Coming Off The Cleanse

We survived the cleanse and after 12 days, we both felt a lot better. I had more energy and was sleeping better. Jim also had increased energy and noticed an easing of his arthritis pain. Now it's time to slowly re-introduce the things that were stricken from out diet during the cleanse. At first we gleefully thought sugar! It just makes things taste a bit better. OK, it makes things taste alot better. But when actually thinking about it, sugar doesn't really add any nutritional value so we decided to hold off on that for now. After careful consideration the thing we decided that would make the biggest impact on us right now was yeast. Surprised? Let me explain.

If we introduce yeast first, we are now able to eat oranges, grapefruits, peanuts, grapes, those wonderful things that have naturally occurring yeast on their skins. Plus we can have all of those things in the 'feremented' category that we weren't allowed. Yeast must be present for fermentation to take place which is why we weren't eating anything fermented. Now we can have vinegars, soy sauce, pickles, olives, black tea, DIJON MUSTARD. Can you hear the angels singing?

While I was looking through cookbooks to decide what to make for dinner, the page that fell open when I opened Let Them Eat Vegan! was "Chickpea and Artichoke Bliss in a Dish". When I was doing recipe testing for Dreena this was one of my favourites. It's consistently good. 

There's balsamic vinegar in there and olives....the full recipe contains raisins, but I had to leave those out this time around. Dreena was kind enough to post the recipe on her website. You can find it here. If you make it, I highly recommend adding the raisins. Those angels are really singing now. 

While we were "cleansing" I tried making a couple of different salad dressings, and they were just OK. Something seemed to be missing. Oh yes - that vinegar "punch". Now I could make a proper dressing. One that I really enjoy is from Dynise Balcavage, that I also did testing for.  

Here is 'Dijon Vinaigrette' from The Urban Vegan: 250 Simple, Sumptuous Recipes from Street Cart Favorites to Haute Cuisine.  It's got dijon mustard in there and vinegar. Simple, classic, a winner! 

It really livened up our salad. A plate of greens never tasted so good. Now the entire choir has joined in.