Saturday, August 25, 2007

Here Come the Caterpillars!
Yes, it's that time of year again - caterpillar season! I love it because I just can't get over how adorable those little guys are - little balls of fluff, squniching their bodies along and munching away on anything green. One particular little cutie has been hanging out on our back steps for the past couple of days and every time I go outside I carefully step over him/her and marvel at how much of the weeds have been eaten.

What I hate, however, is the number of poor innocent caterpillars I see squashed on footpaths. It's so very sad - they particularly seem to like the bike paths around where I live and every time I see one still alive, it gets the ride of its life on my bike until I find a nice grassy spot for it to live.

Anyway, sorry about my month long absence. I have two 'reasons' (ahem, excuses!) for my disappearance - one is that my ridiculously long holidays finally came to and end and I'm now back at uni, the other is that all the food photos I take are appalling. I would love to post every couple of days, showing you the stunningly attractice food I eat, but I just can't - it's not because the food I eat is ugly, anything but - it's just that I can't take nice photos of it. I think the reason for this is that it is always dark when I eat dinner and the artificial lighting stuffs up my photos. During the day when it's light, though, I eat fruit. I think you might get a little bored of photos of fruit.
But then again, maybe not. Because, really, what is more beautiful than nature's own stunning creations? But anyway, I do have some ugly, artificially lit dinner pictures for you as well:



These are nori wraps that I made last week and they were so yummy! Truly raw (untoasted) nori, surrounding home-grown alfalfa sprouts, slices of tomato, carrot and avocado - yummy yum! Oh and there are silverbeet leaves in there too, to keep the nori dry.



This is a little mini carrot cake I made myself, surrounded by sliced bananas. The recipe is inspired by one in Juliano's RAW (wow it's a long time since I've eaten a meal even inspired by a recipe book - normally they're just inspired by me!) and it was yummy but not as nice as previous times I've made it. Probably because the young coconut I bought was on the way out (even though I bought it THAT DAY!) and so there was no where near as much as there should have been. The 'icing' was heavenly though.



Here is some pesto I made. I'll be honest, it was not very nice at all. The walnuts were past their best, I think, although I only just bought them - that'll teach me to buy them pre-packed, not in-shell :-( It's kinda pretty though!

Now the exciting bit... RAW PICNIC! We had a picnic scheduled for last Sunday. Sadly, I woke up to see rain beating down and the tree outside my window bent almost double, but we had an alternate (indoor) venue so it was okay. I rode my bike the 9 or so kilometres in gale force winds but was still the first to arrive, lol. The relocation affected our attendance numbers, but nine beautiful people still managed to make it a great and very tasty afternoon!



Fruit Salad



Green Salad



Raw Torte, oh so amazing!



One of my contributions, flax crackers (savoury)



My other contribution, sweet flax cookies (sorry it's blurry!)



My absolute favourite thing there, kale salad. It is soooooooo amazing!! YUM!! I have a real struggle getting kale but I got my hands on two big bunches at the market on Saturday. Who wants to guess what I'm going to be making... :-)



This is the spread, although some more people arrived with scrummy food that I didn't get pics of.
Phew! After that mammoth picture upload, I"m going to leave you all drooling on your keyboards and go bounce on my little mini tramp! Have an awesome day!