Thursday, July 26, 2007

Your Questions Answered (and camera is fixed!)
It turned out that my camera really WAS only malfunctioning due to battery related problems, so now it is working just fine again, yay! And since we all love food porn, that's what you get first.



I think this is just the most gorgeous salad I have ever eaten. It looks so bright and colourful and alive!! If you're interested, it is dandelion greens, corn, tomato, carrot, celery, parsley and the tiniest avocado I've ever seen, with orange juice squeezed over as 'dressing.' Mmmm I want another one right now. (I think I know what I'm having for dinner!)



This picture is not great, I don't think it caught the true vibrancy of the fruit, but I wanted to show you a little portion of what I hauled home from the organic growers market. In addition to this fruit I got loads of bananas and a whole tray of persimmons (YUMMMMMMMMM!!!)And also there was celery, kale, silverbeet, rainbow chard, parsley, sweet corn, a cucumber... I think that's it.

Now, onto 'sharing my secrets' and answering the questions all you wonderful people left me:

From Erica -
I am curious, are you still 100% raw? How long has it been now? I slipped off the wagon for awhile but now am back up to only one cooked item per day (unless I'm at a social function).
AND
I realised last night I am also curious about your experience with the "raw high", if you have/had it, and also if you feel connected to the universe/get messages from it, as they say happens when you're 100%?

My Response - I (very excitedly!) celebrated my 1 year raw anniversary just last week. For the first few months of that I still ate dried fruits that were probably dried above a 'raw' temperature, as well as eating not 'truly raw' cashews, but aside from that I have been 100% raw the whole time. Oh and I don't eat those things anymore.
REgarding the raw high... I'm not sure. I am happy pretty much all day everyday and that is still, even now, a bit foreign to me because I suffered depression for about 4 years before going raw thanks to harassment at school etc. So yes, I think I do get the raw high, but I don't feel connected to the universe. I am not religious or spiritual at all so maybe some people would say that is because I'm not open to communicating with the universe, but whatever.

From Anne -
I haven't been reading your blog for very long, so this might be redundant:

How do your parents feel about you being raw?


My response - No question is redundant here. I don't know whether I've talked about this much on my blog or not, actually. Anyway, I have absolutely fantastic, amazing, incredible parents. I love them more than I could put into words. They always support me 100% in what I do and I appreciate that so much. After I went vegan age 15, my mum decided she wanted to go vegetarian - due to food intolerances she had already given up dairy years earlier so is now almost totally vegan. Last year I became the official family chef, cooking for my parents 5 nights a week, and my dad happily eats whatever I cook, which is always vegan or vegetarian. Just recently he has started eating an imitation ham product (instead of the real dead pig kind) in his lunch rolls, so now he only eats meat twice a week instead of 14(!!) times, yay! And also, he now usually gets a vegetarian option if he eats out somewhere, which I think is excellent.
So, in summary, my parents have no issues whatsoever with me being raw!

From Bazu -
Here's my question for you, since I'm food obsessed: what are your biggest food cravings? What "naughty" food is your downfall?

My Response - I think I am very fortunate, as lots of people who go raw struggle with lots of cooked food cravings but in a whole year of raw I haven't craved a single specific cooked meal. I tend to crave texture more than taste - the texture of plain tofu always really did it for me, kinda soft and squidgy (I know I know, I'm weird!) and a few times I've really missed that, but I found mushrooms (which I used to hate) really did it for me there. I don't really crave anything other than fruit now!!
Hmm... 'naughty' food... what's that? :-) Ahhh, the beauty of being raw. There are no naughty foods! Nothing I eat is a 'downfall.' It is all fabulous, delicious and amazing, I can eat it all day long and never suffer a thing for it! Yay!

From Melissa -
hi
ive been reading your blog for a while now and always loved your recipes...
i always felt like i could relate to you because i was anorexic for years and am just starting to feel better (mentally) since the last 6 months (up 25 lbs yay...used to be 80lbs at 5'8...)
i am vegan and although i dont eat all raw, i still eat raw as much as possible...
one day i decided to go 100% raw... the reason why i stopped eating raw wasnt because i didnt like it or didnt feel good but because part of my recovery was recognizing where i had lied to myself... i then realized that i had only become raw as a way to (subconsciously) be able to refuse more food and/or control yet another aspect of my life (or try to...)
Is that how you became raw?
Now, i would like to be more raw (at least 75%) but im scared that i would be doing it for the wrong reasons again... any suggestions???


My Response - Thankyou for sharing so much about your recovery journey Melissa! I can totally see how raw would be an easy way to refuse more food and thus fall back into the anorexic cycle. I went vegan while I was in the midst of my disorder and while it was 100% motivated by my compassion for animals and NOT by a desire to turn down food, it did make it a heck of a lot easier! Thankfully, finding raw was like an awakening for me - I suddenly felt that I could connect myself back to nature, however, in nature I knew I would not feel the way I did as an anorexic. Suddenly, after 3 years, it was gone. By 'it' I mean that feeling of worthlessness that meant I had to starve myself in order to be anything special. I'm not saying I recovered overnight - it still took months and months before I let go of all the old obsessions, but the most important change in mindset was almost instantaneous. That is unfortunate in a way, because it means I can't really offer much to people like yourself in terms of a way to overcome those feelings, since mine kind of overcame themselves. All I can say is to keep working on it - wake up every day and tell yourself you ARE worth it, you CAN do it. And if you feel you can make it to 75% raw without becoming more ill again, do it - I promise you, after a few weeks you will feel like a new person!
If there is anything else you think I can offer to help with, please, just ask!

Thanks to everyone for your questions, if anyone has more don't hesitate to ask!
Have a smashing day!

