Just another raw dinner...

Zucchini pasta with sauce, kale salad and fruit salad all seemed yummy together! Some raw foodists would never combine the fruit with the veggies, but I'm not at that level yet, and may never choose to go there.


Still, it's funny how your idea of what makes a good dinner can change!

Pizza Kinda!

Who doesn't love pizza? Well, my Raw Food Gourmet book has a raw version that just might work. I tried it and I was happy enough that I will try it again to improve upon it.

First you have to soak and germinate buckwheat. Then you put the buckwheat (about 2 1/2 cups) into the food processor with some olive oil and seasonings and make a batter which you form into pizza rounds on top of dehydrator mats. I let them dehydrate for at least 8 hours, but although they were tasty, they were much too crumbly.

My next attempt will involve flax seed. If you add it to very hot water, it will make a gelatinous mass that substitutes for egg whites in vegan recipes. Why not in raw pizza rounds?

These "pizza-kinda's" were topped with pesto sauce (made with peas), tomato sauce, mushrooms and marinated (and probably not raw, but I had them in my frig) artichoke hearts. Guacamole would taste yummy on these as well.

Eat to Live for Weight Loss

My husband has lost 14 lbs so far and he's gone down a waist size. I know that this doesn't sound like a huge amount for 7 weeks, but I'm very happy because he has always had difficulty losing weight--that's one thing we have in common! :-) We are also getting better at preparing food with less fat and our exercise is starting to increase. So I believe that with this mostly raw diet, less dietary fat and more exercise, his weight loss may even become more rapid in the weeks ahead. Still if he lost 2 lbs every week, that would still easily get him down to his goal weight by the end of the year.

I know it may sound counter-intuitive for a cancer patient to be trying to lose weight, but in fact his oncologist recommended it. Being obese or overweight is a detriment to your immune system and increases your risk for cancer.

My new favorite book is Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. It is packed with great information and written as if a friend is giving you good advice. Dr. Fuhrman has come up with a useful formula: H= N/C or Health = Nutrition divided by Calories. In order to increase your health, you need to get the most nutrition with the least amount of calories. That means that the bulk of your food should be nutritionally dense and only a small proportion should be calorically dense. Fruits and vegetables, especially leafy green vegetables will give you a high amount of nutrition for a lower amount of calories.

Now, if you are trying to lose weight, you cannot gorge on avocados, olives and nuts--you have to eat those sparingly. John gets 1 oz of walnuts per day and a tablespoon or two of ground flax seed to make sure he gets his essential fatty acids. But he's cut out most other fat (well, we did splurge a little for Easter...I made some coconut "vice cream" that was way too rich!).

If you are looking to be healthy and/or lose weight, read Eat to Live. Dr. Mehmet Oz of Oprah fame endorses his book with these words, "A medical breakthrough. If you give this diet your complete commitment, there is no question in my mind that it will work for you." He also writes the forward for the book.

Easter Dinner

Spinach Mousse, Red Cabbage and Corn Slaw, Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Steamed Asparagus were all on our Easter dinner menu yesterday. The slaw had an interesting but good dressing made out of lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil, liquid aminos and ground cinnamon. The spinach mousse was a success and I will be making it again, but next time I think I will experiment by adding some basil and garlic so it will be reminiscent of pesto--something my husband loves! Here is the recipe for the spinach mousse which is like an alternative to quiche. Next time I might try making this more like a pizza so that the mousse part is spread out like a sauce. It looked beautiful in the pie plate, but as pies often do, fell apart when we served it.

Spinach Mousse

Crust

2 cups almonds and/or pecans (3 cups for a thicker crust)

1 T. liquid aminos (or soy or tamari sauce)

2 - 4 T. water

1 T psyllium, or more (I used ground flax seeds)

The recipe asks you to soak and then dry the nuts. You can do that, but I didn't this time. I processed the nuts in my food processor and then added the other ingredients until it came together into a dough ball.

Press evenly into a pie plate. This took a few minutes, but keep at it. Then put it in a dehydrator for 60 minutes or in a low oven for 30 minutes.

