Green Wraps & Moving On Up

by thissparklylife

Hola! After a few intense weeks and 5 exams in 7 days, I’m free from uni for a month – woohoo!

I’ve spent my first week of freedom catching up on Pretty Little Liars and Keeping up with the Kardashians, attending celebratory dinners, drinking apple and cinnamon tea with friends, watching The Voice, doing Integrative Nutrition modules, cxworxing, body balancing and going to Bunker Bay for the weekend for one of my best friend’s 21st birthday. Bliss!

The last couple of days have been spent trying to figure out how to move this blog onto bigger and better things in the world wide web. Very soon it’ll be getting a much needed overhaul/revamp so keep your eyes peeled ;) Despite having a website when I was much younger and even developing an (extremely amateur!) website for a company, I’ve lost most of my geeky knowledge and am learning/struggling as I go. If you’re also considering creating a website or blog, check out Vienda Maria’s soon to be released How to Create Your Own Website guide, I know I’ll be buying it even if I get the new site up and running before it’s released.

Green Wraps »

With my dramatic increase in free time I’ve had the luxury of taking more time to prepare and get creative with meals. I’ve always been meaning to try out more variations of ‘green wraps’ where big leafy greens take the place of traditional grain wraps and are filled with all sorts of delicious fillings.

These kind of wraps are more nutrient dense, are a fun way of sneaking more greens into your diet and leave more room for you to amp up the fillings. I bought a beast of a cos lettuce the other day (I think it was cos? this was huge!) and have been making my green wraps out of its small boat sized leaves, but other big leaves you can use include collard, flat kale and rainbow chard as used by Lolita to make her Rainbow Wraps. Hers are definitely on my list to try and look like a great snack that’s veggie rich.

The first wrap I made contained lots of quinoa mixed with avocado, a little garlic and nama shoyu (unpasteurized soy sauce), tomato, coriander, raw mushroom, grated carrot, red onion, kalamata olives, wholegrain mustard and sprouts. It was delicious!

The next one I made contained overcooked brown rice (to get it to stick together) with nama shoyu, lots of grilled portabello mushrooms, capsicum, grated carrot, sliced avocado, a squeeze of lime, kalamata olives, sprouts and nutritional yeast. I put the mushrooms in when they were still hot and this wrap was equally as delicious. As they were such large leaves cutting them in half made the wraps much less unruly!

I can tell green wraps are going to become a regular meal of mine and I look forward to trying different recipes and types of leaves. A word of warning – these can get pretty messy! Definitely not first date material. I don’t think they’d go too well as a packed lunch unless you use a firmer leaf, less juicy fillings, wrap it really tightly or keep the wrap and fillings separate until you want to eat them.

Filling Ideas (+ veggies!):

  • hummus
  • marinated tofu/tempeh
  • scrambled tofu
  • left over salad
  • seeds and nuts for crunch
  • curried eggs
  • chicken or tuna
  • guacamole
  • a mexican bean wrap
  • taco fillings in smaller cos leaves
  • if you’re up for something completely different you could try Gena’s Raw Banana Breakfast Sushi
  • and absolutely everything else you’d put in a normal wrap!

I hope you try out a green wrap and let me know if you come up with any amazing combinations :) xx