The Raw Vegan Princess

2008-09-25T23:11:00.002+09:30

Raw Vegan Crack

That is what this stuff should be called, seriously. We are having a bit of a banana glut at the moment, which is something that makes me very happy, but it has actually gotten to the point where I am having to freeze and dry them to stop them rotting! But I'm not complaining! So here is a lovely little plateful of dried bananas (I bought the plate for $1 at an op shop). I was reading Lolo (at veganyumyum)'s most recent post Foor Photography for Bloggers and got really inspired to take some pretty pictures. As I've said before, my main problem is that I don't eat much more than fruit during the day, so when I have pretty food I never have nice natural lighting. But I think these pictures came out quite stunning, even if I do say so myself!

Oh and I made banana ice-cream with chocolate sauce and chopped almonds. It was heavenly... and looked very pretty too! ;-)

Lastly, I got myself a copy of Vegan With a Vengeance a few weeks ago and I have been going so nuts cooking and baking for my parents and the girls at work. I lOVE this book! Here are the Coconut Heaven Cupcakes - they were very popular at work! I know the lighting is not great but I actually really like this shot:

Anyway, I have to be getting to bed. Sorry if you are drooling all over your keyboard now ;-)

2008-08-01T22:38:00.003+09:30

TABBOULEH!

Isn't it pretty?

Sorry it's been a while. I have been planning this big post to commemorate my 2 year anniversary of a 100% raw diet, but that was 3 weeks ago and it hasn't quite come to fruition yet...
So instead I give you a big fat bowl of tabbouleh. I found this meal to be fascinating to me, both in taste and texture; fascinating is good, by the way. ;-) It is not something I have ever eaten before (though I've made it for others a million times), in fact I don't know if I ever even ate non-raw tabbouleh. I do think it is a very easy dish to convert into raw though, if you like it cooked i imagine you would like it raw.
The reason I have never made it for myself is that I am not 100% comfortable using oils of any kind. This is not because of the fat content, it is simply because extracting oil from anything, be it an olive or a hemp seed, will alter the constitution of the oil and is a form of processing that I'm not entirely happy with. BUT I was really hankering for a big bowl of tabbouleh and, as you probably know if you read this blog much, when my body is asking for something I give it what it wants. I must admit, I have had some emotional/psychological stressors in my life recently and I know I haven't been taking 100 proper care of myself, so I wondered if I was a bit low in iron and that's why my body wanted all that iron-rich parsley.
Whatever the reason, I'm glad I made it because it was really very tasty. The dressing used 1/4 cup of organic, cold-pressed sunflower oil and I felt absolutely no ill effects from that, so I intend to be making it again!
Because I'm so nice, I want you to be able to enjoy this recipe as much as I did, so here it is:

Salad ingredients:
4 bunches parsley
about 300grams cherry tomatoes
1/3 cup almonds

Dressing ingredients:
1/4 cup cold-pressed oil (olive, sunflower, I'm thinking hemp would be great...)
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 small clove garlic (optional)

Finely chop the parsley in a food processor. Halve or quarter (if big) the cherry tomatoes. Chop the almonds in a food processor briefly until just crushed (not powdered!). Blend dressing ingredients in a blender then put everything in a big bowl and toss until well combined. Serve and enjoy.

Hope life is going wonderfully for everyone. I will try to get back with that anniversary post soon!

2008-07-04T23:25:00.001+09:30

Another Meme

Okay so I know that doing memes is just a quick and easy way to knock together a blog post. But I do really love doing them, I get immense enjoyment out of answering questions, and also out of sharing myself with others. So all round, memes are good for me! I found this one at The Tropical Vegan, a blog I love.

1) LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATRE? Ummmm... I think it was 'Bee Movie' last year. I loved the vegan undertones in this movie, and I LOVE Jerry Seinfeld so all round I quite enjoyed it. But you know, it was a kids movie, lacking in adult humour. I'm not a big fan of movies :-)

2) WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? Sort of reading a book on animal experimentation, I can't remember what it is called. I have read heaps of books on this topic but the style this is written in just isn't doing it for me.

3) FAVOURITE BOARD GAME? I love all the ones that go on for ages... Simpsons Monopoly, The Game of Life, Risk and of course Scrabble.

4) FAVOURITE MAGAZINE? Vegan Voice and The Big Issue

5) FAVOURITE SMELLS? Oooh that's hard. The smell after rain. Cacao butter. My cats' fur. My pillow case.

6) FAVOURITE SOUNDS? Wow I don't think I've ever thought about that before. Silence.

7) WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD? That feeling when you desperately desperately want something and you would do virtually anything in the world to get it but you just can't.

8 ) WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE? Oh no did I sleep in again? Or maybe "good morning Ruhsa."

9) FAVOURITE FAST FOOD PLACE? The fruit bowl. Doesn't get faster than an apple! ;-)

10) FUTURE CHILD’S NAME? Never ever ever ever having kids. Ever.

11) FINISH THIS STATEMENT—IF I HAD A LOT OF MONEY I’D… donate to lots and lots of charities. Share with my family and friends.

12) DO YOU DRIVE FAST? I don't speed, if that's what you're implying ;-)

13) DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL? Well on my bed there sits a pink stuffed elephant (as old as me!), a stuffed dolphin, a tweety pie and a little grey rat. But at night i share with two cats and a dog who are definitely NOT stuffed, so the toys have to move out.

14) STORMS–COOL OR SCARY? Cool for me. Scary for my little doggy Casper :-) The cats aren't too fussed.

15) WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? A white toyota station wagon named Abigail. She was older than me and absolutely covered in animal rights related bumper stickers.

16) FAVOURITE DRINK? Green smoothies.

17) FINISH THIS STATEMENT - IF I HAD THE TIME I WOULD… play my instruments more.

18 ) DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI? Well I'm not a broccoli lover. My guinea piggies loooove those stems, so they usually get them.

19) IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY OTHER COLOUR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE? I love love love the colour of my hair and would NEVER change it. I wish it would be long and straight again though, like it used to be :-(

20) NAME ALL THE DIFFERENT CITIES/TOWNS U HAVE LIVED IN? Oh i don't think I can do them all. I can do Elizabeth, Burton, Lobethal, East Victoria Park, Bayswater.

21) FAVOURITE SPORTS TO WATCH? I like soccer (football) on telly or basketball live.

22) ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? Theresa is so passionate about so many issues and is clearly a very dedicated activist.

23) WHATS UNDER YOUR BED? Like Theresa, I sleep on a mattress (actually, 2) on the floor, so i guess the floor is under my bed! Probably also a lot of cat hair, lol.

24) WOULD U LIKE TO BE BORN AS YOURSELF AGAIN? well i am happy with who i am now but I wouldn't want to live through the last 5 years of my life again.

25) MORNING PERSON OR NIGHT OWL? I used to be a morning person and i will be again someday. At the moment though, definite night owl.

26) OVER EASY OR SUNNY SIDE UP? What?

27) FAVOURITE PLACE TO RELAX? In nature. Somewhere with my cats or rats. The shower (but I hate the water wastage).

28 ) FAVOURITE PIE? Apple (raw, of course).

29) FAVOURITE ICECREAM FLAVOUR? Banana. Straight up.

30) OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE TAGGED, WHO IS THE MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST? I don't know the rules on how to tag people, so I'm not going to bother. Go ahead and do it if you want :-)

2008-06-26T23:12:00.003+09:30

Searching for Recipes
Okay, here's the story: as you probably know, I am working at an animal shelter called The Cat Haven. I LOVE my job and I LOVE the girls that I work with (one in particular!! :-) but what I don't love is that they are among the typical, hypocritical 'animal lovers' who still eat animals. There are a few vegetarians among them but certainly no vegans (and most of them had never heard of a raw foodie until they met me!)
So I am winning them all over with my delicious cooking and un-cooking, showing them how ultra tasty cruelty free food is. My first major experiment was last Sunday when I took a big batch of Chai Latte Cupcakes (from the ppK) in to share. Instead of the suggested topping I just sprinkled them with icing sugar, then personalised them by using an old stencil to put the first letter of everyone's name on a cupcake in cocoa powder. They looked AWESOME and I so badly wanted to share photos but lo and behold, my camera ran out of batteries. And my camera is really finnicky and only takes Duracell brand batteries, which I of course didn't have any of, so I was going to take pictures on my Dad's camera but my parents went away for the weekend so that was out too, boo :-( The good news, however, is that every single cupcake, including the rejects that spilled out of their liners and turned more into cookies, was devoured. Everyone thought the initialing was cute and funny and the cupcakes went down really well, with most people not knowing they were vegan until they were told (of course!) All in all, a great response.

But what I am after now is suggestions of other recipes I can take in. My only real requirement is that they are vegan: can be cooked or raw, sweet or savoury, whatever. Obviously if I am making a cooked recipe I'm not going to be sampling it, so this is why I want really tried and true recipes, that definitely WON'T fail me. Also, these girls are serious junk food addicts so I don't want anything that tastes too 'healthy,' if you know what I mean. SO, suggestions please!!

Because I didn't have a photo of the cupcakes to show you, I thought I'd share this one instead:

It's the cake from my best friend's engagement party about a month ago now (where is the time going!?!) The lighting was bad but the cake was stunning. Definitely not vegan but vay vay pwetty!!

And here is my gorgeous artsy fartsy photo of it :-)

I leave you now... lots of recipe suggestions please!!

2008-06-21T18:03:00.003+09:30

An ode to a fruit that I love...

... PERSIMMONS!! And as you may have guessed from my previous post, I like a certain type of persimmon, the type that not many other people like. I like astringent persimmons. Sweet persimmons, also called fuyu fruit (I think) are eaten crisp, almost like an apple. To me, they have very little flavour and the texture does not delight. But astringent persimmons...woah. I actually only discovered this joyous fruit last year - i've been missing out for 18 years! - but I plan to make up for that in years to come!
Many people are put off by astringent persimmons because at some point they have tried one that wasn't ripe, which is certainly not a pleasant experience. When eatne under-ripe, they leave the inside of your mouth feeling furry and gross. A truly ripe astringent persimmon is really really squishy and the skin should split if you squeeze it. The inside has a texture very much like jam - the way I eat them is to pull out the flower-like leaf at the top then split the fruit in half and slurp the insides out messily. Yum.

This post is the beginning of my attempt at blogging much more regularly. I think the main reason that I don't post is because I like all my posts to have (good) photos, but because all my blogworthy meals are eaten at night, when the lighting is bad, I have no photos. Hence, no posting. But I am going to try and change all that!

2008-06-19T22:57:00.003+09:30

A meme
You know you need to update your blog when your Nanna is telling you to do it, lol :-P
Tonight I bring you a meme, which I spotted at Walking the Vegan Line. The way it works is that if you do any of the five things, then you are tagged. So here are the options:

1. bite your nails
2. secretly listen to Britney Spears while driving
3. wish you had a pig as a companion animal
4. consider yourself a scientist
5. ate a cupcake this past weekend

So I don't really fit any of these. I did bite my nails for 8 years but I have now actually stopped, yah! I do sometimes listen to a bit of Brit but it's not much of a secret. To be honest I have never really wished this at all, though my Mum does. I used to have a sheep and I looooooooooooved her so much. Number 4 is probably the closest, I don't have any qualifications yet but I will eventually have some kind of science degree. And it's a definite no to number 5.

What were you doing five years ago?
Ummm...2003. That would be my first year at St Peters, the private all-girls school where I did my last 3 years of school. That was a horrible horrible horrible year that I would really rather not remember too much.

What are five things on your to-do list today?
Well as it is now 9.30pm there is not much left for me to do today.
1. Brush my teeth.
2. Feed my darling ratties.
3. Brush my hair
4. Get my bag ready for work tomorrow so I don't have to do it in the morning.
5. Clean up the kitchen.

What are five snacks you enjoy?
My ultimate favourite thing to snack on is simply fruit. So I'll tell you my favourite fruits :-)
1. Grapes (probably the BEST snacking food in the world :-) I like red ones with seeds, lots of different varieties but especially currant grapes
2. Rockmelon
3. Persimmons (astringent ones)
4. Figs
5. Bananas

What are five things you would do if you were a millionare?
1. Give money to all my favourite charities... animals australia, PAWS, the Australian Orangutan Project, Veg-fam, TEAR ... the list goes on.
2. Give some to all my close family and friends.
3. Buy a totally eco-friendly house in the country somewhere.
4. Start a feral cat rehabilitation shelter (my dream!)
5. Publish my own books including raw food books, poetry, fiction...

What are your 5 bad habits?
1. Procrastination
2. Always running late (probably linked to number one :-)
3. Picking my scabs (sorry, TMI)
4. Getting to bed late (also linked to number one)
5. Ummmm... I can't think of another one!!

Where are five places you have lived?
1. Burton, Adelaide, South Australia
2. Elizabeth, Adelaide, South Australia
3. Lobethal, South Australia. The BEST place to grow up on Earth. I will always <3 you Loby!!
4. East Victoria Park, Perth, West Australia
5. Bayswater, Perth, West Australia

What are five jobs you've had?
Hmmm I don't know if I've had that many...
1. I mowed the lawn for a friend of my Grandma
2. Berry picker/packer
3. Giant teddy bear
4. Junk mail deliverer (the worst job going... well not the worst, but pretty bad)
5. and now... Cat Welfare Officer. How i love my job :-)

So now I have to tag some more people. You are officially tagged if you:
1. Sponsor or have sponsored a child or animal of some kind
2. Take cold showers in the summer (or all year round!)
3. Love squishy slurpy astringent persimmons WAAAAAAAAY more than those stupid crunchy ones
4. Share your home with more than one feline friend
5. Have a compost heap

2008-05-23T22:55:00.003+09:30

Yummy Yums!!

Guess what? I have a recipe for you! A real, honest-to-goodness recipe, that is super delicious! I created it out of nothing this evening, which is probably not what you would expect from someone who had been out of the house working for 10 1/2 hours and had to get packed and ready to catch a plane at 6.20am the following morning... but I was feeling more inspired to create than I have in a loooooong time. My parents are out, so I cranked up the radio and had a lovely relaxing un-cooking session, with wonderful results. I achieved exactly what I wanted to first time, which is always lovely in the kitchen!

I call it Glistening Green Fruit Medley (avocados, zucchinis, capsicum and tomatoes are all, botanically speaking, fruits).
Glistening Green Sauce
1 large avocado
1/4 cup parsley
80 mLs of celery juice
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 large basil leaf
Fruit Medley
2 small yellow capsicum
1 1/2 punnets cherry tomatoes
1 spring onion
generous handful snow pea or sunflower sprouts
lots of fancy lettuce mix (aka mesclun)
1/2 a zucchini

To make the sauce combine all ingredients in a blender and blend till smooth.To make the medley, begin by thinly slicing the capsicum and spring onion; halve the cherry tomatoes, finely chop the lettuce and create zucchini noodles using a spiraliser. Add all ingredients to a large bowl and toss with sauce, then serve and enjoy slurpily!

As you can see, I took quite a number of artsy photos of this and while they are not perfect I really quite like them! Good considering the poor lighting, at least!

I'm sorry this has been such a short post but as I mentioned, I have a plane to catch early in the morning... my best friend in Adelaide just got engaged, and I'm flying back for the party to surprise her!!! Soooo exciting. I'll try to get back soon but meanwhile, enjoy life and eat your greens! :-P

2008-04-25T21:38:00.003+09:30

Stuff happening in my life!

Okay I know it has been a long time since I last posted and I am now going to try and explain why that is. As you may remember (visit this post if you want a refresher) I have been studying Vet Medicine and Surgery for the past two years but have been having some serious moral/ethical issues. In addition to that, after 14 straight years of being a full time student I am just a wee bit sick of studying. I was planning to just push through and finish my 5 year course but come time to start back at uni this year, I just couldn't do it. I kinda had a bit of a breakdown on the first day I was meant to go back... just couldn't do it. So I decided not to!

I don't know yet what I'm going to do next year but this year I am working at a wonderful wonderful cat shelter called The Cat Haven. It is a horribly sad job on many occasions but it is also fun and rewarding. Plus I adore all the people I work with!! We work on a roster, normally 8am to about 5pm though we often stay later. I have almost an hour travelling time each way, so I am out of the house 11 hours a day! At the moment I am working 4 days a week (though never the same days and usually not all in a row) plus I am still doing my personal raw food chef job for about 4 hours a week. And I am still in charge of all the food prep for my parents. So I'm super duper incredibly busy. I have been reading loooots of your blogs on a really regular basis, I just can't get motivated to write on my own for some reason! And even though I'm here now, I don't have that much to show you.

This is an African Horned Cucumber, local grown and organic. Sorry the picture quality is not great, I'm having trouble adjusting to daylights savings still (even though I'm VERY happy to have light mornings, it makes food photography hard). Although it looked totally awesome, it didn't taste that nice unfortunately; the skin was not edible and the inside was kind of filled with this jelly-like green stuff and lots of seeds. It had this odd, slightly sweet taste that I didn't really appreciate. But at one dollar, I think it was worth it just so I could look at it in the fruit bowl for about 5 days!!! :-)

Here is the sushi I made for my Mum tonight, the lighting is poor again and that bugs me cos I would have had a few really good photos. :-( But never mind. She loved it, that's what counts.

Finally, on another non-food note, I have a new family member. You know how even though it would be nice to save every single animal everywhere, there are just some that you get a feeling for... I looked at this boy and I got that feeling, big time. When anyone at work really really likes a cat, we just put a heap of effort into getting it adopted out to a good home. But this gorgeous boy didn't get adopted and then he was going to be euthanased, which I just couldn't bear. I don't know how I did it, but after several days of begging, cajoling, crying, pleading, sucking-up, bribing... whatever!... my wonderful parents finally said I could bring him home. His name is Tuli, meaning Serene in Swahili, which is exactly what he is. It is now 2 weeks since he came home and Ruhsa is still quite hissy but Casper has liked him from the start. They'll get there eventually!

Well, I'd better go as I have to be up early to work tomorrow. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

2008-03-30T18:46:00.003+10:30

Mum's Food
Here's a meal I made for my Mum last week some time, she really enjoyed it. I used the recipe for Creamy Herb Dip from Shazzie's 'Detox Delights,' though I changed it up a bit. Mum really liked it and I think it is the most awesome colour!! I love green food :-P

To go with it she had some veggie sticks - carrot, celery, snow peas - and this, which is a buckwheat cracker. I make these using my own recipe, which I have never written down but I will soon (honest!) Mum really likes it and says it has a nice texture, kind of like shortbread, that sort of crumbly texture.

Once again, how awesome are these photos now that I know how to work my camera!?! While I'm talking about my Mum, I'll share a little story. As you know, she went totally raw at the beginning of December last year and has been doing really well, however, she has an intolerance to salicylates, which are a naturally occurring pesticide found in a lot of fruits. In addition, her digestion is not great and she can't have many nuts or seeds. So her diet is fairly limited, and she has trouble feeling really full. Last week, she decided that she was going to try introducing some boiled/steamed veggies into her diet (like potatoes and pumpkins); she was really looking forward to it for a few days and then she ate it Thursday night. Afterwards, she was really disappointed and said it fell far short of her hopes, plus it made her feel pretty unpleasant and the next day she said - "don't eat cooked food, it makes you STINK!" So there you go - she's on raw food for life, I think!

2008-03-22T20:17:00.002+10:30

Easter-y Picnic Food
You know, when I was a cooked food eater, I liked hot cross buns a lot more than eggs at Easter so when I was deciding what to make for today's raw picnic I wanted to go for a raw Hot Cross Bun. I knew of a recipe by Elaina Love called Cinnamon Rolls and it looked really yummy so I decided to try it.

Since the recipe is already on-line in a number of places I'll publish it here if you want it, with my changes noted:

Elaina's Cinnamon Rolls ( from Alissa Cohen's book)

DOUGH::
2 1/2 C almond meal (left over from almond milk)I used brazil nut pulp, cos it was sitting in the freezer)
2 1/2 Cflax meal (grind 1 1/3 C whole flax seeds
1 C soft dates, firmly packed
1/8 C pure waterI needed a LOT more water - don't know how much though
1/4 tsp celtic sea saltI omitted this altogether
dash cayenne (optional) I didn't use this
1/4 C olive oil or coconut butter I used coconut oil

Blend dates and water in food processor or blender till a paste. I used my coffee grinder blade
Mix everything together in a large bowl and work with your hands till dough is well mixed.
Place dough on teflex sheet and form into 1/4 inch thick square using hands to shape it.
Cover with another teflex sheet and roll with rolling pin till dough is uniform thickness. I don't have an Excalibur dehydrator so I just used baking paper, one piece under and one on top.
Prepare filling.

FILLING:
1/2 C soft pitted dates, firmly packed
1/2 C raisins (sultanas)
1T cinnamon I replaced this with Mesquite powder
1/8 C pure water
extra raisins
1/2 C soaked and dehydrated walnuts, coarsely choppedI left these out

Puree 1st 4 ingredients in food processor till smooth.
Spread this mixture onto the dough.
Sprinkle with extra raisins (sultanas) and walnuts.
Using teflex sheet on the bottom to push, roll the dough tightly.
Wrap the roll in teflex or wax paper and refridgerate till chilled.
Slice into desired thickness and dehydrate at 105 deg till warm. I didn't dehydrate

It looks like a long and difficult recipe but it took me less than 45 minutes to produce a really delicious and fancy looking dish. If (when) I make it again I think I'll actually make two rolls from the one recipe as this was quite hard to roll up and it was also really rich so smaller pieces might be better. But it was really very yummy and I enjoyed it a lot, and everyone at the picnic agreed. My Mum thought it looked delicious - it was her idea to decorate with frangipanis from our garden. The coconut flavour really came through delightfully.

