Celebrating an all-natural lifestyle

Weekend Highlights

Ah, Sundays.

I’ve just gotta say it: I kind of hate Sundays. The malaise, the anxiety about the work week ahead, the frantic attempt to catch up on editorial deadlines and reading. Blech.

But it’s not all bad. A couple of nice things manage to squeeze into the picture: extended and leisurely morning workouts, early dinners with my Mom, the occasional Sunday night movie. Most importantly, Sunday is my kitchen day: it’s the day I put aside to cook, cook, and cook some more. I prep meals, dressings, pates, vats of hummus, soak and boil beans, wash and chop veggies, etc. Few things give me more pleasure or sense of calm than preparing a good meal, and the chance to do that definitely helps to chase away the Sunday night blues.

Yesterday, Kristin asked what everyone’s foodie highlights were this week. I know what mine were. The first was this:

As part of my Best of Raw 2009 prize, I received a gift basket from the incredible Vivapura company. Makers of wonderful coconut, cacao, and fruit/nut mixes, Vivapura is an amazing raw resource. One of the treats they sent me (in addition to some amaaaaaazing, life changing cacao paste) was this wonderful coconut vanilla creme. The ingredients?

Coconut and vanilla. Period. The result is a vanilla infused coconut butter that’s sweet and rich, but also low glycemic and all raw. Methinks my friend Heather–maker of homemade coconut butter and critic of all things sugary–would looove this stuff (and inspired by Heather, I’ve also given homemade coconut butter a try lately, with awesome results!).

So, what to do with this magical stuff? Yesterday, I woke up with a crazy craving for oat bran, and I had a hunch that it would be all the more wonderful with some coconut butter melted atop.

And oh, it was.

Other stuff I plan on doing with Coconut Vanilla Creme? I think it would be mighty tasty atop roasted yams or squash. I think it would be delicious on banana soft serve. I think it would be tasty in any avocado pudding combination, or atop Ezekiel toast.

Or how bout straight up, with a lick of the spoon?

Other highlight of the weekend: revisiting an old friend:

Re-discovering beloved cookbooks is without a doubt one of every home cook’s favorite pleasures. I’ve always loved Veganomicon–it’s a bible among vegan cookbooks–and often serve up simplified or modified versions of its grain dishes, soups, and dips/spreads. But it had been a while since I flipped through its pages, and today, unsure of what I wanted for dinner, I decided to consult my girl Isa for recipe advice.

I settled on her red lentil and cauliflower curry, a simple, savory, and one pot dinner recipe. I love curries: they’re tasty and spicy and filling, and the leftovers are always awesome. I followed this recipe (red lentils, cauliflower, parsnips, celery, spices, c’est tout!) pretty much to a T, omitting onion and garlic. It turned out beautifully!

Along with a fresh salad, it was food for the Sunday soul.This was definitely inspiration for me to yank out some other favorite cookbooks and uncookbooks, and get re-inspired!

I hope you all had lovely weekends of your own–and if there were any special culinary highlights, I’d love to hear about them!

xo

Spotlight on cookbooks: THE RAW FOOD REVOLUTION DIET

Hey all!

Hope that your many Thanksgiving celebrations were absolutely lovely. Thanks for your comments on my thankful post — I should have added that I am terribly thankful for all of you!

One of the more frequent reader questions I get is which cookbooks or raw diet books I most recommend. It’s not always a question I love to answer, since I like to encourage those who are getting into raw to work intuitively, incorporating raw foods into preexisting routines and tastes, rather than relying on diet plans or recipes. Even so, I realize that cookbooks serve an important function for those who are transitioning into the raw lifestyle: they offer culinary inspiration, a sense of kinship with the cookbook authors, and they often include a lot of helpful how-to. So it’s only fair, I think, that I periodically share with you the cookbooks that have most inspired and helped me in my culinary journey.

