Sweet sweet Public Holidays

I LOVE Mondays that are public holidays , it feels so decadant to be able to loaf around and not contemplate work.

Today Brett feels the need for nutrients, so for him that is Raw Food. We have been trying to incorperate more raw food into our diet, and todays lunch/supper is from Kristen Suzanne's EASY Raw Vegan TRANSITION Recipes

We are having the Protein Pesto Pasta, to which we've added our own twists. To start off with, I havent been able to find Hemp Seeds, so we're leaving those out, and secondly we added lots of extra raw veggies, for bulk but also for flavour. Instead of hemp seeds we are using raw pecans, and that is going to affect the amount of protien in this dish, but I have no idea by how much, and no desire to look it up.

Protien Pesto Pasta


250 g uncooked pasta
3 cups tomatoes diced
250 g white mushrooms halved
200g fresh Broccoli cut into small florets


Pesto
4 cups Fresh Basil
1/2 cup raw pecan nuts

2 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 clove garlic crushed
1 tsp Balsamic vinegar
1/2 Himalayan rock salt or to taste
1/2 tsp fresh lemon zest
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/2 c olive oil


Cook Noodles as usual. Place in a large bowl and add the tomatoes, broccoli and mushrooms
Place all pesto ingredients except olive oil in food processor with the s-blade attachment and process briefly.
Leave Motor runnning and add the olive oil in a steady stream. Do not over process. Add pesto to Pasta and Veg and toss gently before serving.

This was almost perfect. My only complaint is that I really dont think it needed the Balsamic, so I'm going to try leaving it out next time.

Tomorrow its back to work, and I have the feeling this is going to be even better tomorrow after the flavours have had some time to develop!!

Added 22.3.2011 - Sadly the next day this wasnt great. The mushrooms were a bad idea on my part, they seemed very dry , and made everything else dry as well. I rescued the salad somewhat by removing the mushrooms and adding 1/2 full fat greek yoghurt, but this does need a re-think somewhat as it wasnt anywhere near as good as I expected