant – yes thats the same plant that tequila comes from! Our flavorings are also made of course, by us, from real ingredients. For instance strawberry syrup is made by simply blending strawberries with agave, none of these artificial flavorings that most ice creams use.

While we don’t claim to offer a lower calorie ice cream than others on the market we do claim that the calories in our ice cream are more readily used and absorbed by the body as immediate energy rather than stored as fat, plus because it is made from whole natural plant based ingredients you are actually providing yourself with an array of very usable nutrients. We will be packaging ice cream for purchase in half pint containers.

This is only a small example of the menu, and, in addition to our suggestions all our ingredients will be displayed on a seperate page in our menu, so you can ‘help yourself’ and create your own dish depending on what you are in the mood for.

We will also be offering fresh pressed juices, smoothies and organic teas and coffee, oh, and wait till you try our blended coffee float – shot of espresso blended with our vanilla ice cream, topped with almond cream and sprinkled with raw chocolate – move over Starbucks!!

I will expand on the juices in a later post as we are getting a specific juicer that ensures superior nutrition in all our juices – a whole other story!

For now I hope you enjoy this small slice of our menu and keep checking back as I update the blog with information. The next post is all about trash – composting and recycling, very exciting stuff!!

Just wanted to post these pictures as this is the last time its going to look like this! The next pictures will be of a working kitchen!

Its very exciting as the inside is finally ready for the equipment to start arriving, hopefully this week! All the finishing touches, the cutting in and the trim work were taking me ages and seemed to be dragging on and on so finally I just got someone to help me finish it yesterday, and what a relief that was! Of course theres still lots of small things to finish up but I can at least start bringing in the equipment ready for the fun part of recipe testing! Paul, who would otherwise have been helping me, has been traveling in Ecuador and Peru for 3 weeks (a trip that was planned long before we embarked on this adventure!). I have been chatting with him via our gmail chat and it sounds like he is having an amazing trip. He has been visiting the local farms and markets and been cooking with the local people, so is bringing back some great recipe ideas he says!!

And in amongst the work I have been doing on the building, I have been doing some small bits of recipe testing at home. Last night I made a chocolate brownie that we are planning on offering. And this brownie isn’t like normal brownies, it tastes the same, but is packed full goodness and nutrients! Theres plenty of anti-oxidants from the chocolate and the goji berries that are in it. Hemp seeds, chia seeds and walnuts provide protein and Omega 3’s and the coconut flour and oil provides fiber and instant energy. So now you can feel good about indulging! However one word of warning don’t eat too much of these late at night, you might not sleep – I found that out last night!!