Day 25 - Cauliflower Rice

This recipe is a great way for anyone to get more veggies in, without having to eat them plain in a salad or with a fatty dip. I ate mine over some Massaged Kale, Nathan used some as sandwich filling between sprouted bread.

CAULIFLOWER RICE

Ingredients:
-About 3/4 of a large Cauliflower bunch
-1 small mango
-Handful of dates
-1 T curry powder

Instructions:

Process everything in a food processor until you get a rice-like consistency.

My notes:

-1 T curry powder was a lot for me, even though we use a not too spicy "sweet" curry powder blend. So maybe use a little less than 1 T, depending on how much flavor you like. Garam Masala might also work well in this recipe.

-If you add some raisins, slivered almonds, shredded carrots, maybe splash of olive oil... this could be a great filling side dish or light meal on its own.

Last night, we also finally experimented with Jicama, which neither of us had tried before. We used it to make Rosemary Garlic Mashed Potatoes, recipe & pics to come!

-Kelly

Day 23 - Happy St. Patty's!

And an extra reason to celebrate today - it's warm enough to walk to the bar. We'll be at Keegan's tonight if anyone wants to go!

My menu from yesterday:

Workday
-Smoothie: Banana, apple, blueberries, spinach
-Carrots and Zucchini Hummus
-Big Salad: Spinach, radish, sprouts, tomato

Snacks after work
-Leftover raw chocolate balls
-Ginger Almond Pate on Buckwheat Bread
-Prunes
-Salsa

Around 7, I went for a long walk around the neighborhood, ending at Surdyk's to buy our Jameson for today. It is SO NICE to be able to walk places again. It's like I've won my life back from the cold weather. So we were planning to try a new drink for St. Patty's, and of course since I bought the Jameson last night….we had to sample it:

BIG GINGER

Ingredients:
-Jameson
-Ginger Ale
-Splash of lemon and lime juices

And with my drink I had some more Buckwheat Bread & Zucchini Hummus, plus a piece of sprouted bread with peanut butter. Yum.

As long as I'm on the topic, a couple other great Irish beverages:

-Johnny Jump Up: Hard cider with a shot of whiskey.

-Finnegan's Irish Amber: Drink for a good cause! Profits go to charity, and it tastes good too. Sorry, only available in MN.

Cheers,

Kelly

Day 23 - McNathan

As you can imagine, raw foodists take St. Patty's Day very seriously. Why? There is green literally everywhere. Basically, the rule as I understand it is this: If it's green, you can eat it. Of course, this rule isn't usually applied to things like Leprechauns.

This evening, I'll be testing my theory that beer becomes raw when you dye it green. I'll also follow up on a hunch that Jameson is a naturally-occurring vegetable product.

In honor of the holiday, I'm eating a delightful salad today:

NATHAN'S SHAMROCK SALAD

Ingredients:

- Four handfulls of freshly picked clover, preferably from a field, whilst the wind is blowing softly at your back.

Important note:

Take care to discard any of the four-leaf variety. Interestingly, the Irish used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the pre-Christian Irish. Four leaf clovers are likely to confuse people. If a spiritual crisis sounds appetizing, carry on. But four-leafed abominations have no place in my salad.

Instructions:

- Put the clover in a bowl or pot (preferably a gold one)

- Go to the Over the Rainbow bar in St. Paul

- If you intersect with a parade route on the way, participate

- When you arrive at the bar, expect to be mistaken for a wealthy and potentially eligible leprechaun. It's likely that someone will try to catch you. Just go with it.

But seriously:

I'm not eating clover. I've even tried researching whether clover is edible, but e-quarterback answers to posts like "My girlfriend told me you could eat the little white 'flowers' that grow in a clover patch" aren't inspiring my confidence. Consider this informed response: "Well, you ate two and you're still alive. I guess it's safe. Moron."

I'm not even wearing green today (making it very likely that I'll be pinched soon).

Last night, Kelly made this very intriguing curry dish using, in part, dates and cauliflower. I'll be eating that for lunch. Breakfast was an orange and banana smoothie.