And I have to give an absolutely MASSIVE thankyou to my good friend Kate, who helped me figure out how to take AMAZING pictures on my camera. I have been getting really disheartened by how bad my pictures are so I'm sooooooooooo excited to have these amazing pics to show you. Hopefully there are many more to come! And Kate is going to come over next week and help me design a custom blog template. Kate rocks.

This is some salad that Rachan bought to the picnic, it was really yummy too, especially when mixed with the Indian Spinach Dip Kate and Chris bought (from Alissa Cohen's book, I think).

Have a great day everyone!

2008-03-20T12:30:00.005+10:30

Fancy Food
Hello! I know I've been away for a while but I've got quite a few yummy food pics to make up for it!

Last night I made capsicum boats - aren't they pretty? I would so serve this if I owned a raw restaurant, or had someone really special coming over for dinner. If you're interested, I actually had quite a few more boats than are in this picture, but with all of them on the plate didn't look as nice, lol! In terms of taste, they were good but only had about 3 hours in the dehydrator and in this case I think at least overnight would be much better, simply to soften up the capsicums a little bit. I like capsicums but they have to be really sweet for me and these weren't quite, so I think that would be good. And I needed to soak the dried tomatoes. But other than that they were good. So good in fact, that I'm going to post the recipe on my recipe blog. Aren't you lucky!!

This is another occasion recently when I felt like getting really creative. The kebabs have cherry tomatoes, pineapple, capsicum and cauliflower on them, they are served on a bed of baby spinach and have a tomato-ey dressing. Very yummy, but also could have done with longer in the dehydrator. Sorry that pic is so blurry!!

This is a picture that I took a looooooooong time ago and I really can't remember what was in this salad but I thought it was pretty (if a little blurry) so there you go!

Now before I post anymore meal pics, I need to tell you about the exciting thing(s) I bought just recently. COCONUTS! I love me some coconut, both young and mature but the ones available here in West Australia have been grown with chemicals, shipped from overseas, irradiated and stored for who knows how long. Buying a coconut from a shopping centre is basically taking a 50/50 chance on whether it will be edible or not - often even if it's edible it's quite tasteless. Plus i really think I could feel the chemicals having an effect on my body. So I pretty much gave up coconuts.
Then I discovered that Sunrise Coconuts delivers to WA. WAHOOOO! Basically, these are both young and mature coconuts, grown organically in Northern Queensland and harvested by hand, then delivered to your door. And they work out at about the same price as the awful supermarket ones. Yes please!! My friend Kate, of In the Raw and I went halfsies on a sack of coconuts and then we waited...and waited...and waited... then finally came! (They travelled by road, all the way from one side of Australia to the other, which is why it took so long.)

I personally didn't love the young coconuts that much - they were nowhere near as sweet as the ones shipped over from Thailand and they had almost no meat. They weren't bad, but not great either. But the mature ones! WOWEEE! These are amazingly good coconuts. My beautiful Ruhsa seems to love them too:

Here she is laying on the sack that they cam in, with one of the young ones next to her. She was having fun chewing on the sack itself so I thought maybe that was her fascination but then the cocos were moved into a box (without the sack) and she climbed in with them, so I guess it was them she was after. Isn't she a cutie!?! I know she looks grumpy but I think she was just getting sick of us pointing and laughing at her, lol.

So here are some coconutty creations:

Very loosely based on the Snow Cake in Ani's Raw Food Kitchen. Yummy but honestly, with dates and dried banana, it got a bit sickly at the end.

A salad with simply lettuce, snow pea sprouts, grapes and coconut. Yum. Grapes and coconuts are a very good pairing!

Well congratulations if you made it to the end of this mammoth post. If you celebrate Easter,I hope it's wonderful. If not, enjoy the long weekend like I will (though I'm working, lol!)

2008-02-27T16:16:00.003+10:30

FIGS!
Hi there! Sorry I haven't been posting much lately, though I do have what I consider to be a good reason... See, I like to post delicious food pictures for you all, to keep you inspired and make sure you know how scrumptious raw food is. But I haven't been making too much scrumptious food recently, because nature's been making it for me, in the form of all the different varieties of incredible summer fruits.
And the one I've been loving the most is figs! Aside from the fact that figs are ridiculously yummy and also good for you, around here, they're FREE!

Here is me, in the fig tree that's in our garden. Well, the actual tree is growing just the other side of our back fence but as you can see, I am within our property (on the roof of the guinea pig enclosure, to be exact) in this shot. But that's not the only place I get free figs. There are 2 other trees within 2 minutes walking of our house, which I frequent regularly. All 3 are different varieties of figs, though I'm yet to figure out exactly what variety. There are really fig trees just about everywhere! And I love it!
I will get some close-up fig pics for you soon, to get everyone drooling. Oh and I do have a brand-new, scrummy recipe planned, so I'll post pics of that too!
Have a great day everyone!

2008-02-20T19:05:00.002+10:30

My Etsy Shop
HI there, just a quick post to let everyone know that I have created my own Etsy shop to sell my Raw Recipe e-Book and a few other things. You can find it here:
Freedom Productions Shop

Hope everyone is having a great week - there are big things going on here and I'm busy, but I'll get back with a proper post soon!

2008-02-12T14:16:00.000+10:30

My Raw Mum
There's something I've been wanting to share with everyone for a while, but I couldn't... but now I can! For just over two months now, my Mum has been walking the wonderful path of a raw vegan! Here is her story, as I recently posted it on the Raw Pleasure forums:

Well, my Mum is officially a raw fooder ... in fact, she has been for 3 weeks now! As you might know, I was in Adelaide from the 10th to the 23rd of December; when I was in the car on the way home from the airport with my parents, Mum started to try and tell me something. She was kind of beating around the bush so eventually Dad said "she's gone raw!" I couldn't believe my ears! I'm going to share Mum's story with you now (and yes, I've checked with her and she doesn't mind!)

Mum has had digestive problems for over 20 years. She has had in excess of 7 abdominal surgeries, the main ones being: appendix removed, one ovary removed (due to cysts), gall bladder removed, 4 feet of excess bowel removed. When the bowel was removed, the remaining bowel was stitched together and stapled to the wall of her abdomen. That staple is still there.

For many years she (and the Drs) thought Mum had IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). Over the years she gradually ate less and less variety, searching for things she could digest without pain and discomfort. She never tested positive for lactose intolerance but started giving up dairy anyway when I was about 9 or so (10 years ago now). She removed overt dairy (eg glass of milk, slice of cheese) from her diet but still ate bread, biscuits etc with dairy in them. Plus she loves chocolate and would occassionally indulge.

Many foods gave her terrible wind, some of the worst ones being brassica vegetables like broccoli and cabbage. She also couldn't have any high water content foods (eg lettuce) because they made her feel bloated. She couldn't pass the wind and had to lay down and massage her stomach to get it out; she described this like a ball of lead in her abdomen.

Mum has always drunk lots of water and the only hot drinks she enjoyed were herbal teas and the occasional hot chocolate, so no caffeine addictions there.

I clearly remember that by the time I was in about year 8 at school (2001) almost every night of the week Mum would say "what I am going to have for dinner?" Dad and I would chant "chicken, rice and peas," and we'd all laugh, but clearly Mum longed for some variety and flavour. The plate of plain grilled chicken, boiled rice and peas never looked very appealing!

I"m not sure whether it was before or after this that Mum discovered 'adhesions' - only through the glory of the internet did she find out about this condition, where the scar tissue that results from any major surgery does weird things in your body. Apparently certain people have 'adhesion skin,' making them much more susceptible to this condition. In Mum's case, the scar tissue has effectively formed little bands around her intestines so things can't move through them normally.

All the internet literature on adhesions says that the best way to deal with them is to eat a really low fibre diet, as the bulky fibre jams up the intestines where the adhesions exist. So from then on it was white bread, white pasta, white rice... you get the picture. Mum was concerned about the fact that she probably wasn't getting many nutrients from her diet but at least she could digest it.

Mum decided to become vegetarian after reading a lot of my animal rights literature (I was already vegan by this point)... it was September 2006 I think, or maybe it was 2005. Anyway, this didn't have any noticeable effects on her health (when you're only eating plain grilled free range chicken, I can see why) but it did serve to limit her food intake options even more.

Since I went raw last July, I've believed it could 'cure' Mum. I am a passionate believer in raw food... I would put 100% of my trust in it, always. I have read stories of people who have dissolved cysts, tumours and warts... why, then, could Mum not dissolve her adhesions? The hardest thing for me has been that Mum agreed that the raw diet was the best way for humans to live. She sees the truth behind it all. But she always said "my body has been unnaturally altered by doctors so I don't believe this natural diet can help me now."

As this year has progressed, I have seen Mum's condition deteriorate... this was because she had an office job and sitting down all day was affecting her stomach muscles. She quit that job and got another one that involved home assistance to people with disabilities/illnesses ... she was using an upright vaccuum cleaner and a floor washing thing that both hurt her stomach muscles.

A few times I outright suggested raw foods, juice fasts etc... I also dropped subtle hints. Eventually I realised I was going to make Mum angry, push a wedge between us. If Mum wanted to raw, it had to be because she wanted to.

Then I went away for two weeks and whaddya know, I get home and she's raw! Lol.

There was a reason for this though. A couple of months ago she decided to try going gluten free (she has done this before) and so for a few days she ate heaps of gluten free crackers, bread pasta etc... most of which are corn based. She was an absolute mess after that, in agony. So she decided she was allergic to corn and tried to eliminate corn from her diet... you have NO idea how hard that is! It's in EVERYTHING! So she settled to just minimise the amount of corn she was eating.

On the first day I was away, Mum was preparing dinner for Cherimoya (one of my gorgeous ratties) which included scraping fresh corn off the cob. Some corn juice squirted into Mum's eye and she had a terrible allergic reaction to it - the eye swelled up, itched, watered etc etc for over half an hour. From then on she decided that all the corn had to go. And the only way she could find to do this, was to go raw!! (And the rest of the time I was away, Dad was chopping corn for Cherimoya, lol!)

It is still a HUGE learning curve. We have also figured out that Mum has a salicylate allergy and dehydrated foods do NOT agree with her at all. But she is generally enjoying her food and said that she hasn't felt so good in 20 years. I can definitely see that 'raw glow' all around her.

Viva la RAW!!! yahh ohyeah yahh

So anyway, what I'm saying here is - give people time and space. Let them make their own decisions. Be gentle. Just offer what they ask for and maybe a bit more. Don't push too hard. I KNOW it's hard to see people you love suffering.

Here's me and Mum a few weeks ago. Don't we look great? Glowing rawbies!!

Have a fabulous day!

P.S I have been meaning for a while to give a big shout-out to my lovely Nanna, who has been reading my blog for quite some time now. I love you Nanna!!

2008-01-28T14:39:00.000+10:30

Ani's Eats
Hello hello! Well, I have finally made something else from Ani Phyo's book that I can share with you. First, this is Mexican Squash Rice

Now, I'm going to digress a bit here to explain something about me making recipes from books. A while ago there was some ongoing debate in the food blogging community about when you were allowed to post a recipe as your own, without risking copyright breaches or anything. The eventual conclusion was that if 3 ingredients were changed, the recipe was now your own.

I was shocked! I don't think I've ever made a recipe without changing at least 3 ingredients! I could publish every single recipe that I make here on the blog! If I say I've made a recipe from a book, everyone must think that I mean I've followed it word for word, which I soooooo haven't. Because, I don't have the same tastes as the book author. I hate ginger. Walnuts and mushrooms (literally) make me vomit. I have to change recipes!

For example, in the recipe above I added some almond and hazelnuts and a pinch of cumin (which was really a good decision) and removed some other things... I can't even remember. It was really tasty! Unfortunately, about 15 or 20 mouthfuls in, I began feeling horribly nauseous and had to stop eating. Ew. I have now discovered that, like walnuts, hazelnuts make me vomit. I didn't actually vomit but in the future I am steering well clear of hazelnuts.

Aaaanyway, this is another recipe from Ani's book. Sort of. It is very loosely based on the recipe Save-the-Tuna Wraps (which is on P 179, if you're interested). In the book it is made using the Save-the-Tuna Pate which is where I started changing things. I have read a number of 'zucchini hummus' recipes and plenty of 'almond hummus' recipes so I decided to combine them... with very successful results, if I do say so myself! I'll be making this again soon and I'll perfect the recipe then... I might even be generous and share it with you!

I'm going to do some prettying-up of my blog template now, so maybe when you read this it will look totally different! I hope I don't ruin everything, lol!
Have a beautiful day!

2008-01-17T16:10:00.000+10:30

Exciting Garden Growth
Wonderful things have been happening in our garden of late - things of the fruit and veggie variety! My Mum and I are growing a totally organic and chemical-free garden to feast from, mostly grown from heirloom variety seeds; we have an awesome compost set-up to stimulate growth and also to dispose of the masses of 'rubbish' that I generate (nothing of mine goes in the bin - it's all plant material! No packaging, nothing).

Here it is, at the moment we are putting stuff in the left while the right breaks down, we'll swap in a while. I'd like to do another one so we've got one to put stuff in, one to take stuff from and one that's breaking down. This is modelled on a particular composting system but I can't remember what it's called.

Compost isn't just good for fertilising! We have not planted a single pumpkin seed but this little guys are on a plant that grew from pumpkin seeds I chucked in the compost! As you can see, they are quite big and doing really well! Very exciting.

Our biggest crop by far is tomatoes! We just about have them coming out our ears - which is totally awesome. Unfortunately the tomato picture seems to have been deleted...

To use up the multitudes of tomatoes, I've been making lots of this - my spag bol. Yum!!!

Well, I know this is short but I have to wrap it up. I'll be back to post again soon!
Have a spontaneous day!!

2008-01-08T15:44:00.000+10:30

My time at Monarto
As you know, I disappeared from blogland for a few weeks before Christmas, because I went 'home' to South Australia (from my second home, here in West Australia). Why was I there? Well, of course I wanted to catch up with wonderful family and friends, but I was also set to do one week of work experience at Monarto Zoo, a large open-range zoo not too far from where I used to live (and where my Grandma still lives). You can read about Monarto Zoo at their website Now, I think we need to get some things clear here: in general, I do not agree with zoos. I do not agree with locking up an animal for the amusement of humans. I do not agree that zoos are that great for education - what they teach kids is that we can do whatever the hell we like with animals, really. I do not agree with the 'conservation' concept, except in cases where animals are actually successfully released into the wild (I'll come back to this!) I would rather a species be extinct than only existing in zoos. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but I'm interested in the suffering of individuals - if an animal is confined to the unpleasant life in a zoo, just so people can say "that's the last... X... on Earth" I see no point.

Now we're clear on that, I'll tell you why I was doing work experience at a zoo. I am studying a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery - when I finish my degree in 3 years I will be a qualified veterinarian. However, I am planning on being a full time animal rights activist and not a vet, because that is my passion and what I want to devote my life to. I am getting this degree because, sad as it is, people pay more attention to you if you have a bunch of letters after your name. Basically, I think the degree will increase my credibility, which will allow me to do more for the animals. As A part of my course I have to do 5 weeks work experience on farms, but we are permitted to do one week at a zoo or wildlife park instead. I tossed the options up and decided zoo would be better than piggery, lol. So I spent a week at Monarto Zoo. And it was an amazing experience, interacting with the beautiful animals there. It was sad, because I knew that this is not what their lives should be and this is nothing like how they would be in the natural environment, but I tried my best to just enjoy it for what it was, and I did. Plus I taught the meat-loving keepers a bit about raw veganism, lol! So without further ado, here are some pictures:

This is a Tasmanian Devil, native to Australia, crashed out in its newly renovated house. They look super cute from a distance but the have the name 'devil' for a reason, lol! Throw them a piece of meat and they go nuts, tear it to shreds in seconds! Sadly, the wild population (already not huge) is currently being ravaged by a horrible, fatal transmissable facial tumour condition. A lot of research is going into causes, transmission, possible cures etc, but they haven't got far yet.

Here's a lemur. I really disliked the lemur environments - they were kept in quite small cages with only concrete flooring and dead tree branches for climbing. All 7 of them were males and they weren't even on public display... basically, they were pointless. Nevertheless, they were beautiful animals to interact with - being primates, their hands seem so human. They take food from you and are so gentle - touching them made me feel very special inside!

The American Bison moved me deeply as well, just looking at them. On one hand, they are symbolic of not only mans' dominion over the animals but also white mans' dominion over those of other races (I'm talking, of course, about the mass slaughter of the bison when white man first came to america). On the other hand, their sheer size simply made me gasp. But at the same time, they seem so gentle!

Similarly, the rhinos were incredible in that they are obviously amazingly strong, yet seem so docile. They too made me very sad - each morning they are slowly walked from small night yards into larger day yards. Each evening they are slowly moved back. They are fed the same thing day in, day out. There is precious little variability or interest in their day. People say that zoos keep animals healthy and safe, with food shelter and water, so what's the big deal? But if You were kept permanently locked in a house, moved from the bedroom to the living room and back again, with the same 5 people, every single day, would you enjoy it? Sure, you're healthy, clean, have people to talk to... but it just isn't enough!!

Here's me with one of the cheetahs, I can't remember whether is was Tsotsi or Ascari (most of the animals that are named have names from their natural country). There are three young brother cheetahs who were all hand raised and trained and are used as 'ambassador cheetahs.' The head cheetah keeper, who raised them, said explained that she never wanted them to be hand-raised, she wanted their lives as 'normal' and natural as possible, but their mother go very sick while she was lactating. If you're interested they do purr just like a domestic kitty, but their fur is bristly not soft.

This little sweetheart is a critically endangered Black-flanked Wallaby (another Australian native) who was being hand-raised by a keeper at the zoo. This brings me to what I mentioned before about conservation - the zoo is involved in a small number of programs for the conservation of Australian natives, that actually involve the release of animals back to the wild to try and re-establish a wild population. I can see the value in this and I support it, to an extent. Let's leave it there shall we?

Well, congratulations if you got through that, lol!
Have a totally awesome day and don't forget to check out my e-Book, on sale now!!

2008-01-08T13:49:00.000+10:30

My Recipe e-Book is Officially for SALE!
YAY! If you would like to buy a copy of my book, just pop over here and pick yourself up a copy. It's a total bargain at $11.95 (AU)!! Here is the spiel from the linked page above:

It gives us so much pleasure here at Raw Pleasure to bring to you this ebook. We have watched Freedom grow over time, going through her battles with a gentle strength that shines through her writing.

Created by our very own FreedomB, this ebook gives a basic outline on what raw veganism is, mouthwatering recipes, great photos and more!

Great for all types of raw, the recipes are mouthwatering and delicious yet simple and easy to prepare. Become inspired!

Recipes Fit For a Princess comes in an easy to download Adobe PDF format.

I will put a permanent link to the page in the sidebar so if at any point in the future you decide you want one, it will be waiting for you. I had so much fun writing the book and the excitement of seeing it finally for sale was almost overwhelming. Of course making money from it is going to be totally awesome (it will go towards m uni degree, scrummy organic fruit, and charities, if you're interested) but I really hope that it will make raw food easier for people. I'm just one girl, who went raw overnight, without being anything super special. I hope others can see how easy it is.
Have a fantastic day everyone, and stay tuned for more regular posting in the near future!

2007-12-26T14:52:00.000+10:30

Chocolate Ice-Cream Cake!!!
Okay I have HEAPS to blog about but my Dad is going to kick me off the computer any minute now so I'm just going to get you guys drooling with a scrumptious raw vegan treat I made for Christmas yesterday. Sorry if all that dribble damages your keyboard, lol!

Mmmm, yummy yummy in my tummy!

Can you see all our Christmas table decorations in the background?

Hope everyone's Christmas was magical!

2007-12-21T21:10:00.000+10:30

A Quick Hello and a Meme
Hi guys, I've been absent because I've been back in South Australia catching up with family and friends for the past two weeks. For the last 5 days I've been doing work experience at Monarto Zoo, the largest open plain zoo in Australasia. I'm totally not a fan of zoos usually and even though this zoo is very large I don't ultimately agree with it. But I had to do work experience somewhere and I found this a better option than an intensive piggery, lol! I had an incredible time and will post photos soon.
For now, a meme I found at 'Walking the Vegan Line.'

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Paper.. we tend to use the same paper for at least 2 or 3 Christmases, carefully recycling it.
2. Real or artificial tree? Well, we used to have a real one. I looooooved going out and choosing it, watching as Dad cut it down, getting it home hanging out of the back of the car with me hanging on. The smell in the house was amazing, I just adored everything about it. Sadly my parents have decided to go back to plastic since we've moved :-(
3. When do you put up the tree? Where we used to live was a little town called Lobethal, every year there was a big festival called the Lights of Lobethal that started on a Sunday night around the 12th of December or so. We always put up the tree that weekend.
4. When do you take it down? New Years Day
5. Do you like eggnog? I have never had it. But, what with being raw vegan and all, I'd go with no.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? Possibly my bike? Too hard, there's too many.
7. Do you have a nativity scene? Definitely not
8. Hardest person to buy for? Grandparents
9. Easiest person to buy for? My friend Alycia
10. Worst Christmas present you ever got? Geez I don't know.
11. Mail or email Christmas cards? I like to give them out by hand, personally.
12. Favorite Christmas movie? A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL!! The Dickens classic, done by the Muppet gang. I love it and my parents bought the DVD for me a couple of years ago. I watch it every single year!
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? When I see something that looks good for a particular person.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Well I gave away a soap for someone's birthday recently, I can't remember whether it was a Christmas or birthday pressie though.
15. Favorite thing to eat on Christmas? Strawberries. Wouldn't be christmas without them!
16. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Both.
17. Favorite Christmas song? I had never thought about it. I don't know!
18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Well, never travel actually on holiday or anything. I've always had Christmas morning at home; we used to rotate between Christmas lunch at our house, my auntie's and my Grandma's, then go to my Nanna's on boxing day. Now that we live on the other side of the country... it'll be a day at home. I would like to volunteer at an animal shelter too, I think it'd be hard to get volunteers on Christmas day.
19. Can you name all of Santa's Reindeer? No
20. Angel or star on top of tree? It's a fairy. My Nanna used to tell me it was a fairy that went away to see Father Christmas and tell him whether I'd been good or not.
21. Open presents Christmas Eve or morning? Morning, with my parents anyway. We take turns to open pressies. At my Nanna's I have a special crown that my Grandad made when I was about 2 years old, I wear that and hand out all the presents to everyone.
22. Most annoying thing this time of year? Just how materialistic everyone gets.
23. Do you decorate your tree in any theme or color? Mum tried it a few times but I always came along and put other things on, lol!
24. What do you leave for Santa? My main concern was always just leaving carrots for the reindeer!
25. Shopping? I love to buy handmade things at markets; but my favourite option is buying through aid organisations like Oxfam. What you do is buy a card that says "on your behalf, a ... (eg mosquito net, bars of soap, well for a village etc) has been purchased. Awesome!
26. Do you decorate outside for Christmas or just inside (or at all?) Everywhere! As we used to live in Lobethal with the Lights festival, decorating the outside of the house was very important and it still is.
27. Favorite Christmas cookie? I've never eaten cookies at Christmas.
28. Do you own Christmassy clothing or jewelry? When I was little I always had ear-rings with bells dangling from them, but not anymore.
29. Do you believe in Santa? No and if I was going to have kids (which I'm not but anyway...) I would never tell them he exists. I just don't agree with the whole lying thing anymore. Not that I have any issues with anyone who does though!! :-)

Have a great weekend everyone!

