Tweak… and twerking would help too!

Reminder

Doing this is your choice. Everything is your choice. Everything you eat, drink, think and do will effect how you feel mentally and physically. If you have an illness, an auto-immune problem, lack energy, have hormone imbalances, mood swings, lack of concentration, brain fog, constipation, acne – you fill in the words for you – you can change how you feel if you choose to.

You only need to tweak really – tweak a salad for a pie haha, no, I am kidding! Well I am not but there are better ways; Tweak a good pie for a bad pie (suggestion in the last post), roast some sweet potatoes with cumin and smoked paprika in place of fried potatoes. Use Make almond milk instead of drinking pasteurised milk, homemade almond milk its cheaper, fresher and more natural than prepacked. Top some roast aubergine slices with onions, red peppers, mushrooms, garlic and some goats cheese instead of pepperoni pizza and so on. Lots more ideas will follow over the coming weeks.

As you tweak and add in good stuff, move more,  sleep and look better you will be more inspired to do more of it.

Make it a habit to have a really fresh and juicy green salad with meals; if you don’t already love that you will start to. You just need a good dressing (recipes coming up over the next few posts) to make it just as you want it.

Be prepared

Be prepared for feeling a bit rubbish as you remove the bad. If you are used to drinking coffee and black tea all day, fluffy or stodgy white stuff (pasta, bread, pastry, cake, biscuits, pies you know what I am talking about) then as you remove them your body and head will probably complain a bit. Drink more water, rest if needed, move more to push the toxins through. Have warm salted baths to pull the rubbish out. You might be a bit bloated and windy (sorry) as you add more fibre to your diet – chew well, eat slowly, stop when full. Consider taking probiotics and digestive enzymes. You can find them in health food shops and online. They can help but you don’t have to. I take a course now and again and make my own probiotics which I eat and drink daily, more about that in another post.

MOVE

Walk, run, jump up and down on the spot, go for a swim, walk or run up and down stairs, dance, do whatever it takes and whatever you can to move. You need to use those muscles. They support you and hold you up, keep all your bits together. Moving raises your heartbeat, increases your oxygen intake, moves your lymph and so removes some of the toxins. It helps digestion, increases metabolism and mood. That’s enough for now, trust me, MOVE!

Humus Recipe

Drain and rinse 1 tin or jar of red kidney beans or chickpeas, put in food processor. Peel and chop 1 big courgette and throw that in too.

Add 1 big TBS Tahini,

Juice of 1 lemon plus a grate or two of zest.

1 clove garlic.

1 tsp cumin.

Pinch salt (GOOD salt!).

Blend adding a few drops of very cold water until you reach the consistency you prefer.

Serve as it is or with a drizzle of olive oil and lemon juice (please don’t be afraid of good oils, they oil your joints, your skin, feed your cells – olive oil, sesame oil, coconut oil, avocados all GOOD).

Serve with chopped veggies, in wraps preferably made from coconut or cabbage/ lettuce leaves, in baked sweet potatoes etc.

Bits and bobs meal

Last night I served this humus with:

Raw courgette, flax seed, physilium husk, onion powder wraps

Fried courgette, red onion, mushrooms, tomatoes, cumin and ground coriander

Chopped avocado, tomatoe, fresh coriander leaves, lemon juice

A pile of roquette and coriander leaves

Cherry tomatoes

Non dairy cheesy sauce made by blending soaked cashews, pine nuts, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, dash umboshi vinegar or a stoned umboshi plum, pinch salt and ground pepper. Actually I confess I used a few other ingredients (hence the interesting colour!), which have to remain secret for now, but that recipe will get you an amazing cheesy sauce!

There is no way you could feel deprived eating that!

Our diary for the last two days:

Monday

Me: corn crackers with butter and jam (homemade). Dates, soaked and sprouted almonds.

Robin: meusli type cereal (bought) homemade almond milk.

Both: 1 coffee with breakfast

Smoothie: celery, dandelion leaves, parsley, bananas, cherries, maca, spirullina, chia

Robin: Banana, Magnum ice cream!! (note to self make some sweet snacks to be at the ready!)

Humus (recipe in this post) carrots sticks and cherry tomatoes

Raw seed based Falafels with cucumber, tomatoes, tahini sauce wrapped in cabbage leaves.

Piece very delicious, old, hard cheese (using it up!) with Quince paste (homemade).