Mousse

2 T. pine nuts, soaked for 20 minutes

1 lb spinach, torn in pieces (I used the baby spinach so no tearing needed!)

1/4 cup raw tahini

3 T. lemon juice

3 cups sliced mushrooms, including trimmed stems (leave 2 or 3 to decorate the top)

3/4 tsp. sea salt

5 T. water

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

1-2 T. psyllium (Confession: I do not have psyllium and so I added nutritional yeast flakes and some ground flax seed. I really do need to try the psyllium!)

Process pine nuts, spinach, tahini, lemon juice, mushrooms, salt, and water in the food processor. While the processor is still running, gradually sprinkle in the nutmeg, then the psyllium. Pour into the pie crust. Decorate and chill for at least 30 minutes before eating.

My Garden

Today is sunny! How wonderful! My lawn is soggy, but my daughter dutifully got out the lawn mower and did the first mowing of the season. I planted some bulbs and did some pine needle raking and just enjoyed being out of doors.

I also grabbed my seed packets and started planning my vegetable garden. My soil is still just under 55 degrees, so I will probably wait another week or so to start planting. I will be planting kale, beets, broccoli, carrots, pole beans, summer squash and borage to attract pollinators for the squash. My next step is to turn the soil, add some organic fertilizer and/or compost, and section my raised off into 16 "square foot" sections. I'll also need to trim some tree branches that are starting to shade my beds.

The tomatoes and the peppers I plan to grow in my sunroom where it can get very hot!

When my college student (that's her picture above from a few years back when we helped at the Jubilee Farm) returns at the end of April, she will be happy to see our garden planted. She enjoys gardening and is better at it than I am.

Although I will also be getting food from my CSA, I am growing crops that compliment what I get there. It will be exciting to eat healthy fresh food from our itty bitty garden this year!

A garden requires consistent care and consistency is something that I am really working on. Someday, if I become a good gardener, I will know I have developed this trait. :-)

Encouragement

Change is difficult, although often exciting. When the excitement wears off before the difficulty does, that's when you need encouragement! For me encouragement has come in many different forms. That still small voice that lets you know you are doing the right thing. A chance conversation that leads to a testimonial of the healing power of food. Or a call from a friend of a friend that has heard your story and wants to help. That's what happened this week.

The neighbor of a friend of mine called--her name is Faith--to tell me her story. She is a nurse but when she became sick with an autoimmune disorder, she went to Sanoviv--an institute of health in Mexico--where she ate a healing diet and went through a thorough health assessment.

Faith told me about the diet and the schedule she was on there. Here it is:
Early morning: Drink a warm glass of pure water with the juice of 1/2 lemon and cayenne pepper.
Breakfast: Fruit, various kinds, as much as you want
Mid-morning snack: Green drink
Lunch: Salad with lots of different veggies and sprouts
Mid-Afternoon: Wheatgrass juice--2 oz.
Dinner (5pm): Sprouts, salad bar, one cooked item , dessert (but no fruit)

She said that everyone looked forward to 5pm because dinners were so delicious! Their diet was considered 80% raw. When I asked her how to judge what 80% was (did they count calories, or weight?), she said that they were taught to just eyeball their plate. One-quarter can be cooked, but the rest should be raw. I figure that if you eat raw for breakfast and lunch, then you could probably eat even a third of your dinner cooked and you'd be just fine.

On one of the days out of the week at Sanoviv everyone did a green drink "fast" as a cleansing measure.

Faith felt so much better after her stay there and since then she has done much better. She told me that she notices that she feels much better when she increases the amount of raw food that she eats. I think that happens with everything that is good for us. We all know that we feel better when we exercise regularly, but we still sometimes get out of the habit.

I was very grateful for her phone call! She told me that she just wanted to encourage me--that it does work. She told me of another woman she had met who eats a raw diet and cured her cancer from doing so. This woman goes to her medical doctor every 6 months for a check up and he says she is a miracle. I know that all of these stories are "anecdotal" but I sure keep hearing a lot of them!