2007-12-05T16:37:00.001+10:30

A Sandwich. (aka, things I wouldn't normally eat!)

No, it's not a cooked sandwich. But you didn't even consider that it would be, did you? No, this sandwich is made using the Black Sesame Sunflower Bread from my new raw recipe book, 'Ani's Raw food Kitchen' by Ani Phyo. The reason this is something that I wouldn't normally eat is that it had lots of seeds in it (though I omitted the sunflower seeds, as well as the garlic and added lots of tomato) and it is a lot of dehydrated stuff to have in one meal. Oh and also there was avocado on the sandwich, so it was pretty bad food combining with the seeds + avo. But I felt like eating it! The recipe appealed to me as soon as I got the book, and doubly so because I had almost a full jar of black tahini sitting in the fridge that I didn't know how to use because the flavour is so strong and bitter. I bought it about a year ago when the concept of pre-prepared raw food really excited me, which it no longer does... so this was a great opportunity to use it. Because I used the tahini rather than actual black sesame seeds, as the recipe calls for, the bitter flavour was spread throughout the whole bread not isolated. But it wasn't too strong and overall the bread was really nice!
It was also super fun to pick it up and eat like a sandwich! It held together really well and had a very 'bread-y' consistency, in my opinion! I has chopped lettuce, tomato, snow pea sprouts and avocado on there, by the way. For anyone transitioning to raw food looking for something that really resembles cooked bread, I highly recommend this! And I think I may even make it again, sometime next year probably. I wonder how long black tahini lasts in the fridge...lol!

Have a rawsome day everyone!

2007-12-01T19:09:00.000+10:30

Unfoodie Things
Well, Vegan MoFo (that's MOnth of FOod, for the uninitiated) is now officially over. I didn't come even close to posting every day but I think I posted more this month than I have in the whole last 3 months combined, so I'm happy. And I fully intend to keep it up!
However, since it is no longer the month of food, I don't mind doing a post devoted entirely to something not food... the newest beautiful addition to my rattie family. I was looking after 2 female and two male rats and trying to rehome them because their previous owner moved to Canada. One of the females, who I've named Cherimoya, was rescued by the previous owner 8 months ago and recently had a stroke, so she walks with her head on a permanent slant and has really bad balance but she is honestly probably the sweetest rat I've ever known. She just has the most gorgeous personality. And the cutest lil face, as you can see!

Anyway, my wonderful Mum agreed to let me keep her since I'm so very in love with her and for about 5 days everything was happy and lovely. Then, late last Thursday night, I was putting some food in her cage and picked her up for a cuddle only to find myself with blood all over my hands. She was bleeding copiously from her reproductive tract, which is definitely NOT normal in rats, so I was obviously extremely worried and upset. First thing Friday morning I managed to get in at the specialised rodent vet (only one in Perth!) and my suspicion was confirmed that she probably had ovarian cancer. She received a cortisone injection, to stop the bleeding, because it is impossible to operate while an animal is loosing blood like that. She came home Friday and I was feeding her watered down green smoothie through a syringe, and I continued getting up throughout the night to keep her fluids up.

Amazingly, she made it through the night and I got her back into the vet Saturday morning to have a hysterectomy. I watched the surgery (yes, it is horrible - their breathing is so slow, after every breath you're just waiting for the next one, hoping it comes) and I got to see the awful thing inside her. There was a growth the length of one of her legs (about 3 cm) and the width of my little finger just hanging off the side of one of her ovaries! It was just a big, black/blue blood clot basically, so thankfully not a malignant cancer (phew!) It took her a long time to wake up from the anaesthesia, which was made worse by her stroke, and in fact she was still a bit wobbly for a few days but amazingly she made it through! The big challenge now was, could she re-generate all the blood she lost, but fast forward a week to now and she is pretty much back to her happy, beautiful self with the exception of the big gash down her belly.

Okay, I'll come back soon with food photos, I promise!

2007-11-26T15:03:00.001+10:30

It's here it's here it's here!!!

Summer that is! Yay! Well, technically there are about 4 more days of Spring but you know what, it's close enough for me! We've had a few days at over 35 degrees C and there are little mini-tomatoes appearing on the plants all over or backyard (literally, those things are popping up out of the compost all over the place) but you know what really convinced me that the best season of the year was upon me? STONE FRUIT!! Well, more correctly, organic stone fruit (conventional stuff has been in the shops a few weeks but I've pushed away my desires and been patient and now it's paying off! Right now I am drinking a green smoothie with scrummy little nectarines in it and earlier today I ate... AN APRICOT!! And not just any apricot but one that grew in OUR BACKYARD! Now, I love apricots. I really do. Sadly, they have vary short availability - so it's important to get lots when you can, lol! I was amazed and delighted to get one from our tree, as we only planted the tree a few months ago shortly after we moved in and so it's very small. It did have four apricots at one stage but three of them got knocked off in a storm - I've been watching the survivor for well over a month, as it grew and grew, crossing my fingers that birds wouldn't get it before I did. It was one of the biggest apricots I've ever seen (I guess that happens when it's the only one on the tree!) and it was... DELICIOUS!
Have a fabulous day everyone, even those in the northern hemisphere where the sun isn't shining!

2007-11-24T08:30:00.000+10:30

Spaghetti!

Well I was all set to post a picture of ice-cream this morning and then I realised that I posted about ice-cream just a few short posts ago, so I decided to go with something different (because I don't live on ice-cream, lol, though it IS summer here, almost!) Now, I said in my questionnaire the other day that I was planning on making my raw spaghetti and I actually did it ... for the first time in about 6 months! For some reason I just haven't felt I wanted this dish for AGES but this week I was totally lusting after it - and I got two free zucchini from my beautiful organic growers last week so I was set to go! Oh and organic red capsicum is just starting to appear now so I really did have everything I needed.
This really was as delicious as it looked - I put a layer of snow pea sprouts underneath and getting a mouthful of sprouts, zucchini spaghetti, sauce and some of my 'parmesan cheese' all at once was like heaven!

I was awfully late eating this because I had to go hunting for a belated birthday present. One of my dear virtual friends, who I met on the Raw Pleasure Forums and who lives on the opposite side of the country, promised to send me two books for my birthday. She was in America for the Raw Spirit Festival, which is why my books were posted late, but aalmost two weeks after she posted them they still weren't here. Long story short, we've moved house, she accidentally sent to the old address, she doesn't know my surname so the post office didn't do the re-direction. SOoooo, I went way out of my way to stop at our old house on my way home and get my poor package that had been sitting there, with the new inhabitants of the house having no idea what to do with it. And inside was ...

Woohoo, another recipe book! I haven't had a chance to read it too thoroughly but I have a feeling I'm going to looove it! Okay I have to go... but have a fabulous day everyone!

2007-11-23T09:54:00.001+10:30

My Island Foods
Well, this post was inspired by Bazu of Where's the Revolution and her question regarding my response to one of the question's in yesterday's questionnaire (well, actually, two of my responses). Her question: what's silverbeet? I was shocked - I thought silverbeet was silverbeet the whole world over. But really, I should have known better, shouldn't I?

Now, here is a bunch on silverbeet that I bought at the markets last week... already know what it is? Well, if you don't it's okay because I referred to the wonderful Wikipedia and found 'Chard (Beta vulgaris var. cicla), also known as Swiss Chard, Silverbeet, Perpetual Spinach, or Mangold.' So there you go Bazu - I guess you know it as Chard. Oh and the explanation for why it is known as 'Swiss' chard is great: 'Swiss Chard received its name after an epidemic of flea beetles (A. nigriscutis) had an immensely destructive, resulting in a resemblance to swiss cheese.'

Silverbeet is one of the three foods that I chose to take with me if I were stranded on an island, along with bananas to make delicious green smoothies. YUM! I'm drinking one as I write... this one has a medjool date in there too, to make it super yummy, but I only got to take three things so I left dates behind, lol!

Sorry for the short post but I'm having a minor disaster in the fur family today so I'll write more later. Have a stunning day everyone!

2007-11-18T17:29:00.000+10:30

We Interrupt Your Regular Programming... Un-vegan-ness
Do you ever find yourself doing things that are really very un-vegan? Not, like chowing down on a steak or anything, just lifestyle things? I'm studying to get a veterinary degree. In 3 more years I will be a qualified vet, though I no longer intend to practice as a veterinarian, at least not as my major career. I'm going to get a job in animal rights or, if I can't find one, I'll start a non for profit organisation and create a job. Because that is my passion and what I want to do with my life. But I'm still going to get the degree, because I just know that (sad as it may be) people will pay more attention to me if I have some fancy letters after my name. If random hippie animal rights activist comes out and says something's cruel, who's going to listen? A whole bunch of other AR activists, sure, but what about the people who make the laws? But if a vet says something's cruel, well, it's got a bit more backing. So that's why I'm going to finish the course. Doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy it though. It just reminds me, day after day, about how hypocritical people are... they say they care about animals and want to help them, yet they eat them every single day! Huh???
At the moment I'm (trying to be) studying for my 'VET246 - Animals and Society' exams. In the theory exam we have to identify animal breeds and what they're used for. Look at these cuties:

these are Damara sheep, a meat breed. How could anyone eat anything so adorable!?!
And what about this big fluffy sweetheart, a Drysdale sheep that is 'dual purpose' (ie for meat and wool).

I just don't get it!

Oh and don't get me started on what we have to do in our practical exam - taking blood for an un-sedated 500kg cow, anyone?
SOrry about that little rant there, I really needed to get it out!

2007-11-17T19:14:00.000+10:30

A Questionnaire!

Ooooo, I do love doing these questionnaires! I very rarely actually do them but I always want to; since it is Vegan MoFo, I'm going to do the one that is doing the rounds! But I changed it up a bit to compensate for my raw-ness - the original is in brackets after my adaptation.

1. Favorite home-made nut (non-dairy) milk? I haven't had any nut milk in AGES! I looove coconut milk but coconuts aren't, technically speaking, nuts so that doesn't count. I used to make a brazil/hazelnut blend that was divine.

2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to make(cook)? Well, Ani Phyo's new recipe book is on its way across the country towards me as we speak (very belated birthday gift), so I'm sure there will be a few things from there. I'm going to make Apple Flax Cookies (a final test run before the recipe goes in the e-book) in the next few days, plus I want to make myself some 'spag-bol' because I haven't had any in AGES.

3. Topping of choice for popcorn? Yeah there's not much I can do with this one... :-)

4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure? Oh, last year only a little while after going raw I made some samosas, using a recipe I found online. I don't know what it was but the were DREADful! Ick.

5. Favorite pickled item? I have had kim-chee at a few raw picnics - it's nice, but waaaaay too salty for me.

6. How do you organize your recipes? Well my recipe books are alphabetised in the book shelf, like all the other books. I used to have a folder that I put recipes in that I printed off the net (in meal groupings, alphabetised) but I don't really print recipes off any more. Mostly I keep them neatly filed in my brain! :-)

7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal? Oooh, I'll have to post you a photo of our compost pits! We've only been living in this house a few months, so we don't have great compost yet, but they're coming along well. And I"m super proud of the walls I built around them. I couldn't be without compost, really, because I don't generate any rubbish that isn't plant based!

8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods...what would they be (don't worry about how you'll cook them)? No, I won't worry about how to cook them! Bananas and silverbeet, to make green smoothies, and persimmons.

9. Fondest food memory from your childhood? Wow I don't know. Food wasn't a big deal for me growing up (My Mum is a terrible cook!) Oh wait, it is very very un-raw vegan but... making meat pies with my grandad. We used to make 'pimples' out of the dough and decorated the tops of the pie with them!

10. Favorite vegan ice cream? Mmmm, banana ice cream with little chunks of cacao butter in. Or plain, plain is good!

11. Most loved kitchen appliance? Food processor, blender, coffee grinder attachment for blender (I LOVE this!).

12. Spice/herb you would die without? I'll go with the only one I really use - parsley. But I don't think I'd DIE without it ;-)

13.Recipe (Cook) book you have owned for the longest time? The first raw recipe book I got was 'Detox Delights' by Shazzie.

14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly? I can't do much with this one either, lol. :-)

15. Favorite raw (vegan) recipe to serve to an omni friend? I don't do this often. But flax crackers with guac are always a big hit. Oh and the aforementioned banana ice-cream is always well received.

16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh? Well, I'll go back to when I was a cooked vegan - it was tofu. Never had seitan, (you can't buy it packaged here in Aus) and found tempeh frankly revolting. Tofu, I loved. I ate firm tofu plain, straight from the packet. Now that makes me cringe but then - yum!

17. Favorite meal to make (cook) (or time of day to cook)? Well I have to go with dinner because breakfast and lunch are eaither smoothies or plain fruit.

18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator? This thing that has something to do with our broadband connection (if the internet won't connect, there's a switch you turn on and off), a bunch of wires that relate to the phone somehow and probably a lot of dust.

19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking. Ice-cubes, 2 leftover raw chocolate crackles, little ice packs to keep food cool when travelling.

20. What's on your grocery list? Well I shop almost exclusively at an organic market so I sorta get what's available - no list. And I went this morning, so I don't need anything just at the moment. Most important things I get each week are bananas (a good 5 kilos or so), leafy greens (kale, silverbeet, chard etc), lettuces, avocados. Heaps of other stuff too.

21. Favorite grocery store? Alive Organics!!!

22. Name a recipe you'd love to rawify (veganize), but haven't yet. Hmmm, tough one. I truly can't think of anything - there is nothing I miss! :-)

23. Food blog you read the most (besides Isa's because I know you check it everyday). Or maybe the top 3? Where's The Revolution; Yeah, That 'Vegan' Shit; Don't Get Mad, Get Vegan.

24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate? FRUIT! Nature's candy! ;-)

25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately? Oh geez. Probably organic in-shell walnuts the other week. They were pretty costly!

26. Veganaise or Nayonaise?
Home-made cashew mayonnaise thanks!

27. What is one recipe or ingredient or cooking technique that you've become familiar with in the last year that you can't imagine you ever lived without? Okay I'm going to cheat a bit here... I've now been 100% raw for about 1 year 3 months and I think it is the best food prep technique in the universe. YAY for raw!

28. Do you have a food inspiration in your life? Someone who taught you a lot about making a certain dish, or about food prep in general, or someone who taught you how to truly enjoy food? It can be someone you know or a book author, speaker...anything. I don't really have an answer to this question but I want to hear other people's answers! If you do, leave a comment!

29. Make up your own question to put here (and answer it!)

2007-11-14T20:17:00.000+10:30

What to Talk About?

I think it's a bit sad that it has taken Vegan MoFo to motivate me to write more often, but on the other hand I'm glad it has because I have really wanted to become a more regular poster for ages. It is also convenient that it coincided with me finishing my official university year (I do still have some exams to do, but I don't have to go in every day anymore).
So anyway, now that I'm posting, what should I talk about? Well, today I'm going to talk about the coleslaw I made a couple of nights ago. If you remember about a week back, I made my Dad some raw coleslaw to go with his cooked vegan dinner and I sampled a little as I was preparing it - I was blown away! It was soooooooo yummy! So on Monday night I re-created it for myself and filled a nice big bowl. It was really tasty...at first. But to be completely honest with you, it was just too... dry. There was cucumber in the 'mayonnaise' but apart from that there was no (non-sweet) fruit in this meal - normally my salads have loads of tomato, cuke, capsicum, some avocado etc, which makes them really hydrating, but I just felt dried out after I finished this. So, I'm sure it would still be nice, but next time I'll have it alongside a nice leafy green salad. Oh and the recipe will be going in my e-book, so I'm afraid I won't be posting it here but for the small price of $12AU you can buy my e-book when it is ready in a few days!

Have an awesome night guys!

2007-11-12T09:56:00.000+10:30

Delicious Purple Goo

I didn't get off to a very good start with VeganMoFo, did I? But I have a good reason! I couldn't use the computer for long yesterday morning because for some reason it decided that it no longer had a CD drive (which it clearly did!) so my Dad was busy trying to fix that. Then we went to the Walk Against Warming, which you can read about here. Estimates say that between 5 and 8 thousand people turned out here in Perth and I'm proud to say that my parents and I were 3 of those people! AAND we did it in 36 degree (that's C, not F) heat. Personally I love the heat but not everyone else was so enamoured, so it was an even more impressive turnout! After the walk I helped out at the WIlderness Society stand for a while, then rode my bike home. All the way home. It was a LONG way but it felt so awesome to know I'd done it! Unfortunately I can't tell you exactly how far I rode... although my parents bought me an awesome bike computer for my birthday it seems they bought a rather cheap bike computer (fair enough, after they spent so much on my ethical clothes, lol!) and it fell off and got lost the second day I used it. But I'm thinking it was around 30km.

Now, some good news for you guys... my raw recipe e-book, called 'Raw Recipes Fit For a Princess,' is almost finished! It is a 'salads and dessert' book but you get two bonus meals, some info on sprouting and a general 'why raw' section too. It's not 100% finished but I think there's going to be 25 recipes when it's done - I know it's small, but this is my first offering! What I want to know is how much I should charge... how much people are willing to pay? I don't want anyone to go "hey I'd really like that but I can't afford it" - raw food is for everyone not just those with lots of cash to spare! I am thinking $12 (AU) which is about $10.90 (US). You will get the e-book e-mailed to you as a Word document, complete with scrummy colour photos. I want to hear other people's opinions on this, please - how much will you pay for my e-book?!

Anyway, I'll just say a quick word about the photo above... I ate this on Saturday night. The recipe is in the e-book, I was going to call it 'Delicious Purple Goo' in there but decided against it, lol. You'll have to buy it to see what it is called! ;-) It was veeeeeery yummy!
Have an amazing day everyone!

2007-11-10T18:47:00.000+10:30

Yum and Raisin (And VeganMoFo)

Well, I know it is already the 10th of November but I'm going to join VeganMoFo and try my best to write something every single day from now till the end of November. Sorry if all you wonderful people who started at the beginning of the month consider this sacrelige... but what are you going to do?

Anyway, what I am writing about today is this delicious creation, which I call 'Yum and Raisin Ice-cream.' Doesn't it look delicious? It was :-) Ice cream is probably something that people who don't know much about veganism would assume that vegans don't get to eat. They CERTAINLY wouldn't think raw vegans would eat it. But as all good vegans know, we can enjoy it! I'm pretty sure that I never actually tried any pre-made vegan ice-creams before going raw, but I know there are plenty available and even more in the US than here (though we'll catch up). But I have enjoyed plenty of this delicious raw ice cream in the past year. It is the simplest recipe EVER too - freeze bananas. Defrost slightly. Process in food processor until smooth and ice-creamy. Eat. :-) That's it. To this one I added some raisins and some grated cacao butter and it was soooooo good.
Last year when my grandparents were staying with me, I gave some banana ice-cream to my Grandad. Now, I love my grandad very very dearly, he is absolutely awesome but his diet is not exactly great. He would eat meat three times a day if he could. He still (until just about a few months ago) used things like lard and suet in his cooking. Anyway, I gave him a spoonful and he, in all honesty, said "well if raw vegans eat this all the time, then I could be one." Seriously! That's how good it is!
Hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you tomorrow!

2007-11-09T16:19:00.000+10:30

My Dad the raw foodist?

No, not really - he is officially now an 'at home vegetarian,' who eats meat occasionally when out and also eats plenty of vegan meals at home, but I can't forsee him actually going raw in the near future. Nevertheless, this is the meal I gave him last Sunday night. With Summer weather now here, even if the season hasn't officially started yet, I figured I had more chance of getting away with giving him raw food - I feel I should take this opportunity to tell you something about my dad and salads. My Dad doesn't eat salads. For my Dad to eat a green salad he would have to:
a)have a gun to his head, being told that he was dead if he didn't eat it OR
b)be trapped in some kind of post-apocalyptic world where he had withered away to almost nothing and he was second from death if he didn't eat the salad.

