A juice adventure

I purchased a juicer! It’s an Omega Vert — I had wanted a Hurom Slow Juicer but my favorite shop – therawfoodworld.com – was out at the time I was ready to order so I went with the Omega Vert which is basically the same thing anyway.

I love it! I’ve been drinking about two quarts of juice a day, along with simple raw foods like fresh mangoes or peaches. I’m reading a couple of books on juice feasting and considering leaping into one once I feel really comfortable with the idea.

For now, I’m just trying to drink lots of juice. This morning I had 5 leaves of curly kale, a head of romaine, and a head of celery – very green! I’m about to make a dinner juice of carrots, beets, and granny smith apples.

So far, the big increase in juice hasn’t had the pounds dropping off me, but I suspect my body is getting used to being flooded with nutrients. I’ve “eaten” more carrots in the last couple of days than I’ve eaten in an entire year! I tend to go fruit-heavy and skimp on vegetables so this is all part of my plan to get more vegetables into my life . . . though juicing fruit is nice, too! I had a green grape and celery juice yesterday that was really wonderful.

If I do go on a juice feast, I’ll surely be posting here more oftne because there will be so much I’ll want to talk about and so few people with whom I can discuss it.

Flax Bread

So, I’ve been talking about the yummy sandwiches I’ve been making with flax bread. The bread is really easy to make if you have a dehydrator. If you don’t have a dehydrator and want to try it, you can fake it by putting your oven on low and leaving the door open.

Ingredients:
2 cups of flax seeds
2 cups of water
1/2 teaspoon salt
lots of herbs and spice!

Okay, you want LOTS of herbs and/or spices because they are competing with the flavor of flax seeds which seem to like to suck up all flavor. So if you’re using fresh herbs, you want a cup or three of them and if you’re using dried herbs, you want several tablespoons. It will seem like you’re using a LOT of flavoring and that’s because you are. But you will be glad you did.

First grind the flax seeds in a coffee grinder and put them in a mixing bowl. You’ll probably have to grind the seeds in about six batches to fit them all in the grinder. You want to grind until the sound changes so that you have got the seeds nice and powdery.

Add the salt and your flavors to the bowl. You can use any combination of spices you like. Tonight I made a Tex-Mex batch of bread and I used two tablespoons of garlic powder, one very heaping tablespoon of cumin, one very heaping tablespoon of chili powder and a healthy dash of cayenne pepper. Then I sneezed about eight times. If you use fresh herbs, you want to chop them small first.

Stir the salt and spices together with the ground flax until well mixed. Add two cups of water and mix well again. Go check your e-mail. (Or otherwise do something that takes ten to fifteen minutes for the flax to drink up the water.)

Come back and make a big ball of flax dough. If it’s too dry (not likely but it could happen) add more water (slowly! like a tablespoon at a time.) If it’s too wet, don’t worry because the wet will dehydrate out anyway – it will just be squooshier to spread it out.

You’ll need four dehydrator trays and you’ll need to cover them with non-stick sheets. Divide the flax dough into four parts and put one of them on a tray. Smear it out with your hands (it’s easiest if you get your hands wet first) and keep smooshing and working it out until it’s the biggest square you can make it without holes in it. It will be pretty flat and it will fill up most of the tray. You can sort of poke it with the “knife-edge” of the palm of your hand to shape it into a square.

Do this with all four of the balls of flax dough so that you have four big, flat squares of flax dough and then put them in the dehydrator at around 105 degrees for overnight. Whenever you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, flip them over. (Of course you can dehydrate these during the day as well, in which case look at them after four or five hours to see if they’re ready to flip.) They will flip nicely and won’t leave much mess on the non-stick sheets. Flip them onto the mesh tray cover and peel off the non-stick sheet. Then let them keep drying until morning (or for another four or five hours.)

You can cut each of those big squares into four pieces and make two sandwiches out of each big square. So you’ll have 16 slices of bread when you’re done and each slice will have approximately 100 calories and about 8 grams of fat (that’s a lot of fat, but it’s also chock full of omega essential fatty acids that are sooooooo good for you.)