Energy:

I will say this: A noticible benefit of this diet is my mornings alertness. I play lots of poker, and I was up doing it till 2 a.m. last night because I'd napped earlier and couldn't sleep. Even on a handful of sleeping hours, I'm surprised at how good I feel, sans caffeine. I've been caffeine-free for a few weeks now and I'm stunned at how much MORE alert I feel now.

-Nathan

Day 22 - Happy Spring & New Recipes!

I think spring does not officially begin until Friday, but in Minnesota, the first day you can walk to the bus in the morning without a winter coat definitely counts! It felt like a miracle to not be cold this morning, to not be cowering under my hood, to not race in misery from the bus to the warmth of my office building. Yay for 41 degrees.



This weekend I also tweaked two recipes that turned out fabulous. First, a variation on the Raw Chocolate Cake:

Raw Chocolate Balls with Strawberry Sauce

Chocolate Balls Ingredients:
-1+1/2 cups raw walnuts, unsoaked
- Dash salt
-18 pitted medjool dates, unsoaked
- scant 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa or carob powder
-1/2 t vanilla extract
- 2 T water
-1 T agave

Strawberry Ingredients:
-2 cups strawberries
-1/2 cup agave
-1/4 cup maple syrup
-2 tablespoons lemon juice
-1 teaspoon cinnamon
-1/4 teaspoons nutmeg

Instructions:
1) Blend walnuts and salt in a food processor until finely ground.
2) Add dates, cocoa powder and vanilla, and process until the mixture begins to stick together.
3) Add the water and process briefly.
4) Blend all strawberry sauce ingredients together.
5) Roll chocolate mixture into small balls and arrange on plate.
6) Drizzle with strawberry sauce and garnish with mint leaves.

My Notes:
-The number of dates vary on which type you use. I used awful small tasteless dry dates from Fleet Farm. The other day at the co-op I had some large, delicious gooey dates, so probably would've needed less of those.
-Really go easy on the cocoa powder. You can always add more.
-Agave is a natural vegan sweetener from a cactus plant that doesn't cause your blood sugar to spike like sugar. You can get it at Trader Joe's for about $3 a bottle if I remember correctly.
-I somehow forgot maple syrup for the strawberry sauce, but it tasted great anyway.
-The Strawberry Sauce recipe is from The Raw Chef.


We brought these to my sister's birthday dinner on Saturday and everyone who tried them loved them. The name of the dessert is also increasingly hilarious with each glass of wine consumed. My very non-raw family also sampled the sushi rolls with ginger almond pate and buckwheat bread with zucchini hummus, all which went over really well, and my family isn't the type to just be nice!

The zucchini hummus was the second new recipe of the weekend. I had seen variations of this recipe around a lot on raw food boards, but was reluctant to try it, being a huge fan of chickpea hummus. It tastes surprisingly similar to regular hummus though, and really easy to make.

Zucchini Hummus

Ingredients:
- 2 1/2 cups peeled zucchini, chopped (make sure to peel!)
- 4 Tbs. olive oil
- 1 1/2 T lemon juice
- 1/2 cup ground sesame seeds (tahini)
- 3/4 tsp. sea salt
- 2 garlic cloves
-1 tsp. paprika
-1 tsp. ground cumin
- Cayenne to taste

Instructions:

Blend everything in food processor or blender. Next time I will probably ease up on the olive oil and tahini, because tahini is very high in fat and calories and the hummus has more than enough tahini flavor.

Hope everyone had a great weekend,

-Kelly

Day 20 - Nathan

Noteworthy beverages:

This morning, I threw an orange, a banana, and a glacier-load of ice into the Vita-Mix, and ended up with a slushi. How can it be so right, when it feels so wrong?



There is absolutely no way my German heritage will allow my defiant body to cut off its supplyline of good beer. I'm not throwing it down every day by the gallon load, but I'm having it here and there. As a compromise, I've been experimenting with organic beers, and this one stands out as a good, hoppy brew:



Radish Sprouts:

Today, I harvested our jar full of radish sprouts, and I plan on throwing them into some sushi this afternoon. Kelly's grandma is a radish enthusiast, so I'm hoping she's impressed. They taste identical to full-blown radishes.