In my Dad's world, there are three edible salads - pasta salad, potato salad and coleslaw. So I looked at that list and said, well, coleslaw is kind of the raw-est of the three. And how easy is it to make raw mayonnaise? (The answer is VERY). So I did - I made him coleslaw with raw mayonnaise, the mushroom mix from the Wild Fajita recipe that I made him on my birthday (go back two posts) and chopped up a tomato. It was served with two homemade, vegan, seitan patties that were obviously not raw. He ate the patties, the tomato, nearly all of the mushroom mix and quite a bit of coleslaw. His response? Well, he said "it was okay, but I didn't love it. It's all about changing perceptions." Hehe, I couldn't have put that last bit any better myself. He then said I could give him raw things, but it would be better if they were spread out over different meals, not all together (except raw tomato which he is "happy to see at any time." The man likes his tomatoes!)
He apologised a couple of times for not enjoying it more but I told him to stop being silly - this is the man who, only a couple of years ago, proclaimed himself a 'meatatarian.' He just ate an entirely vegan, largely raw meal - that's pretty damn impressive! Oh and yes, my Dad does eat on his lap, off a 'stable table' and he even uses a bib (a tea towel tucked into his shirt). Don't worry, I make fun of him plenty! :-)

Oh and incidentally, the was the best freakin' raw mayonnaise ever to grace the face of this planet, seriously, I had just a wee taste and wanted to drink the entire blender full. I chose not to do so, for the simple reason that none of the ingredients were organic and the cashews used weren't *truly* raw. But I shall be re-creating it for myself next week after my trip to the markets on Saturday.

P.S Remember a couple of posts ago, I said my parents bought me something for my birthday over the net and it hadn't arrived yet? I guessed it was a bike computer... and it was! It arrived a few days ago and I haven't got it completely working but it is so cool!

2007-11-01T20:54:00.000+10:30

An Exciting Picnic

Since I am such a lucky princess, my birthday did not truly end at midnight on the 19th - two days later I gathered with a group of wonderful raw friends on the banks of the river that I am lucky to live just minutes away from. May, Rachan, Karen, Jen, Kate, Chris, John, Jill, Dani and Jess were all there to make the day wonderful and so was.... SERGEI BOUTENKO! If you know anything about raw food you have probably heard of the Boutenko family. Victoria (Sergei's mother) wrote 'Green For Life,' the amazing book that brought green smoothies to the world. Sergei and his sister Valyeria co-authored a recipe book, 'Eating without Heating.' Anyway, Sergei is currently touring Australia giving presentations - and he just so happened to be here in Perth over my birthday so he joined the party. I was very excited to have a celebrity in attendance, lol! But really, he was just a really nice, friendly, down-to-Earth guy. We had a good time discussing language differences (like cantaloupe=rockmelon, courgette=zucchini, coriander=cilantro, and why you should call it a 'bum-bag' not a 'fanny-pack' :-)

Oh and apart from the amazing company there was food... and lots of it. I didn't get many pictures but I'll list what I can remember... cake x 2 (the leftovers of mine, plus one karen made), pizza, flax crackers, kale salad, fruit salad, durian, dip with veggie sticks, banana pudding, banana celery salad, homegrown loquats (YUM)... I think that was it. I do know I stuffed myself silly! :-)

Yum.

Drool...

Have an awesome day everyone!!

2007-10-25T19:37:00.000+09:30

It's my Birthday (and I'll fly if I want to!!;-)
I was my birthday last Friday - I turned 19 (if you're attentive, you'll realise that was indeed the 19th. I was very excited about that - once in a lifetime!) I had an absolutely fantastic day, I couldn't imagine how it could have been any better! Should I tell you all about it? I began my day at 5:55am, it was already sunny and lovely when I got up. I fussed around for about half an hour, making my bed, cleaning the cat's dirtbox, doing my daily oil gargling, then I went and threw myself onto my parents bed no differently than the way I did when I was turning 9, lol :-)
I already knew what my two major presents were, as I picked them out a couple of weeks ago - a gorgeous green jacket made of a hemp/flax blend, and a pair of lovely pink trousers (to be pyjama pants). Both were bought from the amazing shop Ethical Threads, owned by a lovely vegan couple and stocked entirely with cruelty free, enviro-friendly products (no sweat shops!!) In addition to these, I got some lovely things that my parents bought back from their recent trip to Bali - another pair of pants, three beaded bracelets and some spoons and forks made out of coconut shell (COOL!!) They've also bought me something on e-bay that hasn't arrived yet, and are becoming a bit concerned about. I have a big guess on what it is - a bike computer (to tell you how fast your travelling, how far you've gone etc). When it comes, I'll let you know if I'm right.

Anyway, after the present opening I fussed around a bit more, making up a batch of seiten for my parents (I usually make a weeks worth on Fridays) and cleaning out the rats and doing a few other things. Then I headed out on my bike to my favourite Mulberry tree (on public land next to the soccer pitch) - they are the nicest Mulberries going and they are FREE!! Yum! I feasted massively then went to get my parents fruit and veg for the week (carried in the bike trailer). I spent most of the day on my 'personal chef' job, which was fun as always, then (here's what you've been waiting for!) I made dinner for my parents and I. Now, I cook for my parents every night but we never eat together (mum first, then dad, then me). So I said that for my birthday I wanted us all to eat together at the table. And dad had to eat raw food (mum has mega food issues - she had pasta [vegan, as always]). And dad did eat raw food, and he enjoyed it. So here it is:

Dad had guacamole stuffed mushrooms along with the mixture from the 'Wild Fajitas' recipe in Shazzie's Detox Your World. He liked the stuffed mushies, but he REALLY liked that Fajita mixture. Oh by the way Dad LOVES mushrooms in all forms.

I, on the other hand, do not like mushrooms. So I had the guacamole Dad had, but on a mound of lettuce.

We also had flax crackers, corn crackers and yummy dip.

It was all sooooo good - some terrible food combining there but it was delicious. My hilarious Dad finished it and said "I can feel myself detoxing already, lol :-) (And he didn't even know the recipe came from Detox Your World!)

And then later on we had cake.

Need I say more?

I made it, but my Mum did the decorations :-)

Anyway, I have to go. I'll be back shortly with more birthday stuff. Have an awesome day!!

2007-10-12T23:00:00.000+09:30

What I ate Wednesday (again!)
I'm ba-ack! Now I did not eat this sushi on wednesday... I did not eat it today... I did not eat it at all, in fact (I'm sounding like Dr Seuss now - I do not like green eggs and ham. I will not eat them in house - I will not eat them with a mouse... lol! :-) But I did make this sushi and I thought it looked so professional there in it's plastic container, that I had to take a picture. Anyway, I'll get back to the sushi later - for now, lets see what I ate on Wednesday!

Just over 2L of green smoothie, containing 3 really enormous bananas, 4 pears, a load of silverbeet, some parsley and water.
About 6 lady william apples.
LOQUATS! Lots of them... I don't know how many. They were all fresh picked from trees in people's front yards who didn't want them... can't see fruit going to waste! This picture was not taken by me, it's just a generic loquat picture in case you don't know what loquats are. They're very yummy! My parents and I went to watch a game of basketball (we're big fans, but we don't go much anymore - we support the South Australian team, but since we moved here to western Australia last year, we only go twice a year when the SA team comes here to play the WA team). Anyway, I took a big bag of loquats with me to eat while we watched the game and that was my 'dinner.' YUM!

Now, back to the sushi... I made this for lady I work for. Yes, I have a job - I got it about 2 months ago but I've been a tad slack in telling you about it. I have to say, it is the most incredible job I could imagine having right now, because it fits in with my uni schedule so well and it is something I loooove doing. I volunteer every week at PAWS (the People and Animal Welfare Society) and know a lady there who is vegan but also gluten intolerant as well as suffering bad osteoarthritis and somewhat overweight. A few months ago, she found out that raw food is by its very nature all completely gluten free! And then she asked me if I wanted to be her personal chef! So I now prepare her 7 raw meals and 2 desserts every week and she comes over to my place and picks them up! She gives me money to go to the fruit and veg shop and buy the ingredients, and also pays me $15/hour for my time, which normally equates to about $60/week! It doesn't sound like that much but because my wonderful parents still support me and give me some money for food each week, it is plenty for my needs. And it is so fun too!
She is an absolute sushi lover, so I make that quite regularly. Anyway, it is forecast to be another brilliant day here so I'm going to get off the computer and go enjoy it!!

2007-10-04T09:55:00.000+09:30

What I ate Wednesday
Haha, I'm back! I told you I would be and for once I didn't turn out to be lying. Yay! Now, a few months back the awesome team of Heidi and Justin over at Raw Food, Right Now started a regular post called 'What we ate Wednesdays.' They haven't done it for a while, though I know they're very busy people and I certainly understand not having time to post, lol! :-) But in an effort to post at least once a week, I have decided to introduce 'what I ate wednesday' to this blog, starting with yesterday:

Green Smoothie of 2 bananas, 2 pears, parsley, silverbeet and water.
3 Lady William Apples
Another green smoothie, of rainbow chard, 2 kiwi fruit, a banana and water.
Another green smoothie, with beet leaves, kale, water, 1/2 a medjool date and 4 bananas (yum - the best one of the day. They were all great though!)

Massive kale salad (as you can see, it barely fitted in the bowl!) This is modelled on the the recipe in Alissa Cohen's 'Living on Live Food' book and consists of kale (about 1 1/2 bunches), 1 avocado, 3 large sticks of celery, juice of half a lemon and a load of littlish tomatoes (about 6 I think.) YUM!

In case you're wondering, everything I ate was organic. I also have two yummy pictures to share with you from Tuesday. For dinner I had a banana split and it was SO GOOD! (Lean back now, to prevent drool damage to your keyboard!)

And I thought I'd include this, even though it's a bit blurry, to show how stunningly creamy and delicious my banana ice cream was as I whipped it up in the food processor. Yum.

Have a fabulous day everyone!!

2007-09-29T17:53:00.000+09:30

Another picnic and Spring is finally here!!
I feel so sorry for all you unfortunate Northern Hemisphere-dwellers... summer is over, the days are getting shorter and the produce is getting less exciting. For me, the very opposite is true! Although we are already a month into Spring, today was the first truly warm day and my goodness was it beautiful! It just so happened that we had a raw picnic today and I honestly don't think the weather could have been more perfect - it was just phenomenal.
You may or may not remember, a few months back I got a bike with trailer and I have been getting more and more into riding - every Saturday I do a 14km round-trip down to the Organic Growers Market and back, plus I ride just for fun sometimes as well as other general commuting. Anyway, last week I signed up to do The Great Perth Bike Ride, which is a fund-raising ride with a 53km course that you can do once or twice. I'm going to stick with just one lap for my firs time, but I'm super excited! You can check out my web-page here (and you can make a donation there. Go on, please make a donation - it's a great cause!! Well, 3 great causes actually!)
Anyway this does have some relevance to my earlier discussion of today's stunning weather - I reached my maximum ever distance ridden in one day, with approximately 27km (over half the 53km route!) I rode to and from the market this morning, then to and from the picnic. And to be honest, I feel absolutely fine - I could easily have kept going. I don't want to get confident, but I think it will be a breeze! And lots of fun!

Well, I'm sure you've all been reading through this thinking "oh yes, hmm, biuke ride, well that's interesting... WHERE'S THE FOOD?" So without further ado, here is today's picnic food. I'm afraid there aren't that many photos and they aren't that great quality... but it was such a beautiful day, such scrumptious food and such wonderful people, that I simply couldn't spend too much time behind the camera.

The Spread

And again

Karen's Pizza

Meg's incredible Strawberry Shorcake

Rachan creating nori rolls

This was my contribution to the day, a Mulberry Pie (fresh mulberries picked this morning, YUM!) and it was really delicious. IT was also really attractive... before I rode 7km with it in my backpack. But it's not how it looks, it's how it tastes, right!! :-)

Now to move away from picnic food, here is a little mini-pizza I made a few weeks ago (Though I make pretty much identical ones every Friday). Super yum! I AM going to create a little recipe book at some point and both the Mulberry Pie and Pizza recipes will be in there. Oh and I AM going to start posting more frequently, I promise (cross my heart!) Have a great day everyone!

2007-08-25T11:52:00.000+09:30

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!

2007-07-26T11:22:00.000+09:30

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!

2007-07-19T11:49:00.000+09:30

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!!

2007-07-10T11:24:00.000+09:30

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!

2007-06-19T11:33:00.000+09:30

Another Raw Picnic and Other Happenings
Hello! Last sunday was another raw picnic and it was sensational! I do love living in Perth - it is supposedly WInter here but the day was so warm and sunny that I wound up taking my shoes and socks off and wiggling my toes in the grass! It was brilliant!
Oh and then there was the food... Y U M! It's raw - really it is! I know I know, look at that pizza and you won't believe it but it is. I didn't get to try quite everything because there were so many people there (which was excellent) but I didn't mind. Also, one of the chocolate pies was made with honey (I always ask if anything has honey) so I gave that one a miss. Some of the stuff was AMAZING but to be honest, some of it tasted too 'real' - I ate a single forkful of the coleslaw, which contained somehing have never had before, apple cider vinegar. To me it tasted sour and 'off,' like it had been sitting around fermenting (which, I suppose, it had!) And I had some guacamole which was nice but if I hadn't already taken my socks off I reackon the salt would have knocked them off, lol - I was trying to get the taste out of my mouth all afternoon. The pizza tasted insanely realistic and was also super salty. I'm just so used to the simple pure deliciousness of fruits all by themselves! The lasagne was INCREDIBLE though, and I'm actually planning to make it tonight for myself. I took an apple pie and some chocolate, whch everyone loved. There was a little cake left over and my mum took it to work for a birthday celebration - she works with a (non-raw) vegan who absolutely ADORED it, which was nice. :-)

Without further ado, pictures:

This is my apple pie. Just add this t the list of recipes I promise to put on the other blog soon, lol!

Okay, at 12 o'clock we have the pizza. Moving clockwise are brownies (in the rectangular blue container), a chocolate pie thingy (in the oval white dish), a little teeny bit of the honey-pie is visible to the right of that, then my apple pie again, down the bottom are some books that Dani bought to lend to people (I borrowed Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. Read it. Now.) The large glass bottle contais grapefruit juice, then there's some sliced tomato and avocado, at about 9 o'clock are some flax crackers wit a dip that was actually leftover filling from the INCREDIBLE lasagne which is just to the left (did i mention it was DELICIOUS??). Above that and to the left is the innards of a durian - I looove durian but I thought I'd let thoe who had never tried one eat it. Apparently it was very good (new season, only just shipped in from Thailand). To the right of that is a salad and above it is the coleslaw. Smack bang in the middle is dip, from recipe in Alissa Cohen's book Living on Live food. It was yummy, but a bit too rich and (again) salty for me. Phew! Did you get through all that??

Right, this one shows you the whole Honey-pie (at about 11 o'clock), some fruit nut balls rolled in coconut, the chocolate pie, and some spiralised zucchini pasta with two little pots of garlic sauce to go with it. Too hot for my little tongue!!

This one's just a close up of some things you've already seen.

Lastly here's something I made last week. I thought it looked stunning (why you get 2 pictures) but tasted pretty yuck. Pooh. I think my young coconut was past it's best, which doesn't help matters but as I said to mum - I keep seeing young coco in savoury recipes and trying it, but I just don't like it. Young coco is amazing alone and great in sweet reipes o frm now on that's the only way I'm eating it!

Have a fantabulous day everyone!

2007-06-08T11:21:00.000+09:30

I'm BA-ACK!!
Hello! I'm terribly sorry everyone... I did not get swallowed up into a black hole, or drown in a toilet, or get arrested at an animal rights protest (my dad is always saying I'm 18 now, he's not paying my bail if I do, lol!) and I did NOT waste away into nothing because all I eat is raw fruit and vegetables (just in case any raging omnivores who hate us raw vegans are reading this, lol again!)
What did, in fact, happen was that the semester finished and I had exams. Not very exciting, is it? But now I am off uni for 7 weeks and I promise to blog more, I am also getting a bike soon so instead of walking/bussing/train-ing everywhere I will now be pedalling, YAY!
So that's exciting, and what is also exciting is that I have lots of food for you today! Oh but one not so exciting thing is that the ability to comment on my last post was non-existent and I have no idea why. I'm crossing my fingers that the same thing won't happen again... has this happened to anyone else? Was it a Blogger error on that one day? Who knows...

I had this for dinner one night but I think it would be an excellent breakfast for people who are transitioning to/experimenting with raw food, especially if you like porridge/oatmeal. I will post the recipe on my other blog soon.

From another angle:

It is now 9 days into winter here but the end-of-season sweet corn (organic and local) is still available and I think it is the best I've had all season... SOOO sweet and flavourful. I'm eating A LOT of it. This is kind of corn soup... if I remember, it was two ears of corn, a tomato, some flax seeds, bit of water all blended. Maybe there was something else in there? It was nice but with corn this good I think I'd rather just eat it straight up.

Okay I know it is being pretty corny (not literally!) but I am calling this dish 'Dillorangeous.' You know, like delicious but using the two main dressing ingredients... stop laughing! :-) Anyway, I made this salad one night and felt like doing something really different... so I made a dressing. Normally my salad dressing is orange juice or maybe lemon juice, so this really was different. Anyway, it was really good so I'll post this recipe on the other blog at some stage too. I was eating this and going "mm, yum, this is so good" and mum asked why it was so nice and I said "well, I made this nice dressing which is really good but I think what makes it great is the alfalfa sprouts. I love alfalfa sprouts." It's a pity they take so long to grow (well, they do when it's winter and you don't have much sun) but I love love love them. Yum.

Mmmm, this was really good too. I made some 'corn chips' out of my yummy corn in the dehydrator and used them, carrots and celery to dip in two types of dip. I might post those recipes later too. Yum, I want some more corn!

Okay that is all for today. I'll return shortly!

2007-05-20T09:32:00.000+09:30

Feelin' Awesome
I just feel super great today and I want to share it with the world! I am also participating in the Million Paws Walk (read more here) today, which I love. I can't believe it's already been a whole year since the last one though!
Anyway, I have a bit of food to share with you today, along with my wonderful mood.

First we have what I am temporarily calling Flamin' Fettucine... I know that my raw carrot and zucchini pasta (made on the spiraliser) look a lot more like angel hair than fettucine but Flamin' Angel Hair doesn't have the same ring, now, does it? :-) I will put the recipe for this on my recipe blog at some stage... be patient! It's relly yummy by the way!

Next up is something really ugly that I didn't want to post at all but it was sitting on my camera so I thought I would just get rid of it. I hate nothing more than bland, brown food and that is all I think when I see this. It was nice but not outstanding... consists of sliced apples, blended bananas, sprouted buckwheat, young coconut and low temperature dried figs and apricots, re-hydrated in young coco water. Mmmmm I wish I had some more of those figs right now...

I saved the best till last... CHOCOLATE SALAD!! Yumm this was so tasty. I have posted the recipe at my other blog, check it out here. I'm pretty impressed with the photo too, even if I do say so myself!

Okay everyone, have a fantabulously awesome day and spread all the love you can!!

2007-05-04T12:44:00.000+09:30

Things

I had three dishes to post for you but one of the photos was totally blurry and unattractive so I left it out. First up is a salad with my own dehydrated Pecan Patties - how much do these things wanna look like freakin beef burgers or something!??! It's a bit scary really. I was going to post the recipe but they didn't turn out as incredibly delicious as I was hoping so they need some modification. The salad was darned good, but then isn't all salad (Well okay actually no, I'll share a secret - I HATE lettuce. Ick. All kinds, all ways, eww. I eat my salads with sweet, tender dandelion greens from my backyard. Awesome!)

This was something I didn't really think about before I made it - its 'angel-hair pasta' made of yummy new-season pumpkin and some zucchini on my spiraliser, with a sauce of tomatoes and young coconut, with just a smidge of garlic and spring onion, all blended together. It was nice but you know how most sauces become better as time passes and flavours mingle, well, this one sorta went the opposite way. Still good though! Oh and in case you're wondering that big black shadow is the face of my darling Ruhsa, coming in for a sniff!

Ruhsa is going great, so friendly and playful. It's totally weird for me to have a kittne in the house (even if she is nearly a year old, according to the shelter) because I haven't experienced that since I was FIVE years old, ie 13 years ago. When I was five my parents bought me my very own kitten (againn from a shelter) who was just 6 weeks old. We grew up together but when she was 9 she began having seizures and was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She had another year of happy life with ongoing medical treatment but eventually I knew it was time to say goodbye. Shortly after she left the world I adopted Sana, who was anywhere from 8-12 years old, based on which vet you listen to (personally I think 12 was closer to the mark). Of course I have experienced kittens at the shelter where I volunteered and also when my grandma and best friend bought new kittens into their homes, but I haven't had one in my own home.
Does anyone have tips for things for her to scratch on? I built a scratching post out of an old piece of carpet nailed to a piece of wood, but she still wants to scratch carpet, chairs and the speaker of my electric organ. She is and always will be an inside cat so obviously she can't scratch trees as she normally would... any suggestions welcome!

Here's a photo so you can all see how well she is getting along with Casper, who is ten now but is still keen to play with Ruhsa. (Yep thats my mum eating cereal in the background. It's not raw but at least, with rice milk, it's vegan!)

Lastly I'll share a photo of a protest I was involved in last weekend, organised by The Human Battery Cage - check out their website here. That's me, second in from the left in the white t-shirt (which is a PETA one, that has a picture of a cute pig saying "No, I don't have any spare ribs!").
Have a beautiful, productive day!!