When I get tired of chopping vegetables and trying new recipes and I just want to go out for a pizza, I try to remember all of these stories. I also reflect on how much better I feel when I am eating a mostly raw diet. I can really feel the difference!

New Ideas

Yesterday I was able to spend a few hours reading through raw food recipe books, like The Raw Gourmet by Naomi Shannon--a chef at the famed Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida. It was recommened in Kris Carr's book Crazy S*xy Cancer and that is why I picked it up at Borders last time I was there. (Now that's a risky trip for the budget--so many books that are calling out to me: "Take me home!") The photography in The Raw Gourmet is beautiful, but one criticism is that they seemed to have left out the sauces in the photos! All of the piles of various types of salads etc. look beautiful but they don't look like they have any sauce on them, even when the description and recipe of the dish includes a sauce. By the photos, you would think that her food is just artfully arranged piles of salads and veggies.

But as I read the recipes, I started to appreciate the book more. I've decided that I need to make more sauces which will add a vast amount of interest to the raw food. Gremolata, Szechuan Zip, Indonesian Yum-Yum Dressing, Gado-Gado, Vegan Aioli and Sunflower Notmayo! all sound like they will add great appeal to the food I make.

A few of the entrees that I want to try are the Chili Rellenos with Mole Sauce and Mock Sour Cream; Sun Garden Burgers, and Spinach Mousse (which I might make for Easter). It's just that making a new recipe takes extra energy and when you're busy, tired or sick the old stand-bys are what you fall back on.

Speaking of old stand-bys, last night I made Guacamole-stuffed Mushrooms and Black Bean and Brown Rice Salad. (Basically you take brown rice, add a can of drained black beans to it and then start improvising! Last night I added diced red bell pepper, corn, salsa, mild green chilis, and taco seasoning. My husband loved it!)

In a Bit of a Rut

I haven't blogged for a few days because I haven't made anything new! In fact, I realized that I'm in a bit of a rut. Last night I made pasta zucchini with pesto sauce, steamed carrots, and kale salad with cherry tomatoes and pine nuts. It was all good, but nothing new!

What is new is my frig died! Luckily we have an extra freezer, so the frozen stuff went there. The produce went out in the garage where it is still very cool and I have a Coleman cooler plugged in on my countertop. My new frig won't be here until next week--turns out that "bisque" (the off white color) is not very popular, but it's what I want so we'll wait.

Today my husband is having some minor surgery and I'm taking my raw food books to look through at the hospital to get some new inspiration!

Quick & Easy Carrot Salad

When I compose my meals, I try to make sure we have plenty of color. A carrot salad is a fresh and colorful way of completing a meal. Here's what I did:

1. Peel and grate as many carrots as you need for your meal

2. Add some golden raisins, fresh pear slices, and chopped walnuts.

3. Mix together some rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar and honey--maybe using a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio, depending on how sweet you want the dressing. So 1/2 cup of vinegar and 1/4 cup of honey might be good depending on the size of your salad. You might also add a tablespoon of olive oil, a pinch of salt and a nice grating of frozen fresh ginger root. Mix all of this up in a small bowl and pour over the salad ingredients.

4. Let marinate for a good 10 minutes before serving. If you like curry, you can add some curry powder for an Indian twist.

I served this along side of Brussel sprouts that had a Poupon mustard dressing and it was a nice flavor combination.

Very yummy!

Relatives Get to Try Raw Food!

Over the weekend, my brother-in-law and nephew came to stay with us because my nephew competed in a TaeKwonDo tournament held in Tacoma, about an hour south of us. (He won first place in his division, by the way!!!)

Althougth I fixed them hash browns and scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast, they did get to taste some raw recipes such as a Green Smoothie, Chocolate Vice Cream, Fudge-Date Balls, and Pineapple-Coconut Donut Holes. Yum! For dinner, I served stuffed mushrooms filled with Not Salmon Pate mixed with Salsa. The salsa was a nice touch--added a lot of taste and lightened up the pate considerably. I even noticed that Adam, my 19 year old nephew, went for seconds on the stuffed mushrooms!