Here's what they looked like in the jar:



After pulling them out, I went through the process of de-hulling them, getting rid of the brown outer coats that have fallen away. A good instructional is available here.



This is the final product:



The final sushi product. Spicy!:

Please tell your children to leave the blog now:

At the risk of being a weightloss exhibitionist, I want to archive the fact that I've lost some weight since my diet change. The pictures below were taken on the cruise we took about a week before starting the raw diet. The last photo was taken today.

Bulbous Common North American Sea Monster:

A shot of Cozumellian tequila getting in my belly:

15 pounds lighter. I apologize that what has been seen cannot be unseen:

-Nathan

Day 20

First, apologies for the lack of posting and daily menus! We've been straying a bit from the raw and haven't been trying any new recipes.

Lots of days I subsist mostly on the morning smoothie (Green Smoothie Challenge, if you haven't tried it yet!), big salad (spinach, tomato, sprouts, whatever's in the fridge, nuts, olive oil...) and snacks at night. We still have a lot of the Buckwheat Bread left over and Nathan's been making a lot of "sushi" rolls with Almond Ginger Pate, which I just realized we've never posted the recipe for, even though it's one of our favorites. We use it in place of rice in the rolls and for a spread on veggies and crackers.

Almond Ginger Pate

Ingredients:

-1 T ginger
-1 clove garlic
-1/2 t sea salt
-1 cup dry raw almonds
-juice of 1 lemon (or T bottled lemon juice)
-1/4 cup water

Blend everything until smooth. 1/4 cup of water wasn't enough, so keep adding in 1/4 cup increments until you like the consistency.


Anyway, on Thursday night we went to Skinner's in St. Paul for bingo night. We've only been here a few times (because it's alllll the way over in St. Paul), but what a fantastic bar. You feel like you've been transported to a small town bar up north, but with good food, good beer, and clean bathrooms. The most incredible thing is the prices. Our tab was just under $50 for:

-9 beers (newcastle, summit, schell's)
-3 vodka tonics
-fries, side salad, and nachos big enough to feed 4.

The bingo was free with a final round of coverall winning $400 (unfortunately not anyone in our group)!

Friday we took the day off just for the helluvit and I planned to make The Raw Chef's Vanilla Chocolate Torte with Ginger & Strawberry Cream for my sister's b-day dinner tonight, but Whole Foods didn't have any cocoa butter. Even though I called ahead and asked. When we got there they had no idea what we were talking about and directed us to the body care section.

My would-have-been cake:

So, instead I bought some sprouted bread and natural chunky peanut butter, came home and made a screwdriver, and watched Religulous. Not because I thought the documentary would be particularly informative, but it was available on Red Box and I was in the mood for Bill Maher's sarcasm. Can't write a review because I was half reading my new issue of National Geographic Traveler and fell asleep before it was over. Good times.

-Kelly

Day 18 - Nathan

I'll keep this one short, because I'm working from home today. When I'm alone at home, I basically sit around listening to the music that annoys Kelly, while cleaning like an automaton. Time passes without consequence. I'm like a couchbound cowboy, lulled by Sacajawean siren songs, and dulled down by cannabis smoke signals. That imagery makes no sense at all, but it sounds dreamy, and that's how these lazy days always are.

Today, I've made an apple and orange smoothie and 16 raw sushi rolls. I've enjoyed a good book, Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey. I've watched the cilantro grow. I've also checked in on our radish sprouts. I plan on eventually using them to put some spice in my sushi.

The day, in pictures:










-Nathan

Day 17 - Old Country Buffet and Raw Bread

The Old Country Buffet is probably the last place you'd expect us to be eating, but I took the afternoon off work today to do just that with my grandma. They have a weekday soup & salad lunch special for $4.99 so it was perfect. I had a big salad from the well-stocked bar and good cantaloupe too. Thanks for lunch Nana!

In other news, we have real, functional, raw bread! And lots of it. We used Russell James' recipe from The Raw Chef:


BUCKWHEAT BREAD

Makes 18 slices

Ingredients:

-1/2c olive oil
-1 ½c sun dried tomatoes
-3c sprouted buckwheat (1 ½c dry & unsprouted)
-1 ½c flax meal
-3 ½c peeled zucchini, roughly chopped
-2c apple, cored and roughly chopped
-3T lemon juice
-2 avocados
-1 large onion
-½c minced parsley

Instructions:

1) Process the olive oil, sun dried toms, sprouted buckwheat, courgette, apple, lemon juice, avocados, onion and herbs until thoroughly mixed.