2007-04-27T09:14:00.000+09:30

Life
Isn't it amazing how sometimes you're just happily going along, doing your thing, living your life and then WHAM! you get faced with a whole lot of stuff all at once? Two days after my last post, when my grandad died, my beloved darling cat Asante Sana (Sana for short) had to be euthanaesed. I was utterly devestated. I don't believe there is a word for the excrutiating pain I felt, although I'm sure many many of my readers who love animals very dearly, know what I'm talking about. Making that decision to have that needle stuck in the leg of your best friend/baby is beyond horrible. It was very sudden and unexpected, which compounded the problem - last time I had to make that decision, my beautiful girl had been suffering with a brain tumour for several years and I knew it would be coming but this was totally out of the blue. Finally, to make it even worse, there was a drug which would possibly have helped her but because we had to fly across the country for my Grandad's funeral so I couldn't be with her to try it out.
But enough about being sad - not one to be without a cat for long, while in South Australia I returned to a lovely but very very VERY under-funded no-kill shelter that I used to volunteer at before we moved for my university study. I went wanting to get an old, sick, pathetic cat that no one else would want... what I wound up with was Ruhsa (which means Liberty in Swahili). She is an 11 month old ball of fluff that was shy-er than any cat I've ever met at the shelter - she would not come out from behind a large steel drum where she was hiding in a fluffy basket and so I decided that she was not likely to get to go home with anyone else since they wouldn't even know she was there. When she got home (after a three hour plane trip!) she turned out to be friendly, playful and loving. It took a couple of days but she even gets on amazingly well with Casper the dog and even seems to be okay with Bliss the rat. Enough talk - here's some pictures:

Ruhsa making herself at home on my bed

Play fighting with a stuffed dolphin.
We think she might have Ragdoll in her breeding - what do you think? Anyone know much about ragdolls?

Okay now, enough about life - this is a food blog and food you shall see. On the day in between the day that my grandad died and the day that my cat died, I had organised a raw picnic. It was a huge success with lots of great people and delicious food.

Here's the spread.

Dani's delicious contribution, a fruit pie - I think I ate about 1/3 or even 1/2 of this myself! :-)

Here was my contribution, angel hair pasta (aka zucchini from the spiraliser) with spaghetti bolognaise. It was devoured although I think the chocolates (pictured in my last post) were perhaps a touch more enjoyed :-)

May bought a Mumbai Curry - everyone said it was really delicious but it was waaaaaay too spicy for my little tongue! One mouthful and I was just about running away.

Here is everyone: Dani, Me, May (back, left to right) and Rachan, Tracey, Kathy (front, left to right). May's husband, not 100% raw by any means unlike his lovely wife (who was attending her first picnic), was behind the camera. Tracey (a friend of May's, also at her first picnic and feeling excellent having lost 6kilos!!! in only 3 weeks of raw) bought a scrummy fruit salad while Kathy's contribution was a durian and Rachan bought a salad that everyone but me devoured - major dressing ingredients were coriander (cilantro) and ginger, both of which I hate and make me feel ill.

And quickly before I go, I have dinner from two nights ago - it is called 'The Gratest Salad in the World' and is from Shazzie's Detox Your World. I didn't grate as much as it calls for - I didn't have any zucchini so that was gone altogether and I decided to do my pumpkin on the spiraliser to make it pretty! Yum.

2007-04-14T08:18:00.000+09:30

A tough time in Blog Land
It seems that bloggers haven't been having the best time of it lately, so I would like to extend my deepest condolences to Don't Get Mad, Get Vegan who recently lost a baby she never had the chance to meet and also to Tania who lost her father suddenly. Big cyber hugs to you guys!!
Yesterday morning my Grandad died. It was, however, not a shock because he had lung cancer and his condition has been steadily decreasing for the last couple of months although everything happened so much faster than I could have imagined. That's the circle of life I suppose - he was 72 years old, he had lived a good and very interesting life. Although I don't support armed conflict at all I am still proud to say that he fought for his country despite having three young children, and he was also present at the going up of the Berlin Wall and was able to help civilians cross it whilst they were being shot at. I loved him dearly, here is a picture of us at christmas 2005.

Now lets get onto food! Here we have some 'rawviolis' as I like to call them. Thinly sliced zucchini is used in place of pasta and the filling is a blend of avocado/mushroom/garlic/lemon juice/maybe some other things.

You all know how much I love durian but last week I was very excited to discover these little guys (considerably smaller than durian's you've seen here in the past). They are D-24 variety durians from Malaysia, as opposed to the Mornthong variety from Thailand that are most widely available. These did have quite a different taste, I'm not sure I like them as much but what I did like is that these are 'naturally grown' aka uncertified organic. I hate the fact that durians are one of the only things that I ever eat that is conventional.

Lastly two photos to really get your mouth watering, these are little (raw vegan, of course!) chocolates I made for a raw picnic we're having today. I did make more than this but only photographed these ones. I can post the recipe on my other blog for you - it requires some slightly unusual ingredients but I think its worth it. I can't eat more than one at once, they're too sweet, but they are very good and taste very much like 'real' chocolate.

From another angle:

I'll come back later with picnic photos!

2007-04-05T11:34:00.001+09:30

I have lots of Food!
Hello everyone! I finally have lots of yummy new pictures to share with everyone so please sit back and enjoy!

Firstly, I showed you some of my fruit from the market last week so I thought this week you might like to check out some green stuff. THere's broccoli, parsley, corn, cucumber, sweet potato leaves... YUM!

This is a recipe from Shazzie's 'Detox Your World' (I know, I know, I haven't made any Shazzie recipes for AGES!!) It is simply called Cucumber Salad and the ingredients are actually only supposed to me cucmber, raw tahini, lemon juice and paprika. I made the dressing as written (well, mostly - I never ever make a recipe with exact amounts, mainly because they are rarely written for more than one person), however, my idea of a 'salad' is not just cucmber coated with dressing, so I added some other non-sweet fruits, yummy home-grown tomatoes and crunchy organic red capsicum (bell pepper). I very rarely use dried spices in recipes but I chucked in a little bit of paprika, less than called for. Unfortunately, I was using home grown lemons and i tend to forget that they have a MUCH stronger flavour than normal (even organic) lemons and so I had to add more tahini, some water and coconut water to the dressing to try and get rid of the overpowering lemony sourness. It was okay in the end and the salad overall was nice, but it would have been better with less lemon!!

On Monday I was feeling like 'pasta' with an avocadoey sort of sauce. Well no, I 'll be honest - what I really wanted was to eat a big faat bowl of guacamole, which in my mind is actually just a big fat bowl of blended avocado since I don't add much to my guacamole. Sadly, this is not exactly what I wanted. By no means was it bad, in fact it was very nice, but much more tomatoey than what I wanted. I'll post the recipe on my other blog anyway though.

There was a long conversation on the Raw Pleasure forums the other day about someone craving an apple and cinnamon flavour combination, in any form. Someone suggested just slicing apples and drizzling them with agave nectar then sprinkling cinnamon on top. I wasn't enthralled by this or anything but felt like something a bit different to what I normally eat so I made myself some date sauce (don't use agave) and mixed it up with apples sliced on my mandoline and a sprinkling of mesquite meal instead of cinnamon, plus a few raisins. It was nice but nothing stunning - I would have preferred eating some apples, some raisins and some dates separate from each other. I'll post that recipe on my other blog too though.

2007-03-30T09:53:00.000+09:30

I'm on Holidays!

Or vacation, as all the americans out there would put it. We lots of people from the US and Canada in my course, one said to me as we were leaving yesterday afternoon "By Freedom, have a nice vacation" and I almost burst out laughing. Vacation is not a common word here!
Anyway, what this means is that I can post more regularly for the next two weeks (although I do have lots of studying to do!)
So for today I have for you just a little bit of what I bought at the market last week:

Someone asked me in a comment the other day how much I spend on groceries each week. I don't know anything about exchange rates so I'm just going to tell you in Australian dollars - it's about $75 - $80 AU a week. That is spent on organic produce that I buy at an organic growers market where prices are very reasonable. What you can see in the picture above is only a small percentge of the total of everything I bought - there was also a couple of rockmelons (cantaloupe), lots of pears, several bunches of greens, plus a few veggies. Some weeks I also spend a bit more on something that I use less of, eg sheets of truly raw nori, truly raw cashews, chickpeas for sprouting etc - I always buy those things in bulk. So that's my shopping costs!

After I took that fruit photo I was goping to take a cute piccie of Casper but her wanted his dinner and wouldn't stand still so this is the best I've got:

I am going to be making some scrummy raw chocolate treats today for a pre-Easter treat to share with fellow volunteers at PAWS so I will take some pictures and post them - I also have some pictures from The Big Veg Out that I will share soon.
I just posted a yummy new recipe on my recipe blog, so check it out here.

2007-03-16T09:45:00.000+10:30

Back Again
Oh dear I did it again didn't I... promised to post more often and then completely did the opposite. I really really want to keep my blog going but I am soo busy at university - and I figure if I only post once a fortnight I'm going to lose most of the small readership I did have. But I'll keep doing it anyway! :-) If you do stop by, please please leave a comment. It really is exciting getting them!

Okay so now I have some food for you. FIrst of all, I decided to take a photo of some of the scrumptious FREE home grown mangoes that I mentioned in my last post. As you can see, some of them are totally humungous! I honestly think that I have now eaten at least $100 worth of mangoes... I mean, these are basically organic and I would pay $3-4 each for some of these mangoes so if you added it up, that would be heaps! And they are a trillion times nicer than any organic mango i have ever bought. Oh don't get me started talking about them... *drool*

This is a salad which I find very exciting because a number of the ingredients were grown by me! You can't see the greens in this picture, because they're right at the bottom of the bowl, but they are mainly borage and dandelion greens (yum!) which I grew. Then there is some corn, which I did not grow - I did try and grow corn, but for some reason it didn't quite finish growing - the kernels stayed really small and dry and ick. But my guinea pigs liked it! :-) Next there are tomatoes, which I did grow - we had 32!! tomato plants. I was trying to keep track of how many tomatoes I've eaten but I'm not sure anymore. They are so yummy! And (like everything else in the veggie garden) they're heirloom variety. Yay! There are also some mung beans, which I didn't actually grow myself but I did sprout them so that's kinda growing... There's coconut, which obviously I didn't grow (oh how I wish I had a coconut palm!) and then grated carrot, which I did grow. My carrots have gone quite well I think, considering we don't really have the best soil for root vegetables (it's super sandy).

Tomorrow is a very exciting day for me. I volunteer at an organisation called PAWS (People and Animal Welfare Society) and they are holding their inaugural 'Big Veg Out - The Cruelty Free Lifestyle festival.' It's going to be a day full of awesome vegan food and drink, health and beauty products and cool local music... plus I am having a raw vegan stall with samples, information and uncooking demos! In a future post, I will present some pictures of the day.

Now last of all, I posted a new recipe on my recipe blog the other day, so check it out here: Mushroom Pizzas.

Have an amazing week everyone and I promise to post again in the not too distant future!

2007-03-03T21:33:00.000+10:30

HELLOOOOO!
Hi Everyone! I'm so sorry it's been 13 whole days since my last post! That's terrible! Nothing either terrible or particularly exciting has happened to cause my absence, except the fact that I went back to university to start my second year of veterinary science and it is already really full on. But I promise that from now on I'm going to try and post twice every week!

Not a whole lot else has been going on in my life in the two weeks since I last posted, except maybe the fact that I am rolling in the most AMAZING, INCREDIBLE, DELICIOUS, STUNNING mangoes. I have tasted a lot of mangoes in my life so far but I can tell you that until you have eaten a home grown mango, you have not had a really really good mango. Unfortunately they aren't home grown by me, but I befriended a lady who has a huge tree in her garden so I have been eating literally mounds of them. Oooh I want some now! I was going to take some pictures of them in all their yummy glory but I was too busy stuffing them in my face, lol! I will take a picture in a few days when I have some more.
Until then, you'll have to be content with these few pictures:

This is the first Shazzie recipe I've made in a while - I've been so busy eating masses of fruit that I haven't felt inclined to actually make a recipe. It is called Seaside Smoothie and while I didn't eat it by the seaside, it was delicious! The slight bluish tinge too it comes from the spirulina in it, which was a very nice addition!

Here are some little mushroom pizzas I made tonight - they would look better and be easier to eat if I could use those big field mushrooms but this was all I could get at the organic market this morning. They were amazingly stunningly delicious, I might post the recipe on my other blog sometime soon.

Lastly we have my 'dinner' from a week ago on Friday, grapes garnished with grapes, lol!! :-) My family never normally eats together but I thought it might be nice so I put a tablecloth out and my parents sat down. My dad nearly exploded with laughter when I put my dish on the table... then mum said "we don't have to sit here until you've finished eating a whole kilo of grapes do we?" (She was being humourous, of course). So we 'adjourned to the sitting room' (aka went to the lounge room and watched South Park) as soon as my parents had finished. It was nice to have dinner together.

Okay, I have to go study now. Promise I'll post again soon!!

2007-02-18T10:23:00.000+10:30

Blissing out on DURIAN!!

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Okay in order to get that little play on words, it is necessary to know that the lovely rat in the picture, with whom I am lucky enough to share a home, is named Bliss. So it is both Bliss literally sitting on a durian, and at the same time she (and I) were absolutely blissing out on the divine taste and amazing nutrition and energy supplied by THE BEST durian I have ever eaten. Oh it was so incredibly good!! And I always feel like I'm walking on clouds when I finish them, my feet are so light - I completed a walk which normally takes me about 34 minutes in only 31, which doesn't sound like that big a deal, but in that time I also stopped to raid a fig tree and take a fallen mango!

Bliss, being the stunning and intelligent raw vegan rat that she is, also appreciates the delicious delicacy that is durian, and eagerly gobbled down the little bits I could bring myself to share with her.

I actually bought two durians, planning to have most of them earlier in the day and then finish off in the evening. The one I ate first was the incredibly amazing one (I ate it first cos I could tell it was going to be great!) - it was really green, meaning it was quite fresh, had an even stronger odour than usual, and had soft, squishy, custardy, increidble flesh. Oh goodness, writing about it makes me want another one right now!! Anyway, I ate all of that and a little of the other one in the afternoon then came back to finish it off later... unfortunately the last few pods were not very nice at all - kinda dry and hard, not soft and custardy like they should be. I put it in my blender with some mange and a medjool date and that was yummy though, so it wasn't wasted.

Okay, I am going back to university tomorrow so I have a few things to do today to get ready. Have a great day!

2007-02-15T11:47:00.000+10:30

Raw Picnic, Yay!!
Well, Sunday was another raw picnic. This one would have to be my... 5th? I think that's right. Anyway, it was LOADS of fun, as usual. This time there were 5 of us in attendance, three of whom I had never met in person before - two I had met on the internet and one I hadn't met at all - and Kathy, a lovely lady I've met several times. Dani, Michaela and Jo were all gorgeous ladies too, and we had a great time feasting on scrummy food. Unfortunately, It was so delicious that I forgot to take photos until most of it was gone, lol!

Dani bought a huge and scrumptious fruit platter, which I ate most of - in the picture you can only see grapes and paw paw (aka papaya) - I don't like paw paw and grapes are one conventional fruit I just won't touch. I'm sorry but look at the size of them!! Imagine the hormones packed into that! The rest of the platter was mango, peaches, figs, and lychees... YUM!

Michaela and Jo both bought salads - Michaela made a dressing from Alissa Cohen's book 'Living on Live Food' - it looked stunning, very professional but contained (raw) honey, so I didn't have any. I'm not that much of a salad gal - I'll take fruit any day thankyou very muc :-) - so I didn't have any of the salad eaither, but it was very much enjoyed by the others.

Kathy bought figs drizzled with almond butter - they looked really good before we started but not so great in this photo!

And my contribution was Blackberry Mousse, the recipe for which can be found here at my raw recipe blog. Unfortunately, the others were rather full of salad and so each only dipped a few apple slices into this pure deliciousness, but said it was very good.
This was both good and bad for me, because I ate almost all of it myself. Super yummy, but too much too fast made me feel a bit yucky in the tummy. Didn't last too long though! I highly recommedn you try making this, it is a beautiful sweet alternative to regular dips!

Okay, must run. Hope everyone has an amazing day!!

2007-02-10T17:52:00.000+10:30

I hate coming up with titles

Don't you? There's always the option to just name them after a dish that features in the post (like I did last post) but I think that's kinda boring.

Anyway, on to more important matters like the meal you see pictured above. It is I can't believe it's not Waldorf Salad from Shazzie's Detox Your World. I have never tasted 'real' waldorf salad and so I can believe that this isn't waldorf salad cos I bet it wouldn't taste anywhere near this good!! Personally, I can't believe that this wasn't actually heaven... and I don't normally even like celery in salads that much (well, it comes and goes - sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it, sometimes it's in between the two). The sauce was the outstanding bit - the walnuts were unecessary and made the salad a bit heavier than it needed to be so next time i make it (which will be SOON!!)I'll probably leave them out. I modified the sauce quite a bit so I'm going to put my recipe on my other blog for you (lucky things!)

I'll have another new recipe for you on that blog in the coming days, as I am attending a raw picnic tomorrow (yay!) and taking it to that. I need to go and make my mum's dinner now (she's having tacos - vegan but not raw).

2007-02-05T10:41:00.002+10:30

Coconut Banana Split

This is one of a number of Shazzie recipes I ate while on holiday (but unfortunately the only one I took a picture of)... it is the Coconut Banana Split from Detox Your World. It was really yummy except the fact that one of my bananas was certainly not up to the normal standard, which kinda wrecked it a little bit - now I know that it has lots of potential though, so I'll definately be trying it again when I have better bananas.

Now on to other matters - who knows that song 'The Best Things in Life are Free?" I don't know who it's by but it's very good. Anyway, my parents and I spent the last two days with their friends who live in a smallish town about 3 1/2 hours (by car) south of Perth. It is a lovely place, surrounded by huge ancient forests that we had a wonderful time exploring. We climbed an ENORMOUS (52m) tree that has been growing since 1795, which I loved - this is my back as I ascended it:

That's one example of how wonderful free things can be... I'm not going to go into any others as my purpose in mentioning that song was actually to talk about the wonderousness of free 'foraged' food!
Over the weekend I feasted on homegrown satsuma plums (ooooooohhhhhhhh, soooooooo gooood!), new season apples (so crisp and sweet), pears and wild grown blackberries, big juicy and delish. All this stuff for free which would have cost at least $20, probably a fair bit more, to buy. Amazing!

Well, after 2 weeks away I have lots of things to do so I shall have to say goodbye and hope you all have an incredible day. Thankyou to everyone who expressed sympathy over the tragic passing of two beloved guinea pigs, I miss them a lot though not as much as little Placdi the only survivor, who I am currently looking into finding a friend for.

2007-01-31T07:59:00.000+10:30

I'm Sorry!
Hello everyone, I am in fact still alive but have been quite absent for over a week... gasp! I am on holiday at the moment but didn't say anything before I went away because i thought i would still be posting on my trip. Unfortunately, although my nanna does have internet it is a dialup connection and soooooooo slow - I have been spoiled by having broadband for so long, lol!

I have, of course, remained 100% raw and mostly fruitarian for my trip and I have shared some wonderful raw creations with friends and family. All round I'm having a lovely time although I'm looking forward to getting home to my parents and animal companions tomorrow night. Speaking of animal companions, however, I have some very sad news since I've been away - two of my lovely guinea pigs BumbleBee and Brandy Pudding both passed away as a result of suffering heat-stroke in the 42 degree (celsius... that's over 100F, I think) heat. My parents did their very best but sadly I now only have little Placid remaining.

I cannot upload any photos at the moment but I will put some up when I get home - I've made some more things for my Shazzie recipe quest that I want to share. I will post again soon, so please keep checking back, and have a totally awesome day!

2007-01-17T08:40:00.000+10:30

The first thing I made with my new blender...

...of course it was a green smoothie, and a particularly divine one at that! I can't remember if I have posted my blender disaster on here or not - I don't think so but I'm npt in the mood to go into the gory details. Lets just say, I got a blender for christmas, it was broken in several respects within a week and we could not get a refund. So I decided to go all out, putting in some christmas money and some money saved up from all the working I've done in the last 2 months and spend $190 on this blender. I also paid an extra $20 to have it delivered by 'overnight first class' postage so it arrived yesterday and I even got to sign for it! That was so exciting - I've never signed for a parcel before! It got a serious workout yesterday with me making flax crackers, biscotti biscuits, avocado/mango mousse and, of course, GREEN SMOOTHIE! YUMMMM! Pictured is my blender with one of the two large cups (it comes with two large and two small), full of a scrummy green smoothie of wheatgrass, peach, banana, celery and water. Not only was this delicious it was super exciting, because my food processor was never capable of making green smoothies with wheatgrass or celery, as they didn't get processed to a drinkable consistency at all. And ohhhhh wheatgrass is so good! In the background you can see what was left of my little tray of homegrown wheatgrass after I harvested it for the smoothie. IF you have a good blender, I strongly advise you to make this smoothie!

Well, I have many things to do today! Goodbye and thanks for dropping in!

2007-01-13T08:24:00.001+10:30

MMMMMM Sunrise Smoothie

Hello, sorry it's been a few days. The truth is I have wanted to post but I haven't had any photos and I hate posting without them, although it seems that people are having trouble seeing them anyway. I haven't figured out what the issue is, I'm not doing anything differently, so hopefully that will be sorted out soon! The reason I haven't had any photos is that I've just been eating fruit the last few days - eg, on tuesday my lunch was 6 plums and 2 apples. Yum, nothing beats fresh, organic fruit!

I had a 100% fruit day with the exception of some borage and dandelion in my green smoothie and some coconut in the afternoon ( coconut is neither a fruit nor a nut, it's in a class of it's own) and it was super delicious. Pictured above (if you can see it) is Shazzie's Sunrise Smoothie from Detox Your World and it is ohhhhhhhhh, mmmmmmmmmmm, soooooooo tasty!! I didn't eat it anywhere near sunrise (actually much closer to sunset) but I really don't think it matters, it's delicious anytime!