Flax costs $0.58/pound in my grocery store (WinCo) and a cup of flax weighs 6 ounces so this batch of bread (not counting the herbs or spices) costs about fourty-four cents or three cents per slice! (If you want to count the dehydrating time, it’s about five cents an hour for 8-10 hours so say 94 cents a batch and about six cents per slice. Plus the cost of the seasonings. Which varies.)

And there you have it. The flax taste is a strong flavor, even with the spices mixed in, so if you don’t like flax, you won’t like this bread. I thought I wasn’t going to like it but once I put a bunch of sandwich stuff on it, it was so tasty!! It’s not really much of a sort of bread to munch on by itself but it’s great with other foods between two slices of it. I hope you enjoy it!

Quiet day

Today I ate:
some mandarin oranges
two mangos
confetti-sauerkraut sandwich
5000 IU vitamin D
and I’m about to go make some “mac and cheese” out of spiralized yam and a nutritional yeast sauce.

Pedometer: 2478 steps; 21 minutes aerobic walking (2305 steps)

In my next post, I’m going to describe how I make the flax bread I’ve been talking about.

Mango Morning

Not much time this morning – I have a test in a few hours. But I wanted to log yesterday’s food before I forgot.

breakfast: homemade soy milk with stevia and vanilla
sauerkraut sandwich on flax bread with nutritional yeast
5000 IU vitamin D
banana-cherry-spirulina smoothie

lunch: curried confetti slaw
avocado-bell pepper-spring mix sandwich on flax bread

And that was it because I was so full I skipped dinner.

pedometer: 3414 steps, 1279 of them aerobic

So I’ve been remiss in keeping up this blog

Where last we left our intrepid heroine, she was looking forward to her next A1c test. That turned out to be a scintillating 5.8!

I’ve settled in to my high raw diet and I’m not fretting as much over the cost as before because I’ve developed a feel for the price of different foods and the amount I need to get to see me through a particular time period. I think transition can be more expensive as we learn what we can afford, how to stay within our budget, how much we can expect to eat, and how to avoid wasting produce that goes bad because we overbought.

I think I may go back to logging my food but not with the super-precision I was doing before; more loosely with rough amounts but not being so scrupulous about recording calories and percentages. I’m no longer so much in a mindset for counting calories like I used to. And I’m not so much bound up in judging myself over how well or poorly I can conform to how I want to eat.  I’m trying to be more loving toward myself and I think this is all a part of it.

But others might benefit from knowing what someone else is eating (please, I’m not a guru, I’m not a role model, I’m just someone else playing the cards she was dealt like we all are. Find your own path and I’ll walk beside you but please don’t follow me or expect to lead me.) and I might benefit from keeping the journal and being able to look back later, so my plan now is to post once a day and, if nothing else, report what I’ve eaten that day.  Some days I may add more details, some days it may be nothing more than a simple list of food.

I hope to be able to blog more about my spirituality as well, but that’s been kind of blocked right now as I’ve been in a bit of a spiritual crisis and I’m not ready to talk about it yet, let alone blog about it, so for now this bird will be chirping more about food and health than anything else.

I didn’t write down today’s food and I can’t trust to remember it so I’ll just give you a link to some really awesome chocolate-chia crackers I made that are the yum (I used carob):

http://kristensraw.blogspot.com/2008/09/chocolate-chia-crackers-and-amazing.html

And I want to tell you about my new kitchen toy, which is the Perfect Pickler – a mason jar with a fermentation lock that allows me to make sauerkraut in only four days with no smell and the jar sitting right here on my computer desk for me to admire while it ferments! No, I’m not a sales rep, I’m just super-pleased with this little find. I bought mine from The Raw Food World, which is my all-time favorite online living food shopping mall.

When I’m done making this post, I’m going to go in the kitchen and decant the shredded carrots I’ve had fermenting and mix them with a bunch of fresh cilantro and some other secret ingredients to make Incan Carrot Salad. Very exciting! In the fridge is a big (but rapidly dwindling!) jar of purple sauerkraut which is, if I say so myself, the bomb!

Today’s pedometer: 5415 steps, 21 minutes aerobic walking (2262 steps)

Oh, what a beautiful morning!

