Sarah's Raw Key Lime Coconut Tarts

Sarah’s Raw Key Lime Coconut Tarts

Sarah Britton

Featuring:

Avocado

Effort:

Complexity:

Cost:

In season now

Serves: 6

Prep time: 10 mins + 2 hours chilling time

Cook time: No cook

Ingredients:

Crust:

1 cup / 140g raw nuts (almonds and pecans are best), soaked for 8 hours if possible

5 tablespoons unsweetened shredded coconut

1 cup / 150g dates (about 7 large dates), preferably Medjool

A few pinches of fine sea salt

Filling:

3 ripe avocados, pitted, flesh scooped from their skins

1/4 cup / 60ml pure maple syrup or raw honey, or more if desired

1 1/2 tablespoons coconut oil, melted

1/4 cup / 60ml freshly squeezed lime juice, or more if desired

2 pinches fine sea salt

Grated zest of 1 (organic) lime

Veg Portions / Serving: 1

Recipe taken from My New Roots by Sarah Britton.

Traditional key lime pie is silky smooth, creamy, and rich, and so is this one. But would you believe that avocados are the star of the show here? Since they are a vivid green, I thought that flavouring avocados with fresh lime to become a tart filling would be just the ticket. Bingo: all the creamy qualities of avocados with the sweet-tart charm of citrus. The recipe for the filling is merely a guide, so adjust the amounts of sweetness and sourness to your liking.

Method:

Make the crust: Pulse the nuts in a food processor until chunky. Add the coconut, dates, and salt, and continue to pulse until the nuts and dates form a solid mass when squeezed together.

Line a 6-cup muffin tin with plastic wrap. Divide the crust mixture into 6 golf-ball-size portions and press one into each muffin cup, pressing up the sides as well, to create a tart shell.

Put the muffin tin in the freezer to let the crusts harden for at least 1 hour.

When you are ready to fill the tart shells, pull up the edges of the plastic wrap to remove the tart shells from the muffin tin.

Make the filling: Put the avocados, maple syrup, coconut oil, lime juice, and salt in a food processor and blend on the highest setting until smooth. Taste for sweetness and add more sweetener if necessary. If the avocados are overripe, add more lime juice to taste.

Spoon the filling into the tart shells and sprinkle the lime zest on top. Return to the muffin tin for storing and put in the freezer for at least 2 hours.

Remove the tarts from the freezer 15 to 20 minutes before serving.

Engaging Kids

Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.

Kids in the kitchen

Kids can really own this recipe. Measure out ingredients for younger children, then have them blitz the crust and filling ingredients, press the crust mixture into the muffin tin and spoon the filling in.

Activities

While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.

Sensory

Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.

Serving

The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.

Sarah Britton

Sarah has been blogging over at My New Roots since 2007 about holistic nutrition, plant-based recipes and fun in the kitchen. Her book, My New Roots, is available now.

www.mynewroots.org/site/

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