Chocolate Dates and Fermented Foods

My last post was about going sugar-free and learning new whole foods/plant based recipes. We made it the whole month without eating any refined sugars, honey, or maple syrup but we did eat dates. I think what made the month easier to get through was when I discovered how to make these chocolate bars with blended almonds, dates, cocoa, and a bit of coconut oil. Super easy. Toss it all in the blender, dump it on parchment paper, flatten it out with your hands, toss it in the freezer to cool, cut it in squares, and enjoy! We leave ours in the freezer because it's so bloody hot here in Cambodia. Having a little square of this date-chocolate-almond goodness is the perfect after-dinner sweetness that we used to enjoy with a piece of dark chocolate. 

Now that our month of going sugar-free is over, we've adopted new eating patterns and decided we'd continue to eat mostly sugar-free. We'll still enjoy the odd KOI Bubble Tea with 0% sugar (which still has sugar in the flavouring and bubbles) and I had a bit of ketchup with my eggs the other day. I wouldn't say we felt extra amazing off the sugar BUT my eczema did clear up significantly and I haven't had itchy feet for the first time in 3.5 years! 

This past July, when I was researching various ways of healing eczema that didn't involve hydrocortisone creams, I learned that I likely could benefit from having more probiotics. So I decided to learn how to make kombucha! I started to create my own scoby, and about a month later I had a thin layer of this bacteria and yeasty gelatin-like goop to start fermenting some sweet black tea. I followed this recipe and let it ferment longer so that most of the sugar was eaten and added some frozen berries, let it carbonate, and it turned out great! I'm now starting to get into a good kombucha rhythm so that we'll have some ready in the fridge to enjoy multiple times a week.

My scoby in the sweet tea ready for fermentation

Last week, I was out of town for work and was able to meet up with an old friend who we used to run with. Over dinner, she shared how she made yogurt super easily. She told me her process and I was shocked how easy it was and couldn't believe all the dollars we could be saving if I simply made it myself! Yogurt is not cheap in Cambodia. A normal small cup of yogurt (one serving) is about $0.80 USD for Thai yogurt. I bought a box (1 L) of UHT milk and a small cup of this Thai yogurt, heated the milk up on the stove until it started to steam, then cooled it off until I could leave my finger in the milk for 20 seconds without burning myself, then added the cup of yogurt, stirred, poured it into a container, wrapped it in a tea towel, then left it on the fridge over night. The next morning, we had yogurt! It was still a bit runny so I strained it through a cheesecloth and we ended up with delicious thick greek-style yogurt. The equivalent amount of yogurt that we would normally buy for $0.80 USD is now costing us $0.15 USD! 

Heating up milk to make yogurt

I'm enjoying learning how to make new things and sometimes I wish I had more time to create in the kitchen. But life here is hectic, we're super busy with our work, our sleep is often interrupted, and often life feels hard to keep up with. So the best part about the date-chocolate bars, the kombucha, and the yogurt is that they're all super easy and fast to make/prep.