Since I don't have much to share in the way of food, I'll instead tell you about the lovely night I had out with my parents last night. It will probably be of no interest to you what so ever but never mind. I am NOT a sport loving person, either playing it or watching it, except for when the world cup soccer is on and going to see basketball games. My parents and I started going to basketball games about 3 years ago because my dad's company sponsored the team and so they got free tickets. We went to every match of the season (almost) and had an amazing time, it was a lovely family outing. Then in February 06 we moved from our home town of ADelaide South Australia (Home of the 36ers basketball team, so named because Adelaide was founded in 1836) to Perth Western Australia, home of the Wildcats basketball team. And do you think we were going to start supporting another team? Of COURSE not. Adelaide has come here to play the wildcats just twice in the season - I didn't make it to the first game with my parents but we all went last night and it was incredible. We were, literally, the ONLY 36ers fans in the whole stadium and we were driving the wildcats supporters nuts! We came soooo close to winning but unfortunately were just defeated. It was a brilliant game though, and three of our bestplayers were out injured so it was even more immpressive.
The whole experience was dampened a little though, by the fact that a lady sitting a little way away from us actually went to the management/security of the stadium and told them that my dad was being too loud! He is never rude or abusive to the opposing team or anything like that but he has a particularly loud whistle. Apparently the lady had hearing problems and the whistling was hurting her ears. But she was surrounded by 3000 screaming fans! When the management came to ask dad to stop whistling, he was trying to explain to her that he was a heck of a lot quieter than all the wildcats fans, he had to keep stopping because she couldn't hear him over the noise they were making! It was hilarious, although kind of annoying too.
If he had been whistling for the wildcats you can bet she wouldn't complain!
Well, that's mmy little rant about that, lol :-)

HOpe everyone has a great weekend!

2007-01-08T15:38:00.002+10:30

Revisiting Juliano

I may be on a Shazzie recipe quest (see here) but that doesn't stop me dipping into Juliano's RAW: The UNCookBook every now and then. I had a bit of a camera mix up so I can't show you what I made (which is a pity cos it was very tasty) But I can tell you about how amazing it was! This is right back 'in the pocket,' Juliano's amazing culinary talent coming through once again.
I'll just point out that I honestly don't believe I have ever made a recipe by myself without changing it at least a bit, even if it is just halving it (although it is usually much more). This recipe was called Durian, Mango, Mulberry, Maple Syrup (or Date) Avo Mousse. So it's kinda an ingredient list in a title, lol. But the durian is optional and I left it out because the only way to eat a durian is by itself as a meal, or maybe in a smoothie (but only using once or two pods that you force yourself to save when you're eating the rest of the durian). The mango is supposed to be frozen ahead of time but I didn't bother with that. And maple syrup is NOT raw so I went the date option there. Oh and I didn't actually measure anything, just threw it all in. The reason I have really been wanting to try this recipe is that I have an ENORMOUS mulberry tree hanging over my back fence from my neighbour's garden, conveniently located directly above the shed and it was COVERED in fruit. Sadly, between me and the stunning rainbow lorikeets, very little now remains. Anyway, although the fruit is delicious as it is straight from the tree, this was the only recipe I've ever seen calling for mulberries, so how could I resist?
The 'mousse' tasted a LOT like mixed berry yoghurt, only a whole lot better! I have a grandma who really needs to lose weight and is always trying to improve her diet, she looooves really creamy fatty dairy yoghurt but I'm going to stay with her soon, I will whip some of this up for her, maybe she'll never eat yoghurt again? One can but dream...
I ate this spread on pak choi leaves, it was absolutely beautiful. I'd better stop, I could rave about this all day! Lol.

Pictured above is one of three Shazzie recipes I made over the weekend, but the only one I took a picture of because the other two were eaten straight from my blender! It is Cream of Orange Soup and was super duper simple - blend orange juice, lemon zest and avocado, and you're done! I sprinkled a little orange zest on top too, for presentation reasons. It was really yummy, kind of interesting because one mouthful tasted more orangey, then the next was creamy/avocado-ey and so on.

At the organic farmers market on saturday morning I was very excited to pick up an aloe vera plant, and so I absolutely HAD to make Shazzie's Aloe Super Mousse from Detox Your World. I wanted to serve it nicely and take a pretty picture but then my parents and I decided to go out and have lunch together on the riverfront so I just took the blender attachment full of mousse and a spoon - who says raw food isn't quick? Here is a photo of me and my mum on a jetty

and here is me and dad on the grassy river bank.

Oh and by the way the Mousse was very tasty, I don't know if I could actually taste the aloe vera or if it just sorta contributed to the overall flavour but I'm not really bothered either way, since it was super yummy.
The last Shazzie recipe I made was the Quick Choccie Thickshake. It was a bit heavier than what i've been eating a lot lately but I halved the recipe and only had a little bit, it was delicious but anymore would have been too much. I drank this striaght from the blender, so sorry but no photo.

Wow that was long! Have a great day!

2007-01-06T08:02:00.000+10:30

I'm Finally Free!

Although I haven't mentioned it much here on the blog, I have been working for the past month or so and yesterday I finally finished! Yay! I am going to be busking (I play clarinet) a little to keep bringing in some income, but no more serious work. I'm very relieved about that, I must say!

I've been 100% raw (well, more like 99.9%) for almost six months now, which is amazing me a fair bit (where the heck did that half a year go???) but what is also amazing me is the way my eating has been constantly evolving and changing over that time. This has obviously been greatly influenced by the fact that I am also recovering from an eating disorder at the moment so embracing the concept of eating when I'm hungry, till I'm full, rather than eaating at a set time and only an amount that I feel I can burn off through exercise later, has been very strange. It's exciting too though!
Anyway, the big change that I'm experiencing at the moment is a definite pull towards fruitarianism. I got the book 'Your Natural Diet: Alive Raw Foods' by T.C Fry and David Klein for christmas, and it focuses on the fact that in a historical sense, the only food we are truly designed to eat is fruit. It has been proven through fossil evidence that early humans very frugivores (fruit eaters) and some people use that as a reason for going fruitarian, which is totally cool. However, I've been in a few *heated discussions* in which people say "so what if we ate fruit a million years ago... a million years ago we lived in caves and died when we were 35, now we all carry mobile phones and laptops" etc. And, to be fair, they have a good point there (although there are certainly a number of characteristics of modern man that I would like to see disappear!)
So I don't use the argument of "This is what we are naturally meant to eaat so we should just eat it" - I now say "well, look at society. Some ridiculous percentage of people are obese, 1 in 4 dies of cancer, people are stressed and miserable, colds and the flu are considered common and normal - now look at raw vegans in general and current evidence says we're doing much better. Not to mention raw food tastes AMAZING!!!"
I have had my life changed by going raw and I wish everyone would experience this but sadly they don't seem to want to. But that is their choice and I figure the best thing I can do is show that this is both the tastiest and healthiest way to eat.
ANYway, to get back to where I started - the fruitarian thing - I am just totally feeling drawn towards fruit at the moment. I love it! (Who doesn't, really?) According the 'Your Natural Diet' people who have a diet consisting of more than about 75% fruit are usually happy to call themselves fruitarian, and I think that at the moment I definately would qualify on those grounds - I pretty much just eat fruit all day and then something heavier at dinner. At the moment I can't see myself going 100% fruitarian, because I consider greens (spinach, silverbeet, chard etc) to be very concentrated sources of minerals and other good stuff, which can to some extent be lacking in modern fruit (a result of hybridisation) but I'm not saying anything definite. I am just going to keep doing what I'm doing now, that is, eating what I want to eat!

Before I (finally) finish this post and head to the Organic Farmer's Market (yay, I'm sooooo low on fruit!) I'd better tell you what the picture is above (apart from not very attractive, lol!) It is Mousse de Naranja from Shazzie's Detox Your World (if anyone knows what that means, please share!) and it is very yummy. It only had five ingredients in the book, those being dried apricots, orange juice, cinnamon, cloves and fresh lavender flowers. I added some fresh apricots, and omitted the cloves and lavender flowers (where the heck do you get lavender flowers?) I don't use many dried spices cos they aren't truly raw, but the cinnamon was a nice touch. It was delish, and had a suprisingly 'moussey' texture. I served it in a savoy cabbage 'bowl' with some mashed banana.

2007-01-04T08:47:00.000+10:30

A recipe and more on the Shazzie quest

Hello! I have a recipe for you today, isn't that exciting? It is what I ate for lunch yesterday and was extremely tasty:

Stonefruit Pudding:
1/2 a large mango
1 peach
1 nectarine
flesh of (most) of 1 young coconut

Put everything in a blender and blend. Well, you might want to take the stones out of the peach and nectarine first, lol!

I had a bit of an issue with my (brand new, christmas present) blender when I was making this - as I was merrily blending away, there was suddenly one of those horrible electrical-appliance-gone-wrong smells, followed by a very unpleasant noise. I stopped the blender right away, opened it up and found that the rubber seal ring had slipped loose and become tangled around the blades! :-( Luckily it hadn't had the chance to get chopped into a million pieces and ruin my meal but needless to say I wasn't happy. There have been problems with this blender from the start, but when it's actually working it is excellent, so I hope they don't continue.

Anyway, for lunch the day before yesterday I had a meal from Shazzie's DEtox Your World, Fig Stew. It was perfect because it uses lots of figs and berries, and I have both free figs and berries at the moment! :-) It was nice but not amazing. I think the thing is that figs are soooooooo amazingly delicious, it is kind of a crime to mix them with anything. Also the idea was to mix the ingredients together and then let them sit for a while for the flavours to blend (ie the 'stew' part) but I couldn't wait for that so I ate it right away. I also left out the cinnamon.
I have to go, I have to work today. Have a great day everyone!

2007-01-02T08:03:00.000+10:30

Sharing the Green Smoothie goodness

Good morning everyone! I didn't have any photos to post today so I just took one of the green smoothie that I am drinking for breakfast as I type this. It is super yummy and contains:

beet greens
rainbow chard
frozen banana
mango
water
young coconut water
mesquite meal

The addition of the mesquite meal takes it out of this world! YUMMMM! Anyway, I have my beautiful ratty Bliss (who is 100% raw since moving in with me!) sitting on me and she was exploring the computer desk. I put my smoothie down to type and what do you know...

she wanted to share! When I've finished my breakfast she always get some green smoothie in her bowl (and always devours it) but this morning she apparently didn't want to wait!! Isn't that totally adorable!??!

Yesterday I came up with the best fruit pudding recipe for lunch but sadly didn't take a picture. But don't worry, I'll definately be making it again so I can do it then, lol :-) This is the recipe - so simple, sooooooo good!

1 medium banana
about 6 little apricots
4 smallish fresh figs (hmm, better make that 3 1/2, I had a bite of each one as I went so it's not really 4 full ones, lol!)

Put it all in a blender or food processor, whizz whizz, and you're done! I served it (as I do with all my fruit puddings) in a savoy cabbage 'bowl.' But you can just serve it in a regular bowl, or just eat straight from the blender if it doesn't make it to the bowl!

Have a great day!

2007-01-01T08:25:00.000+10:30

The Shazzie Recipe Quest

Hey everyone ... two days in a row, how impressive! Lol! Anyway, I've mentioned it before but I am now making it official - I am on a quest to make every recipe in Shazzie's recipe books! It's a secret desire I harboured regarding cookbooks for some time, but now my secret is out in the open! I love the simplicity of Shazzie's recipes, and their reliance more on fruits and veggies than nuts, seeds, grains or anything else. Although the one section that always causes me problems is the Salad Dressings, because despite the fact that Shazzie isn't a fan of oils and uses them sparingly, one place they always come up is the dressings. So I'm thinking I might just aim to make every recipe in every section except Salad Dressings. I hadn't planned a timeline on this but I just realised that it's January 1st so why not say I want to have achieved my goal by the end of the year :-)
I've been doing pretty well recently, especially making loads of fruit puddings from Detox Delights - pictured above is my lunch from yesterday, which was Creamy Sunrise served in a savoy cabbage leaf. It is basically just banana, paw paw (papaya), berries and dates. I used mulberries because we have a HUGE mulberry tree covered in fruit, although the recipe actually calls for strawberries.
Hope everyone has a wonderful first day of the year!

2006-12-31T08:01:00.000+10:30

I'm not dead yet...

... I think I can go for a walk now...

Sorry, I'm doing another movie bit. Raise your hand if you love Monty Python! *Waves hand wildly in air* That's from Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. Anyway I'm really sorry I haven't posted for a week. Is it just me, or does everyone else read other people's blogs every day, leave comments, and feel so involved that they don't realise they haven't actually posted on their own blog? That's my problem. I'm glad everyone had a nice christmas/holiday period and you all appear to have had scrumptious food. We had a very unconventional christmas this year - it was our first year living on the other side of the country to the rest of our extended family so it was just mum, dad, me and a whole lot of animals, of course :-) I woke up to an amazing stocking stuffer - a durian!! See back a couple of posts for a photo and description of this stunningly delicious fruit. I also got:
- a hemp hat (no, I won't get high from wearing it, lol!) a totally aweseome blender just like this one, the book 'Your Natural Diet: Alive Raw Food' by TC Fry and David Klein (great book), a pedometer to track how many steps I take, another book on natural healing remedies, two gorgeous plates and two lovely bowls to add to my crockery collection, a new pair of pyjamas, a new nutmilk/sprout bag, an anklet, a headband, some vegetable soap... these things came from my parents, two sets of grandparents, and two sets of aunties and uncles - a lot of it was posted from interstate. The very best present though, was one that I chose before hand - sponsorship of this gorgeous little orang-utan thought the Australian Orangutan Foundation. It is only a small contribution but I'm glad I'm doing something to help out.
I also got a little bit of money from my other grandparents and some relatives in England. Yes, in case you're wondering, that is 3 sets of grandparents I have - what happened was, both my parents parents got divorced and remarried, so I ended up with four sets but then my dads dad died and we don't talk to his step mum. SO there you go. Anyway, with some of this money I went nuts at my favourtie shop Alive Organics, which sells a lot of stuff from The Raw Pleasure Shop. I bought black tahini, mesquite meal, and ... cacao butter. Raw chocolate here I come. It's, funny, I was never much of a chocolate person but I'm looking forward to having little bits of raw choccie to nibble on. Actually, I'm looking forward to making it more!
Okay, to continue with our slighlty unconventional christmas - so, I had a durian for breakfast. Then, with my super duper new blender, I whizzed up a delicious green smoothie - ooohhh, it was sooo much smoother than the ones from my food processor! I packed up this and some fruit, then hopped in the car with mum and we headed out to the Salvation Army's Christmas lunch, where we healped out by doing dishes and just talking to the people who had come so they wouldn't have to spend christmas day alone. My dad didn't come because it's just not his kind of thing and he doesn't get a very long break from work over christmas so he wanted a chance to relax. Don't think he's not a nice guy!! As a thankyou for helping, we got some leftover food sent home with us including cold chicken, turkey and pork - dad eats vegetarian most of the time but he still likes a bit of meat (yuck) so we weren'g going to be rude and turn it down when we knew he would eat it. So that was what dad had for dinner, along with salad and the thing he and mum both requested I make - chips based on the Herbed Potato Fries recipe from 'The Everyday Vegan'. Mum's request for the rest of her dinner was a simple pumpkin soup (I just made it up once - no recipe).

For my christmas dinner, I made something that I have wanted to make for AGES but have not been able to because it required a blender - sunflower seed pate. There are about a trillion different recipes for this that have been driving me nuts and the one I used was Sunny Hemp Pate from Detox Delights by Shazzie, but mine is more like Peppy and Sunny Hemp Pate because I used half pumpkin seeds (pepitas) and half sunflower. To serve I started off rolling it up in thin strips of zucchini but that was taking too long so in the end I just spread it on slices :-) Sorry about the picture quality, my dad took this shot not me! Oh and you can see one of my lovely new plates. For 'dessert' I made myself a little bit of Carrot Cake from Juliano's RAW The UNCookBook, although heavily modified. I made this for my birthday a while ago too, it is delicious!

This is our Christmas Table, with my mum and my cute dog Casper in the background. Ignore the mound of meat on Dad's plate.

Here is me, totally obscured by my hemp hat and a gorgeous christmas crown that i have had since I was about 4, hacking into my durian. You shouldn't need a knife to get in but a) my parents aren't quite as good at selecting durian's as me and b)it was still a tad frozen.
Pictured at the top of this post is a simple salad of chinese cabbage, carrot and corn (and a chopped date, don't ask why I put that in? :-) mixed with Tomacado Dressing from my new book 'Your Natural Diet.'

Oh and finally, this is a gorgeous little organic watermelon I bought last week. I put the teaspoon in to give you an idea how big (I mean small!) it is.

Have a wonderfully happy new year and I promise promise promise to post more often!!

2006-12-24T09:20:00.000+10:30

Who was it??

Okay come on, own up. Who stole the last year? I can hardly believe that it is Christmas Eve already!!! What the?
This is going to be very short because I have to work today (yes I know, working christmas eve kinda sucks - don't get me started!) Pictured above are Wild Mushroom Fajitas from Shazzie's Detox Your World. They were really yummy, a very nice bledn of scrumptious flavours. Instead of adding It's Not Really Mayonnaise (from the same book) as Shazzie suggested, I blobbed some guacamole on there and that was great.
Although this meal was great, I'll admit I was a tad disappointed. I love button and field mushrooms and I have been wanting to try shiitake for ages but have been unable to find any organic. This week I gave in and bought conventional. Now, maybe organic ones would be better but these mushrooms were nothing special. I like button better! Oh well, doesn't really matter I guess.

For anyone who has never seen one, this is a durian. Aka a small, spiky piece of heaven. And this was a particularly good durian too! As you can see, there are two splits in the skin in this picture. The typical durian has five such splits, each containing two 'pods' or 'pillows' of the most delicious fruit ever. Oh I want another one...

Okay, that's it. Have the merriest Christmas ever!

2006-12-21T07:54:00.000+10:30

Can you turn him into pudding?

Has anyone seen a (very short) movie called 'Darkwing Duck and the Justice Ducks'? It's a kids movie which I watched over and over again with my two cousins at my grandma's house - we also watched 'Ivanhoe,' 'All DOgs GO to Heaven,' 'The Emerald City of Oz' and a few more. Those are beautiful memories. Anyway, in Darkwing Duck, Darkwing is dating a magical duck name Morticia and his daughter GOslen is constantly pestering her to turn Darkwing into things, one of them being pudding. Morticia tries and fails repeatedly... long story short, at the end of the movie she finally manages to turn one of the 'baddies' into chocolate pudding, whic Goslen then sticks her finger into and eats. It's very funny. Well... maybe just to me!

Anyway, having shared that with you let me get to the point! Here in Australia, we don't really 'do' puddings - I don't even know the definition of a pudding, I kinda just think its a gooey sweet thing you eat with a spoon? But since reading Shazzie's books Detox Delights and Detox Your World I have discovered that in England, 'pudding' is actually just another word for dessert. Geez I'm confused!! In 'Detox Delights' Shazzie says "They [puddings] are fantastic whole meals in themselves. How exciting is detoxing? You can eat puddings galore and get healthier than ever!" And that is just what I have been doing. Pictured above is Marinated Mangoes with Lychee Ice-cream from Detox Your World, however I didn't actually marinate the mangoes. Also, it is SO HOT here that my 'ice-cream' very quickly became slush. Still tasted great though! Oh and as you can see, I served it in a savoy cabbage 'bowl' - yum and extra healthy.

This is Semolina Pudding with Figgy Jam also from Detox Your World. I know the picture is blurry, I don't know why and I'm very sorry about that but I thought it was so pretty I'd share anyway. I changed it a little by adding fresh mulberries from the ENORMOUS tree in our backyard to the jam. This (both pudding and jam) was REALLY YUMMY!!! So simple, so healthy, so delicious. Oh and After taking the picture I served this on cabbage too!

Thanks for stopping by and have a super awesome day!

2006-12-16T22:16:00.001+10:30

A Blissful Week

My lovely new rattie friend Bliss is going wonderfully, she is LOVING all the scrummy raw vegan food she is getting - her previous owner was a lovely young girl who clearly loved Blass (previously 'Mitsy') very much but was feeding her the standard recommended pet shop food - which looks like small lumps of cardboard. Mmm, yum - cardboard! Not. She digs into green smoothies, fresh fruit, veggies, sprouts, nuts, seeds - everything I give her, she devours. It's like her tastebuds have suddenly been awoken! So cute.

I am absolutely digging into fruit at the moment too - it is all so delicious! Would you like to know my FLOG for today? First I'll tell you what I actually ate, then what it was turned into:

3 bananas
1 pear
1 mango
1 mandarin
5 apples
chinese cabbage
savoy cabbage
1 young coconut
young coconut water
water
1 heaping tsp cacao powder
1 carrot
1/4 red capsicum (bell pepper)
borage (grown in our garden - yum!)
mung bean and lentil sprouts
some zucchini

And all of these delicious things became:

-a big green smoothie
-chocolate mousse
-a salad with a dressing found in the e-book that can be downloaded here This is the e-book that I proof-read and received a $40 voucher for as a present (see my last post) - if you have any interest in raw food (or even if you don't! :-) it is sooo worth the very cheap $10 to download it. Full of great recipes. I made the Sweet Citrus Dressing which was really good but a little heavier than what I was after. It is HOT here! But I love the hot weather.

The salad is in the picture above, by the way.
Sorry this is short - have an awesome day!!

