Spring Reset: Your Kitchen Essentials
Spring: a time for resetting and decluttering. Let’s take your kitchen back to basics and talk essentials. We’ll throw in some minimal, uncomplicated recipes brimming with goodness for some welcome life-simplification. Because a happy tum = happy days.
We’ve all become a little obsessed with Marie Kondo and her tidying method haven’t we?! The idea of getting rid of anything in your house that doesn’t spark joy has sparked a national clear-out. This is Spring-cleaning and then some. But why’s it got us all talking? Maybe it’s because we are becoming busier without getting very much happier.
Less is more
Research shows we’re working more hours, yet our output is slowing. Is this because while the clutter and busy-ness increase in our lives, quality of life decreases? Our work/life scales are out of balance: we’ve been trading in the currency of stress.
Gradually we are waking up to the benefit of slowing down and simplifying. As demonstrated by the wellbeing movement, the hygge trend and the self care drive, we’re embracing the ethos of less. We’re investing in fewer, higher quality, more ethical products. Streamlining is exploding across fashion, beauty, interiors, technology, and – of course – food.
Food: our fuel, the foundations of so much of our health and wellbeing, also benefits from this movement away from lower quality/higher quantity.
Kitchen Essentials
With this in mind, we’re zoning in on 3 kitchen essentials that form the basis of many delicious recipes. We’re also dishing up guidance on how to use these ingredients in place of some products that might be cluttering your cupboards or lacking in nutrition. We’ve thrown in some tastebud-pleasing, minimal recipes to make life easier, too.
ACV
A good quality apple cider vinegar is a kitchen essential for any discerning foodie or wellbeing enthusiast. The key to identifying a good ACV is to ensure it has the ‘mother’ intact in the bottle. This is the cloudy web of goodness present in quality, unpasteurised ACVs (like ours!).
Read more about the extensive benefits of ACV and the mother here.
Streamline: Swap out your low quality vinegars and pre-mixed salad dressing in favour of this simple, invigorating alternative.
Make life simple recipe: Lift your leaves with one of our ACVs (we have 4 delicious flavours!) as a dressing on your favourite salad. Blend with lemon or orange juice and oil and add whatever takes your fancy – garlic, honey, wholegrain mustard, chilli, seeds. Drizzle over a bed of leaves and whatever you can forage in your fridge and voila! An easy, health-packed plate of goodness.
HONEY
Nature’s sweetener; the golden nectar kitchen essential. Stream into tea or your cake batter as a flavour-burst sweetener, relish the soothing smoothness in a drink with lemon and ginger, in a salad dressing, or in a stir fry. Honey is one of those extraordinarily versatile ingredients you can scrimp on but you won’t be getting the best out of it. A good honey provides so many benefits, it’s worth going RAW for.
Streamline: Stop loading your warm drinks with the white stuff and stir a squeeze of honey in instead.
Make life simple recipe: Whizz up this Boosting Smoothie Bowl – minutes in the making and a powerful omega 3 hit.
OLIVE OIL
A good-quality olive oil is the classic kitchen essential. As a classified ‘healthy fat’, it’s basically a superfood. For decades we’ve heard the benefits of a Mediterranean diet on health issues, such as inflammation, Alzheimer’s, heart disease). It’s no coincidence this way of eating incorporates a variety of rich, nutritious foods and is heavy on the olive oil.
Streamline: Drizzle your toast and teacakes with olive oil instead of cholesterol-heavy butter. If you’re vegan (or experimenting) olive oil serves as a minimally-processed, luxurious substitute.
Make life simple recipe: To get the most out of your olive oil, go extra virgin. we have a RAW Greek Extra Virgin Olive Oil calling out to be poured over pasta with just a pinch of sea salt and pepper. For a speedy midweek meal, blitz a handful of fresh ingredients in a blender to make our RAW Vegan Creamy Pesto.
What staples would you never be without? What’s always in your kitchen and how do you use it? Let us know by tagging us #RAWkitchenessentials #RAWvibrantliving
