Breads, Muffins, Pancakes:

Pumpkin Pancakes from Wellness Mama

Cinnamon Almond Pancakes from Hella Delicious

Almond Flour Crepes from Eat Nourishing

We just love Trout Lake Farmer’s Market, Vancouver BC. Our recipe from today’s haul features many local food businesses. The rough eye fillet is from freshofftheboat.ca, the lychees are from our local Chinese farm stand (we just love lychee season!), the butter in the buerre rouge is from a local artisan dairy out in Chillawack — Farm House Cheeses and is incredibly yellow — out at the farm, behind their shop (see image below) their cows enjoy large fields of grass under the mountains. Strawberries in the salad are of course local as well. My own balcony-grown arugala is also featured 🙂 (By the way this dish is absolutely divine and remarkably quick and easy to make.)

Ever since my menarche I regularly get a powerful craving for raw beef about once a month. When I was younger I didn’t waste time thinking about it and would just head to the fridge, chow down on whatever raw meat I could find in there and end up feeling rather crazy, but satiatied. I kept this to myself for many years, but after coming across Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell everything made more sense, I was simply following a nutritional imperitive dictated by my body.

These days I am careful to be sure to use grass-fed meat for my raw meat dining experiences. When I stumbled upon Ethiopian kitfo I was infatuated. Raw grass-fed beef served with spiced butter from grass-fed cows, mild cottage cheese and collard greens is something I love to crave. The cardamom is one of my favorite spices and adds a very special flavor.

Cherries and pecans are both incredibly high in antioxidants and the coconut cream and oil in these tasty pompoms are also very good for you. These are easy to make and hard to stop eating! They remind me of Santa’s Whiskers Christmas cookies … they taste like fresh wintery snowballs, especially if you keep them chilled. Maybe it is because I grew up in Papua New Guinea, but I always associate coconut with Christmas.

• 1 c chopped dates
• 1 1/2 c chopped pecans
• 1 c dried cherries
• 2 pods cardamom ground
• dash salt
• 1 c coconut cream (manna)
• 1/2 c butter or coconut oil
• 2 Tablespoons cocoa (optional)

Many years ago I worked in an Italian restaurant during the America’s cup races in New Zealand. One of our favorite desserts that summer was a light and creamy traditional zabaglione. This version, made with a coconut water reduction and honey instead of marsala and sugar is a real treat on a winter’s night.

Technically, a zabaglione is a caudle, a hot, wine-fortified drink made as a healing draught for a sick person. The noun later morphed into the verb “to coddle,” meaning “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.” Which isn’t a bad way to describe how zabaglione makes me feel. –Zabaglione Love

When you reduce coconut water to a syrup it results in a salty-sweet mineral rich syrup. This recipe is my version of candied yams and has the perfect balance of sweet and salty with an exotic coconut twist.

This moist chestnut, pistachio and goji stuffing makes a tasty filling for a juicy goose. The chestnuts just soak up the goose fat and the combination of sausage, pistachios and gojis makes an exotic stuffing with a powerful antioxidant punch. Our local neighborhood Italian grocher Renzullo’s gets in delicious fat Italian chestnuts this time of year and the combination of them with the prize winning blueberry sausage from Gelderman farms is a good blend of local and global flavors for our traditional dinner.