Anyway, it was great to see them and it was nice that they were such open-minded guests, willing to try anything! Of course, we'll see if they ever come back! LOL!

New Sandwich Creation

This afternoon I made "Not Salmon Pate"--it's a variation of Jennifer Cornbleet's "Not Tuna Pate" (see Feb. 12th's entry entitled "Mock Tuna Salad"). Basically, you add carrots and dill and it looks a lot like salmon! Pictured here is my sandwich which we had for dinner tonight. I took two thick flax seed crackers and spread each of them with hummus. Then I spread on a scoop of the not salmon pate and layered sliced tomatoes, avocado and alfalfa sprouts, ending with a sprinkle of salt and pepper.

While the flat bread doesn't contain the sandwich contents as well as regular bread, it still tastes yummy! And it was an easy dinner to throw together! (I cheated and paired our sandwiches with regular cooked tomato soup, but pretty soon I'm going to start experimenting with raw soups!)

My Husband Loves Pesto Pasta!!!

When I asked my husband which of the raw entrees was his favorite, he surprised me by saying it was the pesto pasta made with zucchini noodles. I hadn't made those in a while, so last night my husband enjoyed two big platefuls! That's the great thing about eating zucchini pasta--you can chow down as much as you want!

Here's my "best of recollection" recipe for the pesto sauce:

Vegan, Mostly Raw, Pesto

2 cups defrosted peas

1/2 cup walnuts or pine nuts

2 T. extra virgin olive oil

2 cloves fresh garlic, minced

1/2 to 1 cup chopped fresh basil

1/3 cup nutritional yeast flakes (subs for Parmesan)

2 tsp. fresh lemon juice

salt to taste, start with 1/2 tsp.

Process the nuts in your food processor with the S-blade. Then add all of the rest of the ingredients and process until smooth, adding more salt as necessary. Mix into zucchini noodles right before serving, as the noodles will soften and make the sauce a little watery. If you want, you can add more nutritional yeast flakes to make your pesto thicker so that the extra moisture from the zucchini will compensate. Once you mix the two, it really does look like real pesto pasta!

Tip: I set out the zucchini early in the afternoon so they'd be at room temp by dinnertime. I gently heated the pesto sauce so that when mixed with the pasta, the dish was slightly warm.

Another Raw Healing Success Story

Yesterday I took my daughter to a local optician to order some new glasses. Lisa runs this local business with her husband and we've been getting our glasses there for years. Lisa is cheerful and helpful and always remembers our names! Amazing!

Lisa looks very healthy and we got into a conversation, somehow, about raw food. She told me that several years ago she'd started feeling very ill and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritus. She started doing some research on alternative therapies and when she asked her doctor if diet, exercise or accupuncture could be helpful, he told her that none of those things would do a thing to help her. (When we asked our oncologist if nutrition had ever affected the outcome of one of his patients, he shook his head and said no. I have later come to realize that if you never prescribe a specific diet and you never ask the patient about their diet, you might not ever get information about their diet. Also, even if a person told his doctor about a diet they were trying, it would be very easy for the doctor to dismiss the results as "anecdotal.")

To Lisa's credit, she decided to forestall taking the drugs (many of which are chemotherapy drugs!) and try a raw food diet. She went 100% raw for six months. Lisa also took up hot yoga--a type of yoga that is supposed to be cleansing because you sweat a lot and increase blood flow to certain areas of the body.

After six months, she felt great! She is no longer 100% raw, but she is well and she knows to avoid alcohol, sugar and coffee to keep herself symptom free.

As I discussed Lisa's success story with my family, we marvelled that so few doctors prescribe a change in diet first before prescribing harmful drugs. My 15 year old daughter made an astute observation--she commented that doctors might feel pretty useless if people could cure themselves using food instead of depending on them for prescription drugs. I don't know if this is true for most doctors, but the true healers will help their patients get well and "do no harm."

