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