2006-12-14T07:58:00.000+10:30

No Food but a FLOG and Some Other Things

I have had possibly the most amazing week of my life! I'll start on Sunday - my university results for this semester just finished were released and I received two HDs (high distinctions) for my Cell Biology' and 'Biostatistics and Information Retrieval' units and two Ds (distinctions) for my anatomy and 'Animal and Human Bioethics' units! Yay! Although I was hoping for better in anatomy, I guess I should be satisfied! (In case you don't know, I'm studying a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery).
Then Monday a new addition joined my family - the gorgeous ratty you see above! If you remember, my beautiful, precious, beloved rat Spirit passed away after a sudden short illness a few months ago and I've been desperate to find another but I refuse to buy from a pet shop or breeder. I rang the RSPCA, my vet (who specialises in rodents), someone who used to run a rat rescue centre, and joined the Australian ROdent Resuce yahoo group, but had no success. Then on Monday I got a message on my phone from a man who is moving to Melbourne with his family and driving there (at least 5 days from here in Perth). His daughter had a rat but they couldn't take her with them so they had rung the RSPCA, who gave them my number. He cam over right away with his daughter and 'Mitzy' the rat, who has since been renamed Bliss. I felt very sorry for his daughter, but very happy for me!! :-) As you can see from the picture, she is a beautiful girl and her fur is SOOOOO soft. Her diet consisted of dry pellets which look like cardboard and are about the least appetising things I could imagine - I gave her a piece of pineapple on her first day here and she didn't know what hit her! Since then she has been devouring every raw delicacy (eg, fruits and veggies) she can get her paws on! Plus she loooves green smoothies!

Now I thought something exciting happened on Tuesday but I can't remember, so on to wednesday (aka yesterday). I lashed out hugely and bought myself... an Ezidri Snackmaker dehydrator (if you click on the link you have to scroll down a bit). I have had a dehydrator since I went raw but it didn't have temperature control and was technically 'cooking' my treats, so I've been longing to upgrade but the $200 price tag was a bit off putting. But I'm glad I spent it now. The dehydrator I got is about the very bottom of the range when it comes to temperature controlled dehydrators but I prefer fresh food most of the time and I just wanted to be able to use my dehydrator when I wanted without knowing that all the enzymes in my food were dead, so it serves my purpose nicely.
In addition, I bought raw cacao powder (not a half kilo though! Only 150grams) for the first time. I need a little more magnesium and aside from being delicious, raw chocolate is REALLY high in magnesium. I haven't used it yet, but there will be a recipe soon!
I also got a $40 voucher to spend at the Raw Pleasure Shop because I proof-read a new holiday e-book that the site owners Sheryl and Piers have created with Raw Author Nomi Shannon. $40!!! I can't decide what to get.

And for the final awesomeness, today is my five month anniversary of 100% raw. YaY! Now I was going to give you Tuesday's FLOG but I really don't have time.
Hope you have a day as wonderful as my week has been! Here's one more picture of beautiful Bliss.

2006-12-11T09:04:00.001+10:30

More Soup

Hello! As you may remember (I have said it before) I never used to like soup. Like, I really didn't like it. I don't really know why but that was the way it was - since going raw, however, that has all changed. After my recent success with my first recipe from Matt Amsden's RAWvolution, Thick n Thin Sprouted Lentil Chili (see a few posts back) I decided to try another of his soups. He does say soups are his speciality too, so that provided further motivation for me. So On Saturday night I made the Little Green Cream of Celery Soup. The actual recipe contains just five ingredients and since I left out the sea salt, mine had just four! But it was really delicious. I'm very happy with my picture cos it looks just like the one in the book, except for one thing - in the recipe, Matt says 'scoop off and discard any foam which rises to the top' (after blending). I got lots of foam but I thought it was REALLY yummy, so the thought of discarding it was quite abhorrent to me! Therefore, I left it right where it was. I'm glad I did, but I wish I'd taken another photo after I'd eaten it, because the soup is actually green underneath the foam, and looked even more like the picture in the book. Oh well.
Despite having said I really liked it (which I did) I felt kinda funny afterwards. I've had a similar feeling before and I have now decided that A lot of celery all at once just doesn't sit well with me. I think it might be the naturally high sodium content.

Okay I have to work today so this post will have to remain short. Have a great day!

2006-12-04T14:19:00.000+10:30

More Exciting Things!

I'm here! Twice in two days... impressive, huh?

Edit: Okay, so I started this quite some time ago and am only just getting around to finishing it. Sorry!

Now I'm going to continue with the exciting things that happened last week. As Jen pointed out in the comments of the last post, I won a contest to receive a signed copy of Shazzie's book 'Detox Your World' and my entry to the competition can be seen in her journal here. Shazzie is a HUGE inspiration to many many people and thousands of people read her journal so I am very honoured and excited to have my words appear there. Hopefully I can inspire someone too!

Onto the next exciting thing. Being on holidays, I am trying to find work at the moment and last week I started a paper route. It turned out to be about the least profitable job imaginable, paying only approximately $4.20 (Australian) per hour so I'm not doing it anymore, but I made a discovery whilst delivering papers that makes it all worthwhile - a fig tree. On public land. FRUITING NOW!!! So I now have access to free, sweet and delicious figs. I'd post a picture but I've eaten all the ones I picked and need to go back for more!

On Saturday I went to hand out leaflets at shopping centres regarding the factory farming of pigs, which was organised by an organisation called PAWS, the People and Animal Welfare Society. I love them, because they are interested in helping animals without harming people and vice versa, for example they are starting a vegan soup kitchen soo to show that in order to help the homeless, you don't need to slaughter innocent animals. Anyway, they sell a range of organic vegan products like instant vegan meals made by a local company called 'Mental Lentil' (isn't that the coolest name?!!), vegan chocolate, animal testing/animal ingredient free shanpoos and more. Amongst this range of great vegan stuff I found... RAW HEMP SEEDS!!! This may not seem so exciting to you, depending where you're from, but this is the FIRST TIME I have seen hemp seeds in Australia. This is because our government still has the stupid idea that they can somehow be used to grow marijuana (THEY CAN"T!) and so they're illegal. I don't know how PAWS managed to get them... I actually don't think they have gone through the correct channels, and I have a feeling they're illegal, but I don't care! Lol! :-)
Anyway, on Tuesday I used my hemp seeds for the first time to make stuffed mushrooms. The stuffing contains:
hemp seeds
corn
garlic
onion
yellow capsicum
pinch of paprika
All chopped up in the food processor and stuffed in mushrooms. I had more than you see in the picture, so I also had 3 leaves of pak choy with the stuffing spread on them. YUM!
The hemp seeds are very nice, they kinda remind me of pine nuts but I like them and I don't like pine nuts. I don't LOVE them but I think I'll eat them once a week or so. Whatever I feel like. They're very good for you though (well, everything I eat is but... ya know! :-)

Hmm, I think there was another exciting thing but I can't think of it now so I'll just post this picture of Shazzie's Sunset Pudding that I made the other day. Lucky you, even people who don't have her book Detox Delights can see the recipe here. I didn't use the dates and it was divine. Yum yum yum. If you remember, a while ago I said I was trying to make every recipe in this book, and I still am, but I have kinda changed the aim now because there is only one section of the book posing problems, and that is the Salad Dressings. So I want to make every recipe in every other section of the book!

Oh and I haven't done a FLOG in a while so here is what I ate yesterday:

Breakfast - Green smoothie with silverbeet, banana (frozen) and... mango, I think. Or maybe it was peach. And 2 apples after. And a mandaring, I think.
Lunch - Two apples. A DURIAN!!!! YUMMM! Oh this is sooo good, I want more now. If you don't know anything about Durian's read about them here.
Snack - A banana, half a mango and two frozen strawberries blended with a dash of raw carob powder. Yum. And a mandarin.
Dinner - ABC Soup (see my recipe blog) and corn off the cob with sprouted chickpeas.

My whole day was just fruit and veggies and I loved it! Yum.
Have a totally great day!

2006-12-03T09:20:00.000+10:30

Utter raw vegan Excitement

I'm sorry... (*hanging head in shame*) I haven't posted in days. What a naughty girl I am. I have no decent excuse either - well, I couldn't post yesterday because I went out earlyish in the morning to go hand out information on factory farming at supermarkets. It was lots of fun! We got chased away by security gaurds after a while, but we were effective before hand.
Anyway, I'd better share my unbelievable excitement with you now... I HAVE RAW ALMOND BUTTER AND TAHINI!!! I'm generally pretty opposed to anything that comes pre-packaged, and I also don't eat any 'fractured' foods, eg olive, flax, sesame or coconut oil (even though they're raw, I figure, if I want coconut oil then I'll just eat coconut). But I have been desperately waiting for more than 2 MONTHS to be able to get raw almond butter and tahini here in Australia. I still had to order it from Queensland (which is about the furthest place from me that is still in the country, lol!) but I have it. And it is DELICIOUS!!! So worth the 2 months waiting and $30 price tag. (yes I know, it is really expensive!) The tahini is rather more bitter than 'normal' tahini, and took a little adjusting, but I love it. The almond butter, well, I just about collapsed on the floor in a fit of deliciousness. Now I'm kinda trapped, because I want to eat it and eat it and eat it, but I never want to run out! :-) But last night I decided I had to make something with it, and went for this, which can be found here.

Ingredients

Makes
Enough for 2 as a side dish or one for a meal
1 zucchini, peeled
1 yellow squash, peeled
1 carrot, peeled
1 cup broccoli florets
2 heaped tablespoons raw almond butter
2 teaspoons raw agave nectar
Curry paste to taste
2-4 tablespoons water (depending on desired consistency)
Salt (optional to taste)

Methods/steps
1. Slice all vegetables (except broccoli) lengthwise using a mandolin
with a julienne blade (stopping at seeds)
2. Put all in a bowl and toss slightly
3. Top noodles with broccoli florets and set bowl aside
4. In a small bowl or cup, mix together almond butter, agave nectar,
curry paste, water and salt until creamy
5. Pour sauce over broccoli and noodles

Additional Tips
Note: 4 tablespoons of water creates a thinner sauce. Nama Shoyu may be
used as a substitute for salt. If you have a high speed blender you can
also use whole almonds instead of almond butter.

Variation: Top with sliced almonds for a fancier looking dish

But I changed it a bit:

-sweet potato instead of squash
-mashed up date instead of agave
-sprinklings of turmeric, cumin and ground mustard seed instead of curry paste
-combination of water and young coconut water
-no salt
-plus I used less of the zucchini, sweet potato and carrot

It was GOOD!! Not that anything with almond butter wouldn't be...

I made the No-Bean Hummus from RAWVolution the first day I had my tahini but I was so desperate to try it that I didn't take a picture. I regret that, because it looked really good. I really want to make some 'real' hummus too though, so I'd better sprout some chickpeas!

There were two more massively exciting things that happened this week... no wait, three! And those are just the MASSIVELY exciting things! Goodness I love being a raw vegan! But unfortunately I will have to post them tomorrow, as I am busking on my clarinet at a market this morning, so I have to go and get ready. But I will leave you with a picture of a super-delicious green smoothie I made on Thursday. It is based on the Gorgeously Green recipe from Detox Delights by Shazzie and contains wheatgrass, lettuce, kiwi fruit, frozen banana, water and young coconut water. I grew the wheatgrass myself and it is SOOOO good. YUM!

Edit: Hmmm, green smoothie photo seems to have disappeared. Oh well, just imagine a glass full of green stuff!

2006-11-27T14:56:00.002+10:30

Join the RAWvolution!

Huge excitement in my house last week - I got my hands on a copy of RAWvolution by Matt Amsden! I have seen a few bloggers using this book recently - first it was over at What the hell does a vegan eat anyway?, which I didn't mind so much cos they seem to have the best of everything, lol! But then I got very annoyed when I saw it at Candi's Blog. I wasn't annoyed at Candi, not at all (especially since I think it's great to see more people getting into raw) - I was annoyed at my whole stupid country! In her post Cadni said "while I was in the vegan section [of the bookstore] I saw this book and had to have it." American bookstores have VEGAN SECTIONS! Over here in Aus you're lucky to find a single vegan cookbook lurking among copies of 'Women's Weekly Vegetarian' and other veggie books full of dairy. Buying a raw uncookbook is simply not a possibility - the only way I could get one would be ordering in.
But anyway, several months ago I saw that my university library had plans to maybe get it in so I put it on Advance Order just in case and last week, lo and behold, I got an e-mail saying it had come in! AHHH!

It truly is a stunning book - very reminiscint of Juliano's RAW, which we all know I love ;-) It is very gourmet, which I'm into less and less, but it tends to be much better food combining-wise than RAW is. Some of the things look incredible and I certainly think they are great for converting non-raw foodists who think we all live on fruit and veggies (okay so I kinda do, but only because i WANT to - I can eat as gourmet as anyone else if I feel like it!)

So on Saturday night I made my first dish from RAWvolution - Thick n Thin Sprouted Lentil Chilli. Before I start on the actual dish, let me have a little gripe regarding the name. I like dishes with interesting names - if you call something lettuce tomato corn and dulse salad with an avocado lemon juice dressing sprinkled with cumin, not only is it incredibly hard to say but it is darn boring!! So I like the thick n thin part of the name. Also, it is an accurate description because if you let it stand two distinct layers separated out, one thick and one thin (and both tasty!) And the chilli part is accurate (even if I did leave out the chilli powder because I felt that the heat would overpower the delicious other flavours). But it's the Sprouted Lentil part I have a problem with. There are no sprouted lentils in the dish - they appear as an 'optional garnish.' They aren't even used as the garnish in the photo in the book! I love sprouts so I used them as my garnish, although I used mung beans not lentils, and they were really nice when stirred through - little crispy morsels amongst the soup. My other problem is that in the picture there is a big glob of something that looks like (raw) sour cream, but there is no sour cream recipe anywhere in the book! There is a recipe in Juliano's book that I would have liked to use but that requires a number of hours of fermentation and I wasn't planned that far in advance. Luckily, I made Juliano's Almond Flower Cheese last week (pictured below), which requires fermentation and produces whey. So I made up my own sour cream recipe using cashews, lemon juice and whey from making cheese and it was really yummy and a great addition to the chilli. Which, by the way, was very good! Certainly a very delicious introduction to the book.So if you can get your hands on RAWvolution, I highly recommend you do! Have a great day!

2006-11-23T10:04:00.000+10:30

Is it Christmas already?

Here in Australia we don't celebrate Thanksgiving - I really have no idea what the point of it is, although I gather that it is another religious celebration that has been transformed into an opportunity for companies to make a lot of money (I'm a firm atheist - I feel sorry for all the Christians for whom December 25th actually means somthing). So anyway, it's been kinda weird seeing all the other blogs I visit giving Thanksgiving menus etc, but cool to see what you're all doing to convince your doubtful relations of how delicious vegan food can be! Plus I love the fact that some of you, such as Urban Vegan are 'adopting' turkeys! Too cute! But now to get to the point of this post's title - since we don't have Thanksgiving, I think the shops feel they need to get in super early with all the Christmas stuff. I mean, for goodness sake! It is still more than a month till the big day and the shops are already covered in decorations, playing chirstmas music and having christmas sales. So much consumerism.
I'm really looking forward to Christmas this year. Normally we spend it with my mum's family then see Dad's on boxing day but since we are now living in a different state to all of thoes people, that won't be happening. Instead, Mum and I are going to a Salvation Army christmas lunch and helping out with distributing food to the homeless or anyone else who wants to drop in. (Don't think my Dad isn't a nice guy - that just isn't his idea of a fun way to spend Christmas or any other day). Should be a cool new experience and hopefully I'll meet some nice people. The lady in charge already knows that I won't handle meat, by the way, so I'm guessing I'll be plating veggies or doing dishes.

Now, onto food. Here are the FLOGs for the last two days:

Breakfast - Watermelon.Green smoothie with mango, banana, coconut water, water, spinach and silverbeet. Two apples.
Lunch - Apple. Yummy salad with baby spinach, tomato, sundried tomato, mushroom, red capsicum, avocado. Note the big black blob in the picture of this above? My cute doggy Casper had a sniff just as I took the photo so I had to share it!)
Snack - 1 kiwi fruit, 1 banana, 1 tiny plum, two apples.
Dinner - Walnut Burger from Shazzie's Detox Your World, with Real Toast and Mayo #2 from Juliano's RAW and lettuce and tomato.
After Dinner - Juice of two oranges mixed with young coconut water.

Breakfast - Green smoothie with chard, silverbeet, peach, banana, water, young coco water. 1 tiny plum and two apples.
Lunch - 1 apple. Living Fudge from The Raw Gourmet by Gabrielle Chavez. (I have this on loan from the library and this was the first thing I made. It was yummy but VERY unphotogenic!) With celery sticks and chinese cabbage.
Snack - 1 kiwi fruit, 1 tangello, 3 apples.
Dinner - ABC Soup from my recipe with a bowl of sprouted chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and corn scraped from the cob (oh god I love fresh corn!)
After Dinner - Juice of two oranges.

This is what I had for lunch back on Saturday that never quite made it to this blog... but the recipe is here on my recipe blog. Yes, I finally put another recipe there! Try not to fall off your chair!

Now last of all is my bit of daily activism. At the beginning of this year I went to a 'Wildlife Extravaganza' with presentations from a number of charities that work with endangered wildlife including sunbears, painted dogs, rhinoceroses and orangutans. All of the presentations were heart wrenching and touching but the orangutans really got me motivated, probably because (from what I could gather anyway) they are not as at risk as the rhinos but they stand a better chance of being saved if we start doing something NOW! For christmas my parents are adopting an orangutan for me (I chose Bulan, if you want to check her out at the site) and I am also getting into letter writing. Obviously those links take you to an Australian organisation, but whichever part of the world you live in you can still help out.
The greatest threat to orangutan survival is the palm oil industry - habitat is cleared for palm plantations and loggers receive bonuses for killing any orangutans they come across, using whatever means possible. (Including shooting, stabbing and covering with fuel then setting alight). The orphaned orangutans are sold as pets or for entertainment and must endure lifetimes of mistreatment. The Australian Orangutan Project cares for and rehabilitates orphaned and injured orangutans, funds habitat restoration projects and more and it is through them that I'm 'adopting' my orangutan. I'm so happy that my christmas present is going to make life better for orangutans!

Thanks for visiting, have a wonderful day (and Thanksgiving if you celebrate it)

2006-11-20T10:01:00.000+10:30

A Juliano Failure!

Shock horror! I made a Juliano recipe (from the book RAW: The UNCookbook) that wasn't amazingly delicious. If you've been reading my blog for any period of time you'll know that I LOVE this book and consider Juliano an absolute genius but I have now found a recipe that is not good. Had to happen eventually I suppose. The failed recipe was Gordon's Fish Patties... I know some of you are probably thinking "well, with a name like that, what can you expect?" As a cooked vegan I wasn't a big fake-meat fan (just like Leslie) because it tastes weird and felt weird and I don't like to associate my food with dead animals. But if you like it that's cool and it's not really a dead animal so it doesn't matter... please don't be offended! But back to the point, Juliano has other recipes that try and replicate cooked ones, such as Cheeseburgers, Meatloaf, Whipped Cream, Oatmeal Cookies and many more, all of which are delicious, so I didn't let the name put me off.
For ages I've looked at this recipe and thought "*sigh* I'd love to make this but I can't because here in stupid Australia we can't get rutabagas." I discovered several weeks ago, however, that we can get rutabagas, but for some stupid reason we call them swedes. Now if you could choose between calling something a swede or a rutabaga, which would you go for? Personally, I think rutabaga is an awesome word. But anyway, despite what they're called, I was suddenly able to make the recipe. So I whipped the ingredients up in my food processor at 9 o'clock in the morning so my patties could have their recommended dehydrating time but as I did the smell nearly made me vomit. I mean seriously, this was gross. I added some herbs and way more garlic than called for but it still smelt awful. I decided at this point that I almost certainly wouldn't eat it but it was made now, so I might as well put it in the dehydrator. For the whole day the smell coming from the dehydrator nearly made me retch but I persevered and finally had a nibble when they had been in there for about 9 hours (1 less than recommended). TO be honest, the taste wasn't quite as bad as the smell but it was not nice at all! I don't know what Juliano was thinking when he came up with this but all I can say is rutabagas have a better name than taste. (If you'd like to know more about rutabagas aka swedes, click here).

I won't let this experience deter me though, so don't worry - I still love you Juliano!

Anyway, in the time that the fish patties were dehydrating, I found myself a replacement recipe to try and I am happy to report that it was absolutely amazingly delicious! You can see the recipe here and the picture here:

I call it 'Rawtellini,' cos I'm silly and I think that's cute. This photo shows it with the Sweet Tomato Chutney, which was delicious. I changed the ingredients a little, using no salt or black pepper, basil in place of oregano and lots of garlic and lemon juice. Oh and my 'pasta' of choice was zucchini.

Now, here is Sunday's FLOG for you:
Breakfast - Green smoothie with silverbeet, paw paw, banana, water, young coconut water. One apple and some pineapple and an orange.
Lunch - One apple. Salad (see photo above and instructions below).
Snack - One kiwi fruit, one mandarin, one peach and an apple.
Dinner - 2 nori rolls. One had baby spinach, broccoli, asparagus, basil, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes and avocado. The other was lettuce, yellow capsicum, carrot and tahini.
After dinner - Juice of two oranges mixed with young coconut water.

The salad I came up with on the spur of the moment, and it was really good. Make a bed of baby spinach (or another green leaf) then mix together some chopped tomato, chunks of coconut meat (mature not young) and some mixed sprouts (I used sprouted mung beans, fenugreek seeds and lentils), then top with grated carrot and some generous squeezes of orange juice. This is nice presentation but mix it all up lots when you eat it! I love putting coconut in salads, it is really yummy with savoury things.

COngratulations on making it this far through this big fat post... I've got one for thing for you now. Today's animal rights action can be seen here. I don't know how it's done in other places but pig farming here in Australia is horrendous. If you look around the savebabe website you will see lots of the terrible facts such as the fact that pregnant sows are confined in stalls that don't allow them to turn around or move more than a step forward and back. They are supplied with no bedding of any kind for when they give birth (in nature, they create a nest of leaves etc), forced to lie on metal grates, and can't see or interact with their young, which are kept separate so that they can suckle but without the risk of being crushed by their mother. It is really just horrible, like all forms of factory farming.

Hope everyone's having a super duper day!

2006-11-18T09:55:00.000+10:30

Fridays FLOG and I'M ON HOLIDAYS!