2) Transfer to a large bowl and mix with in the flax meal by hand. The reason you do this separately (not in the processor) is that you are likely to have too much mixture for the size of the processor at this point, and when you add the flax meal it will become quite heavy and sticky and overwork your machine.

3) When mixed, process the whole batter in the machine again, but in small batches to achieve a light fluffy texture.

4) Divide the mixture in half and place on Paraflexx sheets on dehydrator trays. Use a spatula to spread the mixture evenly to all 4 sides and corners of the Paraflexx sheet. If mixture is too sticky you can wet the spatula to make things easier. With a knife score the whole thing into 9 squares.

5) Dehydrate for 2 hours at 115 degrees and then remove the Paraflexx sheets by placing another dehydrator tray and mesh on top and invert so that your original sheet of bread is upside down. That will allow you to peel the Paralexx sheet off and continue to dehydrate the underside of the bread.

- Dehydrate for approx 8 hours more at 110 degrees, or until bread feels light in your hand. If the pieces don’t fully come apart where you scored, use a knife to cut them.

My notes:

-Buckwheat is very easy to sprout! Instructions here.

-The batter doesn't get "light and fluffy" after adding the flax meal. But our bread looks exactly like the picture from the raw chef, so I don't think we did anything wrong.

-I used two small apples and only half a large onion, I did not want onion taste left in my mouth after eating this stuff!

-It took us about 1 1/2 hours to prepare, but it was our first time and made two big tupperware containers full, so it was worth it.

The bread is thin, dense, and chewy with a slightly sweet taste. Definitely hearty enough for a sandwich and you can even scoop up salsa with it. We both like it and it's very satisfying for me, but Nathan says it's no replacement for cooked fluffy bread. I have to admit he is right, I couldn't see eating my egg and cheese sandwiches on this stuff after a night at the bar. But, a nice addition to our raw recipes.

Cheers,

Kelly

Day 16 - Nathan, halfway there

The first week or so of this transition was rough. Even though I admittedly haven't been 100% raw, I've been very close. During that first week, I had headaches, I couldn't focus, and I was crabby all the time. I was convinced that my body probably just wasn't made for this diet. I have a rabbit metabolism, and I was 6'3", 215 pounds-ish a little over two weeks ago.

We went to the gym yesterday and I weighed myself for the first time since changing my diet. A neighbor had mentioned that I looked thinner and younger, and I was starting to buy the narcissistic hype, but I figured I'd look down and see that I'd lost a few pounds. I was wrong. I weigh 199.5 pounds now. That's something close to FIFTEEN pounds lost in the last few weeks.


Keep in mind, I haven't been going to the gym regularly because I've worried my energy level would be down, but I did my normal routine and I hadn't lost any of my strength. I felt great on the way home. It's odd, because Kelly and I aren't sure where I lost all the weight from. Maybe from my fat head, but more likely from my stomach. My stomach was out of control, sort of starting to hang sideways when I reclined in bed. It doesn't appear to be acting as a fleshy pendulum anymore.

I've been a little paranoid that I'd shrink and not look like a moderately big, strong guy anymore. I'm sure this fear traces back to my "chicken legs" high school experience, pre-hormone-shift and pre-firefighting. I don't want to become that tall, thin guy, crammed into a tight sweater, passively reading play manuscripts at a coffee house. But I seem to be the same guy still, just trimmed of some body fat.

I suppose I can probably jump higher now. Maybe I can jump TOO high. Maybe it's not even safe to jump anymore. What an interesting problem to hypothetically have.

Alright, I'm in the zone, and I'm super pumped that Kelly got me to do this diet. I feel like that kid who's convinced he can run faster on the day that he first puts on his new tennis shoes.

