Strange and exotic health food ingredients

When you embark on a 'real food' cooking and eating journey, you will find many of these healthy ingredients and condiments at your local health food shop, organic retailer and the good old healthy food aisle at Woolworths, which is full of certified organic ingredients. I know your time -poor and itching to get healthy, so I want it to be simple for you to find these ingredients for a smooth transition in to healthy cooking and eating.

Here are some brands and ingredients to help you follow my recipes on this blog;

Spiral foods

This long established health company make tamari, (fermented wheat free soy sauce) miso, vinegars (for salad dressings), tahini, coconut milk, bonsoy milk etc avail at woolworths or health retailers.

Sweet stuff

I use rapadura or panela (brazilian 100% sugar cane unrefined, full of minerals and vitamins not as sweet as brown sugars).

Maple syrup and rice syrup, date molasses (lebanese ingredient) and black strap molasses when baking.

Flours

I like to use either Demeter farm mill biodynamic grains and flours and Old bob's mill. I find these the freshest and best quality.

My favourite grains are spelt, buckwheat and rye. I also use rice and coconut flours. These flours are only available at the health food shop or organic retailer as they are speciality food products.

Dairy (butter, yoghurt)

I favour biodynamic dairy over organic as its more pure, and tastes much better. I like Barambah and Paris Creek yogurts and quark cheese. I also like paris creek butter but macro whole foods at woolworths now do organic butter which is cheaper.

Milk

Organic milk is a must for children. Barambah Unhomogenised is good, also cleopatra's if you're into raw milk. Of course I also like oat milk and rice milk when I need a break from dairy. No soy milk in my kitchen!

Nuts and dried fruits

In our cupboards we stock, organic dried figs and apricots, raw cashews and almonds.

Meat eggs and grains

We buy all our meat - grassfed and chicken - organic or free range (if we know the farm is certified) We love lamb!. We also favour sustainable seafood and certified organic or free-range eggs (look at the box carefully).

Please get to your local farmers markets to buy fresh produce, fruit and sourdough breads then get the other small goods and get cooking!

This is a rough guide and no means the law, buy what you can afford and aim to buy organic produce and dairy if it's in your budget. We like to promote home cooking for better health like our nana's did not that long ago! We use whole, natural and real ingredients from the markets and growers to inspire our recipes and dishes.

Any questions please email us info@theorganiccook.com.au