It’s Tuesday night, it’s raining. You’re tired, dragging yourself home, your stomach is rumbling. You get home and head into the bathroom straight away: you dry your hair quickly, change your clothes, but the laundry can wait, your stomach is rumbling even louder. Off to the kitchen! You’re not sure whether there’s anything to eat at all but open the fridge hopefully. Hotdogs! That’s great. And there’s some bread left to go with it. Thank goodness. Some kind of sauce would be great, it does make everything slide down more easily. Back to the fridge. Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise… Oh no, not again!

All of us have experienced similar disappointments. Having had enough of them, I plunged into the kitchen and concocted several sauces to put an end to the problem above. Considering their flavor, they could be part of any festive menu, but it is so surprisingly simple and easy to prepare them that I have to mention them as ‘everyday life hacks’.

Besides being quick to make and delicious, they have numerous other benefits as well. You can use them in a variety of ways. You can drizzle them on salads, spread them in sandwiches, hamburgers. You can eat them with meat or make plain side dishes tastier. You can use them as dips for cheese, vegetables or even chips. If you have more time, you can even use the second two recipes as marinade for meat. And there are several other ways to use them too.
Apart from being practical, they are nutritionally great as well because these sauces don’t contain suspicious and harmful ingredients. There’s no preservatives, artificial coloring or flavor enhancers in them. They contain no refined sugars or flour either. They are made from natural, plant-based ingredients so they can be included in many-many diets, are compatible with food intolerances and allergies.

Did you ever think that you could gain so much with just 5 minutes of your time?

SEABERRY SAUCE

Ingredients (for about 200 ml):

1 cup of raw cashewnuts
⅔ cup of 100% seaberry juice
1 teaspoon of thyme
Salt, pepper to taste

Preparation: Place all the ingredients in a high-performance blender or food processor and blend until smooth and creamy. This may take a few minutes depending on how strong your appliance is.
You can store it in a sealed mason jar for up to a week.

Tips: If your food processor is not that powerful, soak the cashewnuts in the seaberry juice before blending. The longer you let them soak, the easier it will be to make the sauce real creamy. If you can’t get seaberry juice, you can replace it with orange juice.

APPLE SAGE SAUCE

Ingredients: (for about 400 ml):

1 cup cashewnuts
⅔ cups of 100% apple juice
1 spoon of coconut oil
1 small onion
3-4 larger leaves of sage
Salt, pepper to taste

Preparation: Place the cashewnuts and the apple juice into the blender. Dice the onion, chop the sage. Saute onions until tender and glazed, then add the chopped sage, salt to taste and give a quick stir. When it cools down a bit, add the sage-onion mixture into the blender as well and blend until smooth and creamy.

You can store it in a sealed mason jar for up to a week.

GINGER DATE SAUCE

Ingredients (for about 200 ml):

½ cup of 100% apple juice
2 spoons of grated ginger
12 pitted dates
1 spoon of wine vinegar

Preparation: Place all the ingredients into the blender and blend until you get a homogenous mixture. If you feel like it, you can add some salt, but it’s great without it too.

You can store it in a sealed mason jar for up to 2 weeks.

But what to do with that boring old mustard in our fridge? Make some cranberry magic with it!

CRANBERRY MUSTARD SAUCE

Ingredients (for about 300 ml):

⅔ cups of dried cranberries
½ cup of 100% apple juice
3 spoons of mustard
1 spoon of wine vinegar

Preparation: Place all ingredients into the blender and blend until you get a homogenous mixture.

You can store it in a sealed mason jar for up to 4 weeks.

Eating is joy, cooking is magic.

With love
A.