Recent food: Today, I'm eating this eggless egg salad on some bread we made in the dehydrator last night. We'll post the recipe when we determine whether it's something we want to recommend. After the gym last night, I whipped together some of that raw sushi, and it was fantastic. I'm going to start prepping the almond pate so I can just bring the ingredients to work and make them there.

-Nathan

Day 15 - Kelly

I read an interesting article in the City Pages this weekend about Traditional Foods, a buying club in South Minneapolis selling mostly natural, local products. This quote from the owner is great: "Americans spend 8 percent of our income on food and 22 percent on doctors. In Italy it's the other way around. You either pay the farmer and the butcher or you pay the doctor."

Sure, buying natural foods costs more than eating ramen, but it is really not that much more expensive. What's really unfortunate is that people think they're being healthy eating wheat bread, fat free yogurt, granola bars, spaghetti sauce etc., when the reality is that most of these products are highly processed and contain high fructose corn syrup and other artificial flavors and preservatives.

Here is an article from Mayo Clinic with basics about high fructose corn syrup. Notice they say moderation is important. But, it is not moderate when that sh*t is sneaking into every meal of your day. Here is another more opinionated article: 8 'Health' Foods That Contain High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Please read your food labels!

Moving on to something more raw related - one of my favorite inexpensive foods is kale. It costs $1.75 per organic bunch at my co-op, which will last for at least three big salads. I used to only eat it cooked because it is sort of tough raw, but problem solved after reading this post from the awesome I ♥ Kale blog. So, part of my lunch today is some "massaged kale".

My planned menu for the workday today:

-Black Coconut Mango Tea (from Trader Joe's)
-Smoothie: Banana, frozen mango (from Trader Joe's), frozen blueberries, handful of kale
-Massaged kale with olive oil and salt
-Celery sticks with Eggless Egg Salad (we made another batch last night).

And tonight, we're going to try making a new bread with sprouted buckwheat…..

-Kelly

Day 14 - Covert Raw Food Party

Our friends Ted, Amy and Ben are members of local band The Inwood Radio. A while ago, they invited us to join their book club. Since then, I've done what I can to work toward the destruction of the book club by picking what may be the worst book club selection in book club history. Albert Camus is a legend, but his book "The Fall" has propelled our book club into the sort of slow-motion freefall that can only happen on planets with much less gravity. So, my selection has effectively caused our club to defy the laws of Earthen physics.

They held a CD release party at The Kitty Cat Club in Dinkytown last night. The band went on around midnight, so we invited some friends over around nine.

We've always made a habit of putting out food, and one of my standbys has been homemade vegetarian sushi. Kelly found a recipe for raw sushi that involves substituting a ginger-almond pate for the rice. We also put out some veggies and raw hummus.

Everything was devoured, proving that raw food can work as pre and post bar food. Even without grease. Who knew? We wrapped things up by making some raw strawberry ice cream.

Here's a link to a video that describes making almond sushi. It wasn't the source of our recipe, but it provides a good introduction to the process.

On a completely unrelated note, I offer you this as a public service: I just returned home from a matinee showing of The Watchmen. When we exited the theater, the sun, at its oppresively low trajectory, turned the entire exiting audience into what appeared to be a blinded herd of drunken cows. My first words were, “If only our retinas had been burned out BEFORE we saw that movie.”

Here are some pictures from last night:


The food we set out


Our sushi


Nathan forming a short-lived relationship with his sushi


Kelly destroying Nathan at some heads-up Texas Holdem'


Kelly showing off her... plate of sushi


Pre-bar food


Communal strawberry ice cream

-Nathan

Day 13 - Alright, great. But now what?

I mean, it’s great and all, but now what?

Somebody paid the piper and the cookie’s finally crumbled. So? What now? Yes, we’re all here because we’re not all there. No matter where we went? Guess what? There we were. That’s nice. But what now?

The cat was away? What did the mice do? They played. Fantastic. But, by all means, tell me what we're supposed to do now. Somebody died and made somebody else the boss? Really? Well slap my a$$ and call Sally. And when that fat lady sings into your receiver, ask her, “Now what?”

