This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today I have another exciting episode for
you. I'm sitting in front of my strawberry bed. And I was inspired today to actually
make a recipe using fresh-picked strawberries and some other things around my garden, so
I could -- actually, I could enter a contest entitled the "Hot Raw Chef Contest."
So this video is the extended-length version. At the Hot Raw Chef Contest, they made me
cut it down to 5 minutes, but you guys are getting the full extended-length version.
And if you enjoy my videos, the one way you can pay me back today is, actually, go to
hotrawchef.com to vote for my video so that I can win. Please go to hotrawchef and vote
for me. In any case, let's get started and go around
my garden to show you how I use some of the fresh ingredients and some of the foods that
I grow here. So now I'm in my strawberry patch, and we're going to pick some fresh strawberries
for the dressing I'm going to make. And I want to encourage you to always use the freshest
and highest-quality ingredients. And I've found that, even going to farmers'
markets, the quality wasn't high enough for me, so I really had to grow my own in compost
and rock dust minerals, to get the full flavor of the food to come out. So I don't need to
use any additives like salt to make my food taste good, because if your food had the nutrients
and minerals in it, it would taste good by itself, without any additives. So let's go
ahead and pick some of these strawberries. You can see I have so many strawberries here,
hiding from me. We just need to simply remove some of the leaves out of the way and brush
them back. And here is a nice red strawberry. All right. So here's the last strawberry to
fill up my pint. Now, strawberries are really delicious foods. They're also very nutritious.
They're high in antioxidants; they fight inflammation. But they don't ripen after picking, so it's
very important to pick them as ripe as possible, so I'm picking the ripe ones here. But if
you're not, you want to get them at a farmers' market; they've definitely fresher and riper.
And you want to be able to make sure they're as dark, deep red as possible. The other thing
many people don't know is that even organic strawberries bought in the store have been
sprayed with copper so that they actually resist of -- going bad. And so then you're
ingesting more copper in your diet, so that's something to be aware of. Let's move on and
pick the spinach next. So we're standing in another area of my garden,
and we're going to pick some fresh spinach. So, yes, this is what spinach looks like when
it grows up a little bit. These nice little tasty leaves are so delicious when they're
fresh-picked. Now, spinach is high in folate and also other antioxidants. Let me go ahead
and fill up this bowl with some fresh spinach. So I think I'm done -- finished picking all
the fresh spinach. Now, when you grow your own food, you get to choose when to harvest
it. I mostly harvested all the little baby tender leaves for my spinach, so that's definitely
a plus. Next thing, we got to harvest the last thing,
and that's right in front of me. As you can see here, I have all these amazing pansies
growing, and flowers are the next ingredients that's going to go into the salad. Here's
some orange pansies. I got purple pansies. We got white pansies. We got lavender pansies.
We got all different color pansies. I'm going to pick a whole bunch of flowers to dress
up the salad. Besides looking pretty to the eyes, flowers are functional; they're high
in antioxidants. But remember they spoil really fast after you pick them, so it's best to
grow your own. I'm going to go ahead and fill this bowl up with some flowers. So here's
the last pansy flower, going into the dish. Now, these are all edible flowers. Another
ones that's common you may know are dandelion flowers. Now, they don't taste as good as
pansy flowers, but they're also edible. So I highly encourage you to use some edible
flowers in all your creations. So now we're in my backyard, and I have a
container garden with fruit trees. So, even in containers, this tangerine tree -- this
is an ortanique tangerine, and we're going to go ahead and pick this, and this tangerine
is going to go into our dressing. So, now that I've got all the ingredients, let's go
out in front and make this dressing. So, now that we've picked all our ingredients,
we're ready to make the delicious dressing. And let me first go ahead and introduce all
the ingredients. Once again, we have a bowl of fresh-picked spinach, a little bowl of
fresh-picked flowers, a half cup of raw macadamia nuts, and one pint of freshly picked strawberries,
plus our little tangerine. So what we're going to do, we're going to make this dressing in
the blender. I'm using a Vitamix TurboBlend VS today, and that comes with this normal
64-ounce carafe. But we're not going to use this, because I find that it's really hard
to get dressings out of a tall carafe such as this. We're going to set that to the side.
And I prefer this carafe here. This is a 32-ounce carafe; works a lot better, a little bit more
squared off, easy to get your dressings out of. We're going to go ahead and put that on
top. We're going to go ahead and cut our tangerine in half. Oh, man, that looks like a good one.
So this one's a seedless tangerine, and I'm just going to squeeze the juice, literally,
into the blender. If it did have seeds, I would go ahead and put it in the nut milk
bag and, literally, squeeze it. So this will squeeze out all the juice in the blender carafe
and not get any of the seeds in there. Then -- now, if you do blend up the seeds, that's
all right; you can eat them. But it's going to take -- make whatever you're eating taste
really bitter. Let's go ahead and throw that other half in there. So we're using, basically,
the juice of one tangerine. Now, you could also use a orange or other citrus fruit, if
you don't have any tangerines handy. So real simple, real easy. Let's go ahead and squeeze
the rest of that juice out, just like that. Next, we're going to go ahead and add our
one pint of strawberries. And, finally, we're going to add our half cup of macadamia nuts.
Next, all we need to do is simply put on the blender top and start to blend. [Blender mixing]
All right. So that'll do it that'll make a nice, creamy strawberry dressing. And now
all we have to simply do is pour that over our -- our spinach. Once again, you can use
this over, you know, noodles, over pasta noodles, you know, made with the spiralizer machine.
And the other trick I like to do is, you know, because we're using expensive ingredients
and high-quality ingredients, I want to get every last bit out of the blender carafe.
And I have this nice spatula that I got. It's nice and long, and it allows you to get, actually,
underneath the blade to scoop out all that delicious dressing. So, as you can see, we're
getting every last bit of dressing onto the salad. And you can use this dressing, you
know, for a multitude of uses. You know, you could put it in wraps, put it over noodles,
or whatever you want. Sometimes I'll just put it over cut-up cucumbers or even celery.
Next, we're going to take our beautiful flowers and sprinkle them on there. The more flowers,
the better; it makes it look pretty. Plus, there's a lot of antioxidants in the flowers.
So there it is. That's how easy it is to make a salad out of the garden with a creamy strawberry
dressing. So here is the final result of the creamy strawberry dressing, over our fresh-picked
spinach leaves. Now, you can use any leaves or greens in your garden. You could even put
broccoli pieces in there, broccoli florets, cut up some celery, or whatever, you know,
salad fixings you would like, under the dressing. So I really enjoyed making this dressing for
you today. The other thing to remember is that you can use different nuts. If you don't
have raw macadamia nuts, use some almonds, use some pecan, use some hazelnuts, or whatever
you have. So, once again, this was a recipe with under 5 ingredients, mostly out of my
garden. And, once again, this recipe was made for a contest I'm entering called the Hot
Raw Chef Contest. So, hopefully, I'm hot, and hopefully, this is raw, and hopefully,
I win the contest. But I need you guys' help. So please go to hotrawchef.com to vote for
me. Don't forget. Please vote for me. I need your help. Once again, this is John Kohler
with growingyourgreens.com. Remember, go to hotrawchef.com. We'll see you next time. And
keep on growing!