My Mongolian Grill Hangover

Talk about the morning after! Last night I joined two galpals for a fun, conversation-filled dinner at the Mongolian Grill. I chose it because I knew I could get a totally vegan dinner there. I asked them to use water instead of oil on the grill and it all looked lovely...

But this morning I awoke feeling like a train had hit me. I'm a morning person, so getting up at 5:30 is no problem because my body naturally awakes at about 5:00 am. But this morning I felt hammered!

Every book I've ever read about raw food eating always carries the warning that you will become more sensitive to cooked and processed foods, but until now I hadn't experienced it for myself. I figured as long as I wasn't 100% raw, I could have my little forays with no consequences.

As I look back, it must have been the sauces they put on, in addition to the sheer bulk of cooked food. I asked for a little bit of teryaki and a little bit of plum sauce. I will be more careful in the future!

Flax Seed Crackers...Finally!

When I asked my husband if this diet was as hard as he had originally anticipated, he surprised me by saying, "Yes." It turns out that the hard part is trying to eat the huge "trough" of salad every afternoon and not having any bread.

So today, we sent leftovers from dinner last night (baked potato, steamed brocolli and raw carrot salad and fruit) in his lunch box and I made my first batch of "live flax seed crackers." It was quite a process! I used a recipe that I got from our library--it's a little homemade booklet by Igor Boutenko entitled "Igor's Live Flat Bread" which you can order from their website http://www.rawfamily.com/.

It took me about 1 1/2 hours to get it all mixed up and onto the dehydrator trays. The ingredients are carrots, celery, onions, garlic, raisins, salt, coriander seed, caraway seed, ground flax seed, water and salt. My Excalibur dehydrator is humming away as I type. Unfortunately I didn't get started early enough, so I'll be up late turning these crackers over. But, it will be nice for my husband to have something "breadlike" to chew on!

Pineapple Blueberry Delight

For this dessert, I made a cashew nut cream by mixing about a cup of raw cashews and maybe 3/4 cup of orange juice in my VitaMix until a very smooth cream, like a thick whipped cream, formed. Then I chopped up some fresh pineapple and put it into dessert glasses. I added some frozen blueberries and topped that with some of the orange nut cream. Then I added a bit of coconut and some more pineapple and blueberries. I topped the whole thing with some more nut cream and coconut and a drizzle of raw honey. Quick, easy, delicious! A very satisfying dessert!

A Favorite Dinner

Mushrooms stuffed with gaucamole and topped with fresh salsa, spiced yam fries and a green salad with black beans...how could anyone feel deprived after eating such a yummy dinner? OK, I've lost touch with the SAD (standard American diet), but I think my dinners have gotten so pretty since we've been doing more raw food. And the food is so filling! I switched over from the Portobello mushrooms to the giant white ones sold in Costco because the latter are a lot cheaper! Anyway, this diet is anything but boring!

However, I am considering what I'll do for Easter to make it special. I'd love any comments or ideas!

Peanut Sauce Cole Slaw

This little invention was a bit hit at our house! I was making various dishes to use as samples at a "super nutrition cooking class" that I coordinated. After preparing food all day long, I looked around and realized that I hadn't made anything for my own family's dinner. I had some extra peanut sauce and some extra Napa and red cabbage. Then I went hunting! I found some green onions, golden raisins, cashews and carrots. I shredded the cabbages and carrot and added the sliced green onions, raisins and cashews, then mixed in the peanut sauce. Everyone loved it! As an afterthought, some mandarin orange slices would also be delicious. Serve this salad with with spring rolls or vegetarian sushi and you've got a filling meal!

Peanut Sauce Cole Slaw

1/2 head Napa cabbage, chopped
1/2 head red cabbage, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and shredded
3 green onions, thinly sliced
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup raw cashews
1 cup peanut sauce

Peanut Sauce (you should play with this)

1 cup organic peanut butter
1 1/2 T. soy or tamari sauce
2 T. honey or maple syrup to taste (I used honey)
a few shakes of garlic salt
a shake of cayenne
1 T. fresh grated ginger
1/2 cup water to thin it to desired consistency