Aha! I've finally found a time to write my first post. Let me start by telling you a little bit about how I live, food-wise. I have been eating high-raw (I don't have a percentage - maybe I'll guess 90%?) since December 3rd, 2009. It's January 17th today, which makes me a newbie I suppose. Not even 2 months raw! I find this suprising even to myself. I have an addictive personality, so if something is on my mind, it occupies it, and my mind has a million thoughts a minute. Plus, think about how often we eat? At least three meals a day? I also tend to graze and not go more than a few hours without munching on something. I'd say that it feels like much longer than a month and a half with all this raw thinking and raw eating every single day.
Let me get to my point-- what do I eat? I'll go meal by meal:
Breakfast:
When I'm not living with roommates who would be woken up by a juicer or vita-mix, I'd, well, have juice or a vita-mix smoothie. Usually I'll toss anything and everything into a juicer, but my "base" tends to be carrot, celery, and spinach. I often add in cucumber, tomato, and/or apple.
More recently I've been adding beet and beet greens, and it just so happens to make the most beautiful color ever. The juice in the picture is beet, spinach, carrot, and apple.
In the vita-mix, my favorite of all time is banana and spinach. I just toss in a banana, a few handfuls of spinach, some water, and a few ice cubes, and blend it up. It's simple and amazing. And again, such a pretty color.
Finally, my typical breakfast now that I'm living in the apartment with the morning sleepers -- avocado chocolate pudding with sliced banana. So. Delicious. The pudding is avocado, agave nectar, raw cacao powder, vanilla extract, sea salt, and water.
Lunch:
SALAD. Even before I went raw-vegan, back in my plain old vegetarian days, all I wanted for most meals was salad. I find salads fun, interesting, super nutritious, and I felt good after eating one. Full but not uncomfortably so and happy that I just ingested some of the best stuff in my kitchen. Eating a big salad feels like a big accomplishment. I couldn't say I felt nearly as good after eating something like spaghetti.
My typical salad: [organic] green leaf lettuce, baby spinach, baby carrots, broccoli, tomato, avocado, olives. Less often (but maybe more often than a non-raw type) I'll add sprouts, snow peas, sundried tomato, raisins, almonds, bell pepper, and anything else I've decided to throw in there. Really it's an anything-goes lunch. I haven't yet come around to making raw dressings, so I've been using no-preservative, no-chemical, real-ingredient (& hopefully organic as well) dressings I find at Whole Foods.
Dinner:
I've been mixing it up for dinner, and allowing myself to play around with fun raw concoctions. Since I am relatively new at this, there is still TONS that I haven't tried. It's all very exciting. I allow dinner to have more nutty ingredients since they're heavier and by dinnertime I'm typically done with work, the gym, or anything that requires me to be bouncing around Boston. Tonight I had zucchini pasta with basil pesto, and it was pretty darn good.
Recently I made
Gena's Collard Wraps with Italian Pizza Cheese. I think I still have some of that left in the fridge. Mmm. Salads are also a go for dinner. Why not? Raw soups are also some of my favorite things to make. I've even made some raw zucchini hummus and just eaten it with raw vegetables. Maybe that sounds boring, but I was full and happy by the end of that meal. That's all I ask.
Snacks:
Oh gosh. Anything? Trail mix, bananas, clementines, more juice/smoothies, a small salad (I told you I liked salad, sue me), figs, dates, chia pudding (which I have to experiment a little more with). I could go on.
What I've learned so far:
1) I need a shiny, new, expensive vita-mix. My old one is fantastic, but still not cutting it with soups and smoothies. My pineapple spinach smoothie left me slurping up stringy pineapple bits, and I wouldn't dare try to make a vegetable/fruit smoothie with raw carrots. I'd be left busting out the cheesecloth to strain away the bits.
2) Going raw made my system highly sensitive to foods it does not want. A couple weeks ago, I ate a couple raw "chocolate bars" from Whole Foods' bulk bins. They contained fairly normal ingredients like cocoa, dates, coconut, other nuts of some kind, but the whole next day and next night I was throwing up. It was like I ingested poison. Whatever was in there made me violently ill! And it was raw! Same happened when I drank one glass of wine when I was staying over a guy-friend's house. Excuse me while I get sick x 3 after one glass of wine. I have to be very careful!
3) My raw-ness is either a controversy or an inspiration. I realized, even this early on, that you have to do this for yourself and not expect others to support you 100%. My family is not really on board with the raw revolution, and I won't force them to be. I'd rather they stop making fun of me though. If I mind my own business I hope they'll mind theirs; however, I thoroughly enjoy inspiring friends/family to eat more raw, which has already happened to a small degree. I won't preach to anyone that this is the only way to be, but if I can discuss rationally the benefits of this diet to others (without extreme defensiveness, which I have encountered), I'd be happy to.
Again, I could go on. This is already a novel of a blog post. 'Til next time.
