A vegan version of the Indian warm-weather classic. 

Seasonal fruit practically pours out of each grocery store and farmers’ market. Temperatures teeter between pleasantly warm and hideously oppressive. It’s summer and there’s no better time to embrace smoothies as cooling, nourishing snacks or even as meals. Blend yourself up some vitamins, minerals, and much-needed glucose with these recipes. Feel free to add chlorella, spirulina, or vegan protein powder as desired.

Recipe #3: Mango Lassi

Though you’ll see this on the menu at Indian and Nepalese restaurants, it’s rare to find it in vegan form. Get your mango on with this dairy-free recipe. The spices really set this recipe apart from the rest, so don’t skip out on these!

Ingredients:

• 3 champagne mangos
• 1 cup coconut yogurt (or flesh from 1 young coconut)
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon or cardamom
• 1 cup water

Directions:

This post originally appeared in Sierra magazine.

Image: Matthias Rhomberg

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The benefits of mango with a recipe to add to the love.

Mango is a meaty fruit that holds its own quite well in more complex dishes. It is a nutrition powerhouse with some major benefits – it lowers cholesterol, regulates sex hormones, boosts sex drive, improves concentration and memory, treats acne, fights diabetes, and prevents cancer and heart disease. It it also helpful for women going through menopause or who are pregnant.

The parsley adds an earthy tone to the citrus from the grapefruit and sweetness from the mango, and the cayenne gives the salad an additional edge that will not only taste great but also boost your metabolism.

Spicy Mango Citrus Ceviche

Serves 1

Ingredients:

• 1 mango
• Juice of 1 grapefruit
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley or cilantro
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• Dash of sea salt

Directions:

Julienne the mango and place on a serving tray with the grapefruit juice. The longer the mango sits in the citrus, the more tender and infused with flavor it becomes.

Add the sea salt, cayenne and chopped parsley or cilantro.

Toss and serve.

Enjoy!

Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

The post Recipe: Spicy Mango Citrus Ceviche appeared first on EcoSalon.

Writer Shira Levine goes in search of an active volcano.

It’s not every day you find yourself hiking a steep incline up to the rim of a previously erupted volcano crater unless, well, you live near a volcano. The closest volcanoes to my home in New York City are too far to consider for a Sunday hike and while there’s the still active Yellowstone volcano in Wyoming, it’s still about 1,890 miles away. A bit further still is Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Volcanoes in Iceland and Greenland are about the same distance. Much closer are some volcanoes located in the Connecticut River Valley, but unfortunately to satisfy my inner volcanophile, they’re now about a million years extinct which leaves me sort of hanging.

I was fired up to find something safely authentic, conical, and maybe offering a little smoke. I’d witnessed classic volcanoes like Arenal in Costa Rica, the Lake Atitlan volcanoes in Guatemala, Lake Ometepe’s volcanoes in Nicaragua, and the twin Pitons of St. Lucia from afar – just never navigated them. Finally, this summer I hiked up my first volcano. Mt. Liamuiga in St. Kitts, one of 18 volcanoes in the Caribbean, and one of the more challenging to ascend.

Liamuiga, which means “fertile land” in the Kalinago Caribbean language, is a precipitous hike. Our guide Oneal Mulraine, took us up something like 4,000 feet through rain and cloud forest replete with Banyan and Viper trees, Spanish Ash, Hearts of Palm, Mimosa, and Maho to reach the summit of the long-ago exploded crater. Really experienced, fit hikers can brave an additional hike down into the crater to explore the lush overgrown greenery and a glittering lake. But for me, the 2.5-hour hike up was just fine.

Hikers can go solo, but going with the guide is safer and more informative. Oneal is an herbalist and bush doctor, so shared with us some cool holistic remedies and fun facts. At the start of our hike, he picked one plant that he suggested wrapping around our neck to prevent neck and back pain. It worked well especially as my hotel, the St. Kitts Marriott Resort & Royal Beach Casino had kindly supplied us with cute but awkward bags full of food and drink. They were more for leisurely picnics, versus any hiking that required the deep lunging movements we used when straddling rocks and fallen trees.

Along the way we spotted a few notable birds that get birdwatchers in a tizzy. Terry, the token birdwatcher of the group was on a casual mission to spot three specific birds, and nailed sightings of: the Bridled Quail Dove, a Green-Throated Carib, and a Red-Tailed Hawk. Another hiker, Edith, brought her spiritual knowledge to the group and shared a collection of blessings and offerings. Without them, the 1,800-year dormant volcano might have exploded and killed us.

Since the volcano is indeed dormant, the main thing to be cautious of when hiking Liamuiga is the moldy mango. According to Oneal, they’re worse than banana peels when it comes to slipping and falling. Wiley French Vervet monkeys, the little dirty, littering suckers they are, are said to outnumber the 35,000 Kittitians on the island. They are to blame for the fruity booby traps. The monkeys take a few bites and then chuck the slimy remains along Liamuiga’s footpath.

If there’s anything sacred at Liamuiga, it is the majesty of the views from the top. The last bend requires a little rope action to help hikers cross over and around to the wide-open clearing. What is revealed is the soul of the crater in all its fertile grassy green glory. No photography does this kind of nature justice. I stop trying to capture and document the hindsight and just let go to be at one with the present.

Hindsight isn’t bad though, especially when back at the Marriott where I further beat away any possible muscle fatigue with a languid swim in the Caribbean Sea, followed by some lazy pool floating, and most importantly, that double shot of local rum at the swim-up bar.

If merely hiking a volcano is too tame for your adventurous side, there are in fact other ways like biking, surfing and skiing, to traverse both the active and dormant volcano.

You go have your own fun.

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In addition to packing a hefty antioxidant punch, the mango – a superfruit if there ever was one – is now proven to fend off poverty, global warming, and sexism.

According to an article in the BBC News, residents of the Dharhara village in the Bhagalpur district of northwestern India have engaged in a social experiment using mangoes to up the value of their daughters. In many parts of India, girls are seen as less desirable than boys. Families want a male heir, and a son is seen as an extra source of income for the family.  Female feticide – in which doctors illegally abort unborn baby girls on the basis of their sex alone – is rampant throughout India, with 50 million girls missing, according to UNICEF. Female feticide has created a shortage of eligible brides in India, with males in some urban regions traveling to rural areas to secure a wife. But girls who aren’t aborted are often subject to extreme domestic violence later in life. Bride burning, in which men set fire to their wives for lack of a sufficient dowry, occurs in parts of India.

It is against this grisly backdrop that the residents of Dharhara have decided to make their daughters more valuable in Indian society. For every girl born, the family plants at least 10 mango trees in the village. The mangoes provide a source of income for the parents, allowing them to save enough money for a dowry upon their daughter’s marriage – thus avoiding the violence that accompanies a scanty marriage settlement. One mango orchard yields about $4,245 worth of mangoes each season, enough to supplement the familial income, with leftover money going in a bank account for the child’s dowry.

“We heard about it from our fathers and they from their fathers. It has been in the family and the village from ages,” Subhendu Kumar Singh, a school teacher, told the BBC. “This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in our village.”

While the Dharhara tradition shelters the village’s girls from the misogyny in greater India, the fact that mango trees alone can make a girl more valuable speaks volumes of the undervaluing of women in the first place. Preferable, of course, is a major cultural shift, one in which women – mango trees or not – are treasured from birth like men. But barring that, the Dharhara mango project is a model worth emulating.

Image: Mickey_boy[L]

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