The cow peed on a flat rock, we sought the wind in a field, there were no athiests in foxholes, we couldn’t live because we couldn’t love, only boring people got bored, today will be tomorrow’s past, and he wasn’t a fool who gave what he couldn’t keep to gain what he couldn’t lose . I get all that. But could someone just answer me, before we’ve climbed so high on the ladder that the view is prohibitively expensive, what now?

I'll tell you what now:

CHOCOLATE PUDDING (modified from Raw Food Right Now)

Ingredients:
2 avocados
½ cup raw carob powder (or raw cocoa or raw chocolate powder)
1 cup dates
Filtered water to desired consistency

Instructions:
1. Put it all in the blender
2. Using our Vita-Mix, we pushed the ingredients down with the tamper while running it just fast enough to keep things moving.
3. Add water a half-cup at at a time until you're able to run the variable setting on 10 without using the tamper. You should be able to watch the pudding become smooth.

So, I'm basically eating chocolate avacados right now. It's as good as any pudding I've had, and I'm in disbelief that this stuff is good for me. I know it's good for me because Kelly says so. In moderation, she notes.

You'll also be happy to know that our cilantro is growing:

-Nathan

Day 12 - Best Recipe Yet?

Last night I made "Eggless Egg Salad" and it was so good we ate it all before getting around to taking a picture. This is not just the best of our raw recipes, but probably one of the yummiest things I've made in my life.

Here is the recipe as printed on Raw Freedom Community, but ours varied quite a bit, as explained below:

EGGLESS EGG SALAD

Ingredients:
½ cup pure water (start with less add more)
Juice from one lemon or lime
1/4 tsp garlic powder (regular garlic is too harsh for me; powder works much better if you don't want to burp or sweat that stuff all week)
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt
1 ½ cups raw cashews
1 Tbsp organic yellow mustard or spicy mustard for a kick
1 - 1 1/2 Tbsp dill (dry or if fresh more)
1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar
Turmeric, as needed for color (approx. 1 teaspoon)
1 bunch celery diced into small bits (7-8 stalks) (pulse in the food processor for a desired crunchiness)
1 red pepper (pulse in food processor)

Instructions:

1. Place the water, lemon juice, garlic, sea salt and cashews in the high speed blender, and blend until very smooth.

2. With a spatula, take the mixture from the blender and place in a medium sized mixing bowl.

3. Stir in the mustard, apple cider vinegar, and turmeric until it reaches the color and flavor you desire.

4. Add the celery and red bell pepper.

5. Serve with spinach and shredded carrots in a sandwich.

Shelf Life: Keeps up to 5 days in the fridge if sealed in a tight container.

My alterations:

I didn't use dill, mustard, apple cider vinegar, tumeric, or red peppers. Some people had commented on the message board that the vinegar and tumeric ruined the recipe, and I didn't have the other 3 ingredients.

I mixed the cashew mixture with finely chopped celery and baby bella mushrooms. The mushrooms gave a great egg-like consistency and didn't seem to add any mushroom taste.

After mixing with the veggies, I added more garlic powder and black pepper to taste.

I literally licked the blender to get every bit of cashew sauce I could. Blended cashews + garlic powder = yum yum YUM!!

-Kelly

Day 10 - Kelly

Well, it's nearing the end of day 10 and I'm feeling too full for I think the first time on raw foods. I ate a bunch of onion bread and hummus and it's not a great feeling. Especially because the onion bread tastes really yummy while eating it, but then the taste stays in your mouth forever. No more of that for me.

One of the most noticeable results of this experiment for me is a more balanced appetite. It used to be when I got hungry, I was all of a sudden starving and felt like I had to eat immediately. Since eating raw I never feel like that, and have avoided the uncomfortable too full feeling also. It's really nice.

Menu for today:

-Black mango tea
-Pear
-Carrots, celery, and broccoli with hummus
-Salad (spinach, broccoli, zucchini, sprouted lentils, olive oil, salt & pepper) The sprouted lentils are a little strange to eat by the spoonful alone, but they're great in a salad, they blend right in. (See below post for lentil sprouting instructions!)
-Snacked on: dates, prunes, cantaloupe, pineapple, flax crackers
-Ate too much of: onion bread and hummus
-Getting the onion taste out of my mouth/settling my stomach with: Organic Rain vodka and diet tonic water

Cheers,
Kelly

Day 10: Necessity is the Mother of Starvation

It's true: necessity is the mother of starvation. The more you NEED, the less you HAVE, and if you don't have enough, you'll starve. That's iron-clad logic right there.