Things have mellowed from the stressful earlier days of transition. I’m not 100% raw but I’m pretty close. My main cooked food is beans, usually eaten cold with a little nutritional yeast and sea salt. I’ve read that “raw” begins around 75% raw, so I’m still raw but I’ve been straying away from that label lately because it feels too confining and too politically charged. I don’t want to be a label of what I eat — I want to be fully human and fully me and that’s so much more than my food.

I just finished eating a fantastic jícama salad (1 jícama, peeled and julienned; 1 chayote, peeled and julienned; two cucumbers, seeded and sliced thin, 3 oranges, peeled and sliced thin; 1 small red onion, sliced thin; juice of three limes; 2 teaspoons chili powder; 1 bunch cilantro, chopped) and popcorn cauliflower (chopped cauliflower, nutritional yeast, sea salt, cayenne) on a bed of mixed organic baby greens. I feel so blessed to be able to eat such vibrant, flavorful foods.

Dr. Douglas Graham says that we should eat all we want plus a little more. It’s so freeing to have permission to eat! I still rein myself in and try to undereat a little on fasting days, but when it’s not a fasting day I indulge my senses with glorious fresh cherries, strawberries, raspberries, mixed sprouts, and more. I love the foods God made!

I have no idea what my blood sugar is doing since I ran out of test strips. My next A1c is due in September so I’m just going to be patient until then and I’ll find out how I’ve been doing. I continue to see small and large signs of improved health. Last Saturday someone was complaining of allergies an dI realized that I’ve only had a little bit of a runny nose, not really enough to notice. In the past, I spent allergy season on a constant dose of sinus drugs. Now I barely get a little runny nose! God is good!

Additionally, my raw diet seems to have healed my fibrotic breasts. I used to have shooting pains in my breasts and they were filled with hard lumps all through them. A gynecologist once described them as feeling “like a bag of frozen peas.” I know, glamorous, isn’t it? But a couple of weeks ago I realized (with a little shock!) that all those lumps were gone! It’s just normal breast tissue now with no lumps and no shooting pains. Amazing! I didn’t even think about trying to heal my fibrotic breasts because I assumed that it was something I was just stuck with. A little research suggests that giving up caffeine probably had a positive effect but the articles warned that caffeine makes fibrotic breasts worse but no caffeine would not heal them. I’m guessing the nutrient dense fruits and vegetables were the ticket.

I’m feeling very happy and very alive these days. I was walking in the sunshine earlier today and breathing the good air and the thought popped into my head, “it’s so good to be young!” What a wonderful thought to have at 42 years of age! I’m so young! And I’m old enough to appreciate it this time around; youth may be wasted on the young but every drop of it is appreciated by the middle-aged!

Thank you, God, for creating such a beautiful temple for us to worship You in and thank you for the beautiful, nourishing foods You make to grow in this grand and glorious temple. I hope someday to taste the fruits You’ve grown in Paradise. You have been so good to me. Bless the Lord, oh, my soul!

low-fat raw sherbet

I’m trying to go easy on the nuts because my body doesn’t process high fat foods very well, which means that almost every raw dessert is off-limits to me.

So I made up a low-fat raw dessert. It’s so good! I often just have it for lunch since it’s so healthy.

Raw Berry Sherbet

Ingredients:
two apples (any sweet variety)
140 grams of frozen berries
two tablespoons flax seed

Core the apples (do not peel) and put them in a food processor. Add the frozen berries. Grind the flax seed in a coffee mill / seed mill and add to the food processor.

Process everything until it’s a thick, frozen paste-consistency substance. You may have to stop the processor and scrape the sides down a couple of times.

Enjoy!

Quinoa, revisited

I watched Simply Raw twice over the weekend and noticed sprouted quinoa on the table at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center. It got me wanting sprouted quinoa again so I picked some up and sprouted it and ate it last night, wrapped up in more collard leaves.

It didn’t make me as sick as it had a few months ago, but it still made me uncomfortable and before too long, my body was saying “stop eating this.” So quinoa is off the menu again but I wonder if I will be able to eat it someday since it didn’t make me feel as awful this time . . . or maybe it’s just that I’m hearing my body more these days and was able to stop soon enough but didn’t hear my body saying not to eat it before and so I ate much more of it?