Thursday, July 19, 2007

A Sad Lack of Yummy Pics and No Secrets to Share
Yes, sorry about that - my camera seems to have died, something I'm very unhappy about indeed. I thought it was just having issues due to some problems with our rechargeable batteries but nothing (not even my awesome Dad!) seems able to fix it. I don't know what I'm going to do, so pics of food might be few and far between, when I can manage to get my hands on Mum and Dad's camera. But faaar worse things could happen to me, eg I could have been born an egg-laying hen, or in a poor village in Bangladesh or a zillion other things, so I won't complain! :-)



Anyway, here is a picture I took AGES ago and never posted (well, I think I never posted it - if you've seen this before, I guess I'm wrong!) I call it 'Smooth as Satin' green smoothie. I do NOT call it 'Smooth as Silk' green smoothie because, in my opinion, silk is equal to leather in the cruelty stakes. Just cos silk worms are smaller than cows, doesn't mean they aren't living beings with an intrinsic right to continue living, instead of being steamed/gassed/boiled alive to obtain their silk.
Sorry for that little rant, now let me tell you more about the smoothie - it is silverbeet, wheatgrass, banana and pear and woweee is it delicious!I am eating a LOT of this basic smoothie at the moment, because bananas and pears are pretty much the only availble green smoothie fruits. I'm not complaining though, they're delicious. At this very moment I'm drinking a gs of spinach, parsley, banana and pear and it is SO DARN GOOD! I can't get enough parsley at the moment - I've never had flat leaf before but I bought a big bunch at the organic farmers market last week and I am totally LOVING it. YUM!

As you may be able to tell from all the capital letters I'm using, I feel AWESOME today. I don't know why but I'm even higher on life than usual! YAY!



On to some other things... my Mum found this little guy (or girl) just outside our back door the other day and it was sitting so still we both stared for ages trying to decide if it was a statue left behind by the previous owners of our new house. But eventually we saw its throat pulsing away with each little breath and realised that it was, indeed, real. I became concerned when it stayed put for three days straight but then one morning it was gone - we do have a creek just on the other side of our back fence so hopefully that's where it went. Maybe it was just waiting until the plumbers and their digging machine got out of our backyard... ahh, the joys of moving into 'new-old' (ie new to us, but built over 50 years ago) houses - I'm just glad I'm still the kid and my parents have to deal with (and pay for!) this stuff. Long (and gross) story short, in the 2 years this house sat empty, a pencil willow decided to investigate the piping with its roots, resulting in NOTHING being able to go down ANY of the drains in the house, as well as some rather unpleasant things coming up. So glad it is all fixed after 5 rather uncomfortable days!



On to the second part of this post - Heidi from the awesome blog Raw Food, Right Now has declared this 'Share Your Secrets' week. I really want to share some secrets, in fact I've been racking my brain for something to share, but what? What is there you don't know about me? I mean, you don't know that my favourite colour is purple and that's what I'm currently painting my room, or that my parents have been married for 23 years this OCtober, but these aren't exactly deep dark secrets! So instead, I'm opening it up to you - is there something you want to know? Pretened this is truth or dare but without the dare - ask me anything! I get to choose whether or not I'll answer you, obviously, but I'll try to answer anything. Meanwhile, if you have some secrets, why not share them. Go on, I dare you! :-)

Oh and there's one more thing - a lot of people with blogs are publishing cookbooks, cookzines, cooking e-zines etc. Basically, I'm a strapped-for-cash student looking to make some money - if I wrote a mini e-book mainly full of scrummy raw recipes and with a bit of stuff about my experiences with raw, would you buy it? Just looking to see whether it would be worth it or not, basically. All feedback welcomed!
Thanks and have an fantabulously amazing day!!

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We Moved!
Okay, I know I did another disappearing act there - sorry abou that, but I was very busy... moving house!! Yay! For the past year and a half my parents and I have been living in a rented property but my parents have now bought a house and I like it a lot. While we were moving the internet was disconnected for a little while - when I got back on I had 215 e-mails in my inbox!! WOW!
To make the move a bit more stressful, I was doing my first week of 'Vacation Farm Experience,' a compulsory (and pretty self-explanatory, lol) part of my vet course. This involves spending time on a variety of farms, the first of which was a stables where they train horses for pacing (where they run with the guy in the little cart behind them). I hated it. I knew I would and I did. I do not agree with horse racing one little bit on a moral ground (as I'm sure most other vegans understand) and I saw some horrible things. I think it's likely to get a lot worse when I head off for a week at a (semi-free range) piggery though... yuck. Trust me, I've tried to get out of this. It is not possible - to complete the course to become a vet (In order to stop animals suffering) I have to spend a total of 5 weeks at farms where animals continually suffer. Oh yeah, makes so much sense. But on to better things...



Here is my little (or perhaps not so little anymore!!) Ruhsa baby - as you can see, she loves my rebounder! But this was at the old house, and it is outaide now so she (a strict indoor kitty) doesn't get to lay on it anymore. She used to sit and watch me on it, totally fascinated by how it moved up and down! So cute!!



This is a version of my Cirrus Salad, the recipe for which you can find at my recipe's page (link in sidebar) but it is a slight variation - to make the recipe as written, you need to do so in a small window of time in Autumn when apples have just come in season and cucumbers are just going out. Well, you do if you eat local and organic like me. But now that cucumber is out of season I'm using zucchini (courgette) instead, and it is equally yummy but surprisingly different. Yum!



Lastly, here is the lasagne I mentioned in my last post. Oooh, it looks so scrumptious! You get two piccies!



Have a superbly stunning day everyone!