That seemed to be my early experience here, but I'm no longer starving, I'm settled into a diet that's keeping me generally content, and I think I'll survive this thirty days.

Basically, I'm starting each morning with a smoothie, snacking on something early (carrots and raw hummus today), having a veggie burger or something substantial for lunch, and randomly making something for dinner, depending on how I feel.

A few days ago, when I nearly had a raw food psychiatric meltdown, I ranted to Kelly at 1:00 a.m about how absurdly extreme this diet is. I was getting flashbacks of my time in seminary, back when I used to be abnormally gung-ho about moral superiority, straining to high-five the stratospheric hand of God. I get that feeling whenever I'm being obsessive about something, and it creeps me out. It gives me the willies, as Joseph Heller would say.

Also, this supposedly natural, breath-of-fresh-air diet was causing me to do a lot of weird things: consider the fact that I now harness the power of two galloping horses in my blender, and I've got a plastic box that dehydrates food at low temperatures, allowing me to make fake hamburgers.

Alright, these ranty feelings passed after my morning smoothie the next day, and I realized I'm pretty happy with the bad weight I'm dropping, and I feel pretty good now. I don't know that the lightning gods are coursing through my unprocessed veins or anything, but I'm eating less crap than I used to and I'm settling into a routine that's not killing me.

In the future, I'll continue to post new food experiments. For now, thank you for allowing me to recline on this leather e-couch. Our hour is up. I'll pay your secretary.

-Nathan

Day 9 - Veggie Burgers

As you'll see in Kelly's post, we saw a Red Stag in the woods last night and wandered a little off the raw food highway. In my defense, I ordered collard greens, something I never would have done ten days ago.

But, back to this raw thing. Kelly found two great recipes that have saved me over the last few days. I've continued to be not-quite-lucid and yes-quite-irritable, but these substantial foods have brought some much needed moments of after dinner contentedness.

ONION BREAD (modified from a post by Pansy on RFT)

Ingredients:
- One and 1/2 large sweet onions, peeled
- 1/2 cup ground sunflower seeds
- 1/2 cup ground golden flax seeds
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1 oz. Nama Shoyu

Procedure:
1) I used the Vita-Mix on the 10 variable setting to grind the sunflower and golden flax separately. It helps to put enough in that the blade is completely covered and the tamper can be used to constantly press down the seeds. If you grind too long, the product will heat up and begin to be less fluffy, so take care.

2) Chop the onions in your blender or food processor. You want small peices rather than puree.

3) Mix it all together in a bowl until the dry ingredients turn to a consistent paste.

4) Use a spatula to smooth it out onto some parchment paper, and put it in the dehydrator. I simply overlapped some parchment paper on the plastic dehydrator sheet and made sure it was secure so it wouldn't flap around. My mixture was about 1/4 inch thick, but a thinner spread will result in dryer bread, which I would probably prefer.



5) Dehydrate on 105 degrees in an Excalibur Dehydrator for 24 hours. At some point in the middle of this process, flip the bread over and remove the parchment paper. You may want to adjust temperature setting and time duration to get the result you prefer. This "bread" seems to remain a bit gooey if you don't dehydrate the snot out of it.

SUNBURGER (modified from source)

Ingredients:
- 2 celery stalks
- 1/2 cup yellow onion
- 1 medium red bell pepper
- 1 TSP sea salt
- 2 TSP dried oregano
- 1 cup ground sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup ground flax seeds
- 1/4 cup sesame seeds (we substituted this for hemp seeds)
- 1/2 cup filtered water

Procedure:
1) Generally chop everything up, put it in a bowl and add the water last. Stir it well and transfer everything into your blender.

2) Using the tamper to constantly press down the mixture, I ran our Vita-Mix at a relatively high variable setting, long enough to get everything blended, but not so long that it became a puree. It's a matter of personal taste, so do what you want.