My first selection is actually a new-ish one. I got my hands on a copy of The Raw Food Revolution Diet, co-authored by Cherie Soria, Brenda Davis, and Vesanto Melina, a few weeks ago, and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. It’s primarily a cookbook, but it’s also a primer on the raw lifestyle and (for those who wish) a dietary guide. I only skimmed the information on raw eating (which includes everything from an explanation of what enzymes are to daily meal plans), but my reaction to the material was both positive and occasionally critical. I think that it’s a fundamentally sound, well-rounded approach to eating raw. I was sorry to see that the authors’ dismiss of food combining, and–more importantly–their choice to include calorie counts with the daily meal plans. While I think that calorie counting can be a useful practice for those who are very overweight and not used to keeping any sort of tabs on their daily intake, I believe that it’s a fundamentally counterproductive habit that instills the wrong sorts of dietary priorities in people. Most raw foodists I know eschew it as much as I do, and I’m dissapointed when I see calorie tabulations in raw books.

This said, the counts and daily meal plans do serve as proof to newcomers that the raw diet is as sustaining and rich in fuel as any other way of eating. So if the authors included the counts solely to persuade doubters that they can meet their needs with raw foods, so be it.

But let’s get to the important stuff: the recipes. In this book you’ll find everything from simple soups and salad dressings to recipes for raw scones, burgers, and garden pizza. Impressive! The book clearly offers a range of difficulty, so that newcomers to the diet who don’t own many appliances can still take advantage of the food.

Whenever a client reports purchasing a new raw un-cookbook to me, I offer an important word of advice: don’t focus on recipes that you won’t have the energy to prepare on a regular basis. Just because a shiny new recipe for raw pizza sits in front of you, it doesn’t mean that you need to spend 11 hours dehydrating sprouted buckwheat crust. Focus on familiarizing yourself with recipes that you might actually make and make again. And choose the recipes that fit into your lifestyle; if you’re a soup lover, give a few new soups a shot; if you love to spiralize pasta, search for cool new zucchini noodle recipes. Later on, once you’ve taken advantage of recipes you’ll really return to, you can play with the toughies.

Me? I’ve so far tested out two staples in my own diet: nut pates and soups. My first excursion with The Raw Food Revolution Diet was a broccoli tahini pate. While I can’t reveal precisely what’s in the recipe or how it’s made, I can tell you that it’s a broccoli base with tahini, miso, lemon and some nutritional yeast, and it’s absolutely delicious! And while I don’t calculate protein or calcium counts for recipes–again, this is very alien to my approach–I will echo the authors’ reminder that broccoli and tahini are rich sources of both nutrients.

I served the pate over a big salad, along with some juice pulp crackers I’d made a few days earlier:

A delicious meal!

My next recipe was the book’s garden soup. This is not so different from any standard blended salad: kale, cucumber, apple, avocado or sunflower seeds, and seasonings. But the result was exceptionally thick and creamy (sort of a rarity for green soup) and the flavor had a lovely sweetness to it. Another winner!!

So far, then, I’m really enjoying the Raw Food Diet Revolution. Of course, I recommend that you approach the “diet” part with a big grain of salt: raw foods are about eating close to nature, and not about dieting! But if you can overcome the linguistics, this is a great source of information and a rich trove of easy to make recipes for anyone — expert or newbie.

Meanwhile, were you wondering about the Thanksgiving meal? I was, as I mentioned a few posts ago, dining in a restaurant with my mom and her boyfriend. So I’m afraid there’s no raw vegan spread to show you. But I can report overall dining success. We were eating at Cesca, an upscale Italian restaurant, and I feared that I’d be terribly limited in options (especially on a high-stress service day for the waitstaff, and with a pre-fixe menu in place). Not so! The restaurant’s manager, Todd, was more than sweet about accomodating me, as was our affable waiter. I began with a salad, and then the restaurant threw together a plate of raw and steamed veggies, including beets, zucchini and carrots, marinated portobellos, and brussels sprouts. Along with a nice vinaigrette on the side, it was simple and satisfying — just what I like!

Thanks, Cesca, for a great meal.

And now it’s your turn, guys: how was your Thanksgiving meal? Hope it exceeded expectations all around.

xo