Apple cidre vinegar in water X 2, 1 ½-2 litres filtered water, green and red tea.

Walked over 10,000 steps (through forest, speedy), swam ½ KM (again, speedy).

Tuesday

Breakfast; Me as above, Robin whole grain toast.

Juice: celery, kale, cucumber, lemon.

Me: Chia pudding with homemade almond milk, banana, spirullina and acai.

Robin : Cereal with homemade almond milk and fruit. Ice cream (NB he is doing masses of physical work and when they are gone they are gone 😉

Grain free wraps, cooked veggies with spices, humus, chunky guacamole, Coriander and roquette from the garden, tomatoes, cheesy (non dairy sauce) recipes in the post.

Plenty of water, red tea, ACV in water x 2. Filtered water, green and red tea.

Walked over 10,000 steps (through forest, speedy), Me danced 30 mins, Robin active work. Ten minute meditation.

Wednesday so far:

Similar breakfast.

Smoothie using the large quantity of juice I made and stored yesterday with banana, mango, frozen cherries, pollen.

Boiled eggs (me 1 Robin 2).

Tonight I am not sure but probably heading for roasted veggies as I haven’t given it any thought and my hands are still covered in wax from renovating a floor!

Take it easy, be kind to yourself, keep hydrated and think about your left hand (see last post here Feel better!).

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Balance, balance, balance!

So, I passed both my courses!

It was so intense, why did I do two at once?

Next time (have I said that before?) I will listen when told “they are both intense and it is best to do one at a time”…

Anyway, despite getting really stressed half way into the photography course and only a week into the raw chef course, I really did love it and I learnt so much!

Raw food is healthy. That is a fact. If it is a regime that is used properly and balanced well nutritionally it is very healthy. If it is an addition to another regime, or simply ‘normal’ eating, it adds a very healthy boost.

And, lets face it, it can also be a huge compromise.

Yes, we can make a raw pizza – NO it will never taste like a cooked, melty, gooey cheese fest!
My daughter used to ask “But why pretend? Its not a pizza/ spaghetti/ chocolate mousse/ macaroni cheese/ lasagne!”. And she was right, sort of, but don’t people need something to help them understand what something is going to be like? I think so.

For example, a lasagne says it will be savoury, rich, cheesy with tomatoes and some herbs in layers.

Chocolate mousse will be chocolately, sweet, smooth. I do believe that most food flavours and favourite recipes can be imitated in a healthy way and I get lots of inspiration from my huge range of recipe books, different traditions and world foods.

And, if you want to convince or convert a non-believer some raw pizza recipes may taste good, even come some way close but that is the dish most likely to fail you!

Other times my kids would ask “It tastes good……what have you hidden in it Mom?” and invariably I had hidden something somewhere like avocado in the mousse, courgette in the hummus etc and they would not have known had they not asked.

Having said that I believe that now, with the input of some amazing chefs worldwide and progress made by people playing and developing and sharing recipes and with the equipment that has been improving them becoming more widely available there is virtually no compromise! No need for pretend! Allelulia!

I have learnt to balance flavours and components and nutritional elements and that the greener and worse it tastes is not better for you – yes, I would do that to me, OK and to Robin, I would make my smoothies very green and glug them down without my halo slipping a millimetre. Then grimace and a shiver would run through me – and him, sorry Robin.

I’ve been uncooking raw food, both simple and more complicated for over 12 years now and mostly the people I share it with have been loving it. It is time more people discovered more about it.

I have just made a divine smoothy which balanced my need to give and receive health and our need for it to taste delicious. He is very happy. Me too, though I don’t feel quite as sanctimonious as I used to!

Here is the recipe. I am using cups because in using the American measure I’ve found it is easier to work with. Use a standardised ‘cup’ measure (they are really easy to get hold of now) or simply a tea cup it doesn’t matter as long as you use the same one throughout the recipe really, I’m thinking a standard English tea cup to balance with the other quantities in this recipe.

1 cup water kefir
1 large banana
4 fresh figs (in season, from our tree)
1/2 cup blackberries (use any berry, I just picked them in the hedge)
10 small kale leaves not deveined
2 good sprigs parsley including stem
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons chia
1 teaspoon agave
Pinch pink salt

Blend and share between two (or one now, one later 🙂 and ENJOY it!

 

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