Staying the course

I’m no longer counting the exact percentage anymore, but I’ve been hanging in there with high raw, some days full raw. I haven’t lost any pounds recently but I’m looking trimmer. I feel like I’m in a sort of holding pattern for the winter and probably won’t start dropping weight again until the weather warms up.

Today my classroom sounded like a TB ward with near constant coughing all over the room. So far, I haven’t gotten sick this season. I thank God for that and I hope this becomes the first winter in years that I don’t get sick. Winters past, I’d have been in the emergency room by now for breathing or dehydration symptoms.

While I’m mainly eating very simply (lots of green smoothies and simple salads) I’m enjoying a tasty late lunch that’s a little more “gourmet” today: collard wraps with alfalfa sprouts and Alissa Cohen’s mock salmon pate, a side of dulse jerky, and a spinach-blueberry-banana-ginger-chia-spirulina smoothie.  Very green.

Off to eat. I will try to update this blog more frequently. I am doing well on high raw and seem to be past the worst of the detox stuff. Its all a process, though. I’m enjoying the journey too much to worry right now what the destination might be.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas . . .

I’m feeling a bit better than I did the last time I posted. I checked a few recipes books out from the library and have been trying new things and finding foods that are filling but don’t break the bank. I’m slowly finding a balance among high-calorie (fruits and nuts) and expensive versus low-calorie, though filling (slaws and sprouted salads) and cheaper foods. I’m still keeping oatmeal and bean burritos around for backup foods since they’re cheap, filling, and nutritious, but I’m getting pretty raw otherwise.

I was trying to follow 80/10/10, but now I’m loosening up a little and just trying to enjoy my transition without as strict an adherence. My budget just won’t stretch to afford proper 80/10/10 right now anyway. But I am still trying to be careful to eat more fruits and vegetables and less nuts and oils and trying to be careful to get lots and lots of greens in.

Some of the new raw foods I’m learning include: borscht, sprouted lentil salad, purple cabbage cumin cole slaw, mock salmon pate, stuffed portobello mushroom, date nut torte, angel hair zucchini pasta with marinara, kale and avocado salad, sweet apple nori roll-ups, jicama spicy fries. All of these are great and some of them are absolutely amazing. I promised myself not to make the date nut torte again until I’m going to a dessert potluck or otherwise have an occasion to share it because it’s so darned good I eat the whole thing in less than two days (and that’s a LOT of calories and fat and it’s not terribly good for my digestion or vitamin intake to live on nothing but date nut torte.)

The books I checked out from the library include Raw Food for Busy People (a great resource for super quick recipes and especially good for those just starting out who don’t have a lot of food prep equipment yet as many recipes are machine-free and only a few use a dehydrator), Carol Alt’s Eating in the Raw (all the recipes are competent and desirable (I skipped over the few non-vegan recipes) but none I’ve tried have been super-awesome. Still this is another great book for a beginner), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Raw (the recipes are good but where this book really shines is in the highly detailed information for the complete raw beginner).  And right now my favorite raw recipe book is Alissa Cohen’s Living on Live Food. Every recipe I’ve tried out of the book so far has been flat-out amazing. There are so many other recipes in the book that I want to try. It looks like this book is out of print, so grab a copy while you still can.

My weight is still stalled, but I cleared a space for exercise (we got two feet of snow and I was getting pretty stagnant) and am feeling a lot better for moving around some. I think I’ll feel much better when the weather gets warmer, the snow melts, the sun gets brighter, and I can ride my bicycle again and go visit the dogs at the animal shelter again (it’s too far away to walk and there’s been too much snow to cycle over.)

The Nativity Liturgy was cancelled due to awful weather. I’m praying that the Theophany Liturgy doesn’t get cancelled. I LOVE Theophany; it’s one of my favorite holy days. There’s something so pure and joyous about being splashed with the holy water. So many people just laugh out loud when the water hits them because it’s such an intense experience. I think of it as a sort of “refresher” of baptism as well as a reminder of the baptism of all Creation when Jesus stepped into the Jordan river.

I pray that anyone reading this during the remainder of the Nativity season has a joyous and prayerful feast and anyone reading this afterwards is having a sweet and happy journey along their path.