3) Like you are making cookies, create patties on a parchment-paper-lined dehydrator sheet. Vary the size to personal taste, but remember that they will shrink in the dehydrator. I've ultimately learned to prefer making about six with this amount of mixture.





4) Dehydrate at 105 degrees overnight, flip in the morning and remove the parchment paper, then continue dehydrating until you are ready to eat that afternoon. Note that the original recipe suggested only four hours of dehydrating time. Again, consistency is just a matter of preference.



-Nathan

[more photos to follow]

Day 9 - Getting back on the wagon?

I'm not quite sure how that saying goes, but if off the wagon = not following the guidelines of this experiment, then last night we were off the wagon.

Our office happy hour at Restaurant Max started at 4 p.m., and after my second vodka diet coke, I was not refusing when the plate of fries came my way. It honestly was more wanting something to soak up the alcohol than lack of willpower.

By 7 I was in full on party mode, so Nathan agreed to take me to the Red Stag (I'm sure I didn't have to twist his arm, they serve Surly there). We had free drink tokens (thanks Ted!), but I could only take a few sips of my extremely strong vodka something or other martini. Our appetizers were cooked but still pretty healthy - collard greens and root vegetables. But, this was not filling enough for me and I insisted we stop at Lunds to get the ingredients for probably my favorite drunk food - grilled egg and cheese sandwiches. So, day 8 ends with me drunkenly eating my sandwich on Ezekiel sprouted bread while watching reruns of Sex and the City.

No regrets though, it was really fun and I'm looking forward to continuing the experiment with one important lesson learned: Drinking while raw hits harder than usual!

-Kelly

Day 8 -Sprouting

SPROUTING

We've finally successfully sprouted. We looked at a number of websites to get down the basic concepts. The most helpful, by far, was Sproutpeople.com. I decided to MacGyver my own jars, but they seem to have good products if you're less venturesome. More importantly, they have a mother lode of sprouting information, describing tiny alterations in procedures depending on what you're growing.

Below, I'll describe how to make a sprouting jar, and how to sprout lentils.

MAKING A SPROUTING JAR

The key to sprouting seems to be simply soaking the beans, rinsing and draining them daily, and storing them out of direct sunlight. The point of the jar is to hold in small beans while allowing for good drainage.

1) I went to the Ace Hardware website and ordered a 6-pack of wide mouth mason jars. In retrospect, these are a little big. I got them at Ace, because they deliver them free of charge to a local store. They came within a few days.

2) I bought a 36" x 84" roll of Phifer Brite Aluminum Screening at Home Depot. It's way too much material, but it was only in the $6.00 range.

3) Remove the lid and grab the round metal plate that would normally seal the jar.

4) Take the aluminum screening and trace a circle around the round metal plate. Do this two times, so you have two circles. I eventually decided to use two because it makes the sprouting jar much more sturdy.



5) Cut out the circles.

6) Set both circles into the jar cap. If you've cut them the right size, they should just set in easily, and should entirely cover the open area.

7) Screw the lid back on your sprouting jar. Game over.

SPROUTING LENTILS

Bear in mind that the point of sprouting a lot of these beans is just to get the thing "living" so you can enjoy the nutritional benefits that follow. Leafy green sprouts like alfalfa produce long, jar-filling sprouts. The goal with lentils, on the other hand, is to get a short sprout so you can add them to salads and other recipes.

1) Soak a half cup of lentils in a cup and a half of cool, 65 degreeish water. Soak overnight, for 8-12 hours.

2) Put the soaked beans into your sprouting jar and screw the mesh top on. Fill it with cool water and drain it a number of times so the lentils are rinsed well.

3) Shake out the remaining water vigorously so the lentils are drained very well. Do this every time you rinse and drain.

4) Store the jar angled, but just about upright, in a bowl. Put it in a place that doesn't get direct, screaming sunlight. Somewhere away from windows is fine. Don't worry about hiding the jar in darkness.

5) Rinse and drain a couple times a day. I did it every morning and evening.

6) After two days of rising and draining, our lentils were sprouted and ready to go. Keep rinsing and draining until you are happy with the length of the sprouts.

7) Wait 8 hours after your last rinsing and draining before putting the lentils in the refrigerator.