Yes, well, the title kinda says it all doesn't it? Lol :-) I am on holidays for the next 3 months!!! Personally, I think that's over-doing it a bit. I mean, uni is easy compared to what my last year of high school was and I haven't had to be on campus that much, although I have gotten in about 6 or more hours of study every day (well, less on weekends). Does that sound like a lot? I never feel like I'm doing enough but then people are shocked when they hear I do that much. Anyway, I can't see that 3 months holiday is necessary but that's what I get, so I'm going to make the most of it! Here is what I ate yesterday, the day of my very last exam:

Breakfast - Green smoothie with peach, banana, spinach, young coco water, water. 2 pears and an apple.
Lunch - An apple. 2 bananas, some seeded raisins and a medjool date wrapped in savoy cabbage leaves. The picture above shows when I had this a few weeks ago, with pineapple added too. It might sound weird but you should really try combining fruit with green leafy veggies, it's great!
Snack - 1 kiwi fruit, 1 peach, 1 mandarin, 2 apples.
Dinner - RAW PIZZA! YUM!! (What better way to celebrate the end of my first year of uni? :-)
After dinner - Juice of two smallish oranges mixed with young coco water.

Onto a different topic - from reading this blog it may seem like my life revolves around food. I'll admit, food is a HUGE part of my life because I believe that veganism (raw or otherwise) is a lifestyle and not just a diet. I love changing the world and I know that my eating habits are good for me, good for the animals that don't get slaughtered, good for the environment (and therefore good for animals that don't die due to habitat loss, etc) and also good for the people who I inspire to eat less meat and more delicious healthy food by setting a good example. Oh and my parents - eg my dad has lost 18kg since the beginning of the year when I started cooking for him and his meat/refined product consumption went way down (he did start doing more regular exercise too, but the diet was a big part of it).
Sorry, back to the point. My life is not 100% about food - I am a passionate animal lover (maybe why I'm studying a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery, lol!) and a dedicated animal rights activist. And I always include humans as animals (no speciesism here!) so I'm a human rights activist too. Anyway, every post I do this summer I'm going to give you a link to something animal or human rights related, hopefully with some kind of action you can take. To start things off, click here to read about the horrors of dog culls currently taking place across China and find out who you can write to. Animals Asia is an amazing charity that I support a lot - one way is through the 'Befriend a Bear' program. They do lots of great work - check out the whole site while you're there!

Hope everyone has a rawsome day!

Oh and motivated by Kris at Squirrels Vegan Kitchen, I thought I'd share a photo of my most beautiful girl, Asante Sana (called Sana for short. Her name means 'thankyou' in Swahili and she was rescued from the RSPCA when I did work experience there a couple of years ago. We on't know how old she is, other than OLD! I'll share more about her in future posts).

2006-11-15T14:40:00.000+10:30

Here I am Again

Sorry for disappearing on you, and after I promised more regular posting too! But I am now two exams down, 3 to go - the ones I have done were both anatomy, which is quite a challenge, but they weren't too bad. I'm really looking forward to my holidays - even though I love studying throughout the semester, when exam time comes and you know that if you stuff up a two hour block of time all your efforts for the past 4 months are pretty much wasted, it loses the fun factor!
But anyway, onto food. Yesterday's FLOG:

Breakfast - Green smoothie with mango, banana, spinach, water, young coconut water (oh so incredibly delish!) Some fruit... 2 apples and a pear, i think?
Lunch - 1 apple. An adaptation of Super Broccoli Quiche from Shazzie's Detox Your World, wrapped in chinese cabbage leaves. I love this and eat it heaps. Mash some avocado, add chopped broccoli, celerey, asparagus and dulse flakes, roll up in chinese cabbage leaves (or other leaf) and devour. Oh and top with tomato slices, that's good too! Also very convenient for taking to uni - put the avo mixture in a container, the leaves in snaplock bags and then just spoon filling into leaves when at uni!
Snack - 1 mandarin, 1 peach, 3 apples
Dinner - Adaptation of Walnut Burger from Shazzie's Detox Your World served with adaptations of Mayo #2 and Real Toast from Juliano's RAW.
After dinner - Orange juice mixed with young coco water.

On Saturday night I made Crispy Spring Rolls (or was it Crunchy Spring Rolls?) from Shazzie's Detox Your World. Oh and the Sweet Apricot Sauce that she suggests to go with them. They were really yummy but not overly filling - i think they should be in the 'Side Dishes' rather than the 'Very Special Main Meals' section of the book. Oh wait maybe they are. Now I can't remember. Well anyway, I should have made more! The sauce was really yummy but very sweet - not the kind of thing I would associate with a savoury meal - more like raw apricot jam. I ended up just eating most of it with my fingers ;-) I think I will try incorporating it into a sweet recipe at some point in the future though!

Well, I must return to study!
Have an incredible day! P.S Summer has hit full on, nice and early! It's sooooooo warm here, I love it. I miss South Australia and my old life there sometimes, and I still plan to return when I finish my uni course, but wow is the weather here great. I pity all of you for whom winter is just starting!

2006-11-10T10:54:00.000+10:30

The Joys of being RAW...

You get to eat ice-cream for lunch! I could list 73 thousand million other reasons why raw is great but that one is enough for today!
So, here is Thursday's FLOG:

Breakfast - Green smoothie with silverbeet, mango, banana, water, young coconut water plus a little of the 'meat.' 2 apples, 1 orange.
Lunch - 2 apples. Three (small!) bowls of ice-cream (see below for details!)
Snack - 1 kiwi fruit, 1 mandarin, 2 apples.
Dinner - big fat salad!

If you've never tried banana 'ice-cream' you really ought to do so in the very near future. It doesn't matter if you're raw, vegan, vegetarian or a raging omnivore, everyone likes it. Example - I gave my grandad who is visiting a spoonful and his actual words were (imagine in very strong british accent - 30 something years in Aus hasn't changed that) "corr, I could eat raw food if I had to eat things like that!" (with an enormous grin on his face). Grandma had a spoonful too and couldn't believe what the ingredients are. That's cos the ingredients are... banana! Break bananas into pieces and freeze for a minimum of 12 hours. When you're almost ready for ice-cream, get them out and allow to partially defrost while you get the food processor/blender, bowl and spoons ready (though it might not make it from the food processor to the bowl! lol!).
Put bananas in food processor/blender and turn it on. At first they'll go all lumpy and weird but just keep going and eventually you get something that looks like a soft serve ice cream and tastes amazing.
I made three flavours yesterday - plain, pecan and (seeded) raisin (that's the one in the picture) and 'Teenage Caronut.' That one had young coconut and truly raw carob powder (most is roasted, but not this!) but the young coco wasn't so young anymore, which meant it didn't really get chopped up and the ice cream was pretty lumpy. Still tasty though!
Okay, that's all for today - go make ice cream!

2006-11-08T09:44:00.000+10:30

Tuesday's FLOG

Well, this is going to be short and sweet. This is what I ate (and drank!) yesterday:

Breakfast - About 350ml of green smoothie with silverbeet, dill, banana, peach, water and young coconut water. Two apples and a chunk of pineapple.
Lunch - 2 apples. Two 'burritos' (see picture above and details below)
Snack - 1 kiwifruit, 1 mandarin, 2 apples
Dinner - Walnut Burger (from Shazzie's Detox Your World) with Real Toast and Mayo #2 (both from Juliano's RAW), and some lettuce and tomato.
After dinner - juice of two oranges mixed with some young coconut water

Now, about lunch. First of all IT WAS YUMMY! I don't really know what a burrito is but I think it is beans mixed with other things and rolled up in something and eaten very messily. I achieved all those things, so I'll call it a burrito! :-)
This is how I made it - the wrapper bit was two leaves of savoy cabbage (I got sooo excited when I found organic savoy last week, I've never had it before and it is yummy as!) Inside was a mixture of:
chopped tomatoes
grated carrot
avocado
sprouted green lentils and mung beans
I was going to include spring onion and corn but didn't have enough corn and forgot about the onion. I will definately be making it again though, :-), so I can add them next time.
Well, that's it! Have a great day!

2006-11-07T08:54:00.000+10:30

Catching Up and Thankyou
I just want to begin this post by saying thankyou so much to everyone who has left me really cool comments lately. I have had people saying I've inspired them to make the leap from vegetarian to vegan, vegan to raw vegan or simply to start incorporating more healthy raw and/or vegan meals in their life. I never intended to 'convert' anyone with this blog but I can't tell you how happy it makes me feel to know that there are less animals and people suffering, and less damage being done to the environment as a result of nothing more than my words typed on a screen. It really proves that everyone truly can make a difference.
All these great comments also make me feel even MORE guilty that my posts have become so few and far between lately. However, that is all going to change! The simple reason for this is that... I have finished my first year of university!!! I can't believe it! Only four more years and I'll be a qualified vet, lol! (Please note, I am not someone who lives in the future - I am not planning any of the next four years of my life - I just can't believe that only 4 of my 5 years ofundergraduate study remain!)
I have a study week this week, exams next week (AHHH!) and then nearly three months of no uni committments whatsoever. Anyway, I am going to post every day starting now. I've also decided that the only way to avoid this blog getting boring when I do this is to post my daily food log (AKA flog), which will (hopefully) also be helpful for anyone who is just getting into raw and wants an idea of what a 'normal' raw vegan eats each day.

I'm not going to do that today though - today, I'm going to tell you about how my birthday finally ended, three weeks (!!) after it began. I'll give you some quick background first - if you haven't been reading this blog for long, you won't know that at the beginning of this year, my parents (and lovely animal friends) and I all moved from South Australia, where I grew up and my entire family and all my friends live, to Perth in Western Australia (about 3 1/2 - 4 hours by plane) because none of the South Australian universities offer veterinary science. On the weekend before my 18th birthday (friday october 13th) I got my first HUGE surprise when my parents took me to the airport and we picked up one of my very best friends who they had payed to fly in from Adelaide! She stayed for a full three days and three nights and we had a great time. Then the weekend after my birthday, (sunday october 22nd) I went to the biggest raw picnic I've attended yet (scroll back a few posts for more details) and although we didn't actually celebrate my birthday or anything I got lots of 'happy birthdays' and Meg made 'chocolate crackles' especially to be reminiscent of a kids bday party. All year my grandparents have been planning a trip over to visit us and for... well, months I guess, I have been planning a party to have with them. So they arrived on october 30th and then last saturday I created a delicious raw spread for them to enjoy. I was planning to make it a lunch but in honour of the 'international day of action on climate change' we attended a 'Walk against Warming' so it ended up being dinner. It was so funny - grandma said "Well! In one day I've been to a protest march and eaten a raw meal!" Two new things she's never done before!
Anyway, on to the menu. I made:
-RAW spachetti bolognaise
-zucchini pasta (to go with the bolognaise)
-mini quiches
-Corn Ring (from Shazzie's Detox Delights)
-guacamole (with veggies for dipping)
-pumpkin soup (modified from Juliano's RAW. This was special and I just made a bowl for my mum, who has EXTREMELY BAD food intolerances. She liked it and I couldn't have been happier!)

-carrot cake (modified from Juliano's RAW)
-chocolate biscuits

As you can see (in this terrible photo - Dad took it, not me!!) Grandma liked the mini quiches! So did Dad and I thought they were INCREDIBLE! They were inspired by Super Broccoli Quiche in Shazzie's Detox Your World but I completely invented the crust recipe, which I will post on my other blog really soon.

This is me with my mum, her mum (my grandma) and her stepdad (my grandad) before we hoed (Is that a word?) into the food.

This is mum's pumpkin soup - sorry the picture is blurry, my camera ran out of batteries so I didn't have time to snap any others and this one was taken on Dad's cam, which I suck at using even more than I suck at using mine! Still pretty though.

How beautiful and vibrant is the carrot in this photo? The colour of the guac isn't that appealing but it was delicious and Grandma couldn't get enough!

Another bad picture... but that can't disguise how pretty the cake is! Unfortunately no one else liked it as much as me but hey - more for me!

Mum is a very neat and tidy perons (I am too) so the streamers that had been in our lounge room for three weeks were really starting to get to her - as soon as I had blown out my candles, she started taking them down! (All over me!!)

And here's me with my lovely mum, lighting the candles (as we were doing so she said - "Watch out! it won't be raw if you get that flame much closer to the cake!")

To finish up, this is my parents and I at the Walk against Warming. It isn't a great picture but its rare that my Dad is in a picture cos he's normally behind the camera.

Whew, congratulations if you made it through that post! Come back tomorrow, I promise to post again!

2006-10-31T09:58:00.001+10:30

Freaky Fruit and Other Things

When shopping at the markets on Friday I saw this banana and I HAD to buy it. I wasn't planning to get bananas, but how could I not, really? I bought it home and showed mum, I was soooo excited, and she just said "oh yeah. I've seen some like that before." Let down! But I didn't really care, I was still impressed. I hope you are too. :-)

This is something I made up for lunch on Saturday, I will post the recipe on my other blog soon, it is a corn blended salad/dip and it was really simple and yummy. Perhaps not the most photogenic thing in the world...

Dinner saturday night was Onion Bahjis with Mango Chutney from Shazzie's 'Detox Your World.' Beside the onion bahji recipe she wrote "serve this with cauliflower florets and mango chutney for a taste sensation." I figured it sounded Indian so I thought I'd make some pumpkin 'pasta' with my veggie spiraliser, and top with cauliflower, onion bahjis and mango chutney. But I forgot to buy cauliflower so I used broccoli instead... it was AMAZING! DELICIOUS! TOTAL TASTE SENSATION! Honestly, if you have what you need, try these recipes right now. My dad tried some and he thought it was good too (this is mr omni, keep in mind!)

2006-10-28T15:18:00.000+09:30

Raw Picnic #4

Sorry for the sporadic posting - I have only two weeks until my end of semester exams start and I have had lots of assignments due recently so I've been extremely busy. I can't believe that I have almost completed my first year of university! AHHH! Anyway, last Sunday was my fourth raw picnic and it was soooooo GREAT! The last ones have been loads of fun with their 'intimacy' (ie, four people present, lol!) but this one was huge - about 15 people turned out! (OKay so maybe not HUGE but certainly big compared to the last ones, lol!)
There was so much food that its hard to remember it all but I'll tell you a few things - you can figure out the rest from the photos. I bet you're already drooling!

This is one of my contributions, which was really funny actually - I had lots of hazelnut pulp in the freezer left over from making nut mylk and I also had a load of slightly bruised apples that were ageing quickly so I just threw the non bruised sections in the food processor with the nut pulp and some other things and here was the result. I didn't even taste it before dehydrating! Yet I got heaps of comments about how nice everyone thought they were. There is a apple-cinnamon loaf and 'chocolate' apples biscuits around the edge - I will post the (approximate) recipe on my other blog soon.

Okay here is one of those amazing raw things that would make a non-raw person collapse and roll on the floor in shock and delight at how amazing and not-raw it tastes! I mean, can you really believe that cake is raw? Now, I was never a big chocolate person before and after 2 1/2 years of veganism I have pretty much forgotten what chocolate even tastes like (although I have to admit to being a big carob fan :-) but the choccie topping on this cake really was unbelievable. YUMMM! I only had a tiny piece because anymore would have been overpoweringly sweet, but it was good!
In the corner of the picture is my second contribution, my Tropical Chocolate Ice-Cream Pie, the recipe for which can be found on my other blog (link in the sidebar). Unfortunately, this one didn't turn out anywhere near as nice as the first time I made it but other people who tried it seemed to like it, so it wasn't a total failure.

Other things present
-big plate of yummy fruit including pineapple, kiwi fruit and strawberries
-black sapote pudding (ohhh soooooooo good, I think I ate more of this than anything else, it was incredible)
-plate of really raw cashews, goji berries and prunes
-avocado and sprout salad (this was nice, especially the sprouts cos I looove them, but it was waaaaaay too spicy for me)
-flax crackers (darn, they were all gone before I got one)
-another plate of fruit including kiwi fruit and orange segments
-another bowl of fruit, just strawberries
-a few plates of random chopped veggies including carrot, zucchini, avocado, tomato and snow peas
-a salad of corn, pineapple, tomato, avocado and maybe something else?
-a yummy pudding of strawberries, mango, banana and possibly several other ingredients
-chocolate crackles! Did anyone else eat these as a kid or are they an australian thing? They were extremely unhealthy but this healthy raw version was totally delicious and REALLY tasted scarily like the horrible cooked ones, only living, vibrant and delightful! I only had one (again, not a huge fan of really sweet things) but it was very good!

SO that's it - all the yummy picnic food. Hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as i enjoyed my day! I got to meet some amazing raw people, catch up with a few from past picnics and I also met two raw kids and a raw pregnant lady - lots of great chats with like-minded people!

2006-10-21T23:05:00.000+09:30

Yummy food using my new toy!
Because I now live 4 hours by plane away from my entire family except my parents, rather than getting lots of birthday presents I have received lots of money in the post, and last week I went and spent some of it to buy a veggie spiraliser, which you can see by clicking:
here
It is SOOO cool! Now, it took a bit of getting used to and my first attempt at raw pasta was using butternut pumkpin, which wasn't a good start because it is one of the harder veggies to spiralise but zucchini becomes beautiful angel hair pasta in seconds!

Here is Butternut Noodles with Golden Curry Sauce from Shazzie's 'Detox Your World' and it was DELICIOUS! Really, the sauce was sooooo good, I ate piles of it. If you have this book, make this recipe right now! EVen if you don't have a spiraliser to make the pasta, make the sauce and eat it rolled up in a big lettuce or cabbage leaf, or maybe on it's own like soup, or you could add some orange juice and make it thinner to use as a salad dressing... whatever you can think of to eat it!

This is an Alfredo-style sauce I made up for lunch the other day with zucchini noodles - it had avocado, basil, lemon juice, tomatoes and some other things I can't remember. It didn't turn out that well but combined with the noodles it was great!

Lastly is dinner from tonight, which is zucchini and carrot noodles with Walnut Pesto (using a couple of pecans cos I ran out of walnuts!) from a book called 'Hooked on Raw' by Rhio, which I have on loan from the library (I have to return it on monday but I don't want to :-(
I played around with the pesto a fair bit and it was nice but not great - the noodles were awesome, of course!

Goodnight!

2006-10-19T23:30:00.000+09:30

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY
I'm 18 today! Yay! I have had a wonderful day - my presents from my parents were an avocado slicer, nut cracker, stainless steel citrus juicer, GORGEOUS necklace, worm farm (yay - no more throwing away loads of food scraps!) and... Juliano's RAW: The UNCookBook (if you've been reading my blog for a while you will know I LOVE this book). A very wonderful lot of presents.
But these were not my main presents. As you may know, I moved across the country with my parents at the beginning of this year to study at university, leaving behind all my family and friends. Last weekend, my parents flew one of my best friends over from Adelaide (where we used to live) so I could see her for my birthday. It was a huge, wonderful surprise and we had a wonderful weekend catching up together. In addition to this I threw a spontaneous raw birthday party on Saturday and that is what you see above - a salsa, a guacamole and dessert of Strawberry Romanoff (from Juliano's book). Here is a close up of the salsa:

I kinda made both this and the guac up as I went and they were delish! My best friend Alycia and my Dad loved everything (my mum couldn't eat any of it, sadly, because of her terrible food allergies).
I must rush off but I'll post again soon!

2006-10-15T08:28:00.000+09:30

So many salads, so little time!

Hello everyone, sorry it's been such a long time. I'm officially returning to regular blogging as of now! Thankyou soooo much to everyone who left comments after my last post about the tragic passing of my beautiful girl Spirit, I truly appreciate them in all my heart.

Now, onto food! A lot of my recent posts have featured photos of salads. All in the same bowl. Basically, all pretty similar looking. I'm really quite sorry about that, because I'm sure without being able to taste the huge variety of flavour explosions present in these many different salads, they all seem the same and boring. Let me tell you, they're not. When I was just a vegan, I didn't really like salads. That was because I, like most people, had never had a really good salad. I can't define the word salad for you, I don't even think I can narrow down what a good salad is, beyond DELICIOUS!! But anyway, enough raving. The first salad you see pictured above is Pretty Papaya from Shazzie's Detox Delights. I wanted to make this salad for AGES and couldn't get all the ingredients - I finally found organic rocket (I think this is also called arugula) and then gave up and bought conventional chives. Now, after all that salad raving, this wasn't a REALLY delicious salad. It was very nice and I will make it again but no rocket thank you! Next time I will use baby spinach instead. As Shazzie says in the book "sweet fruits like papaya (paw paw) are such a nice surprise in a salad" and she is quite right, plus it went really well with carrot and the chives were a scrummy addition. I've heard that rocket is an acquired taste, and I have to agree!

Here we have another Shazzie recipe, this one from Detox Your World, simply called The Greatest Salad in the World (I love the names she gives her dishes!) Now, I wouldn't say it was the best salad in the world but only because that is really unfair to all the other salads. As I said, there is so much diversity and it is so hard to even specifically define what a salad is, that you really can't go around comparing them this way. But suffice to say this was a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY yummy salad. I ate it for lunch on Tuesday and was sorely tempted to make it again and take it with me to uni on Wednesday but I resisted, simply because there are so many other salads out there to try!
Have a great day everyone and thanks for stopping by!

2006-10-07T16:50:00.000+09:30

Bits and Pieces

Hello, sorry it's been a few days - I've been rather busy and today was not easy for me - to understand why, read this post that I put on the Raw Pleasure boards (see link on sidebar)earlier:

Today is a sad day in my life, and I feel the need to share with someone, so who better than this wonderful community of likeminded people?

Some of you may have read about, two weeks ago, my post regarding raw pets, in which I mentioned my beautiful rat, Spirit, who is nearly two and has been a vegan (though not raw) for her whole life. She was always in outstanding health and I really felt that she would far outlive the 'normal' predicted lifespan for domesticated rats, which ranges from 18 months to 2 1/2 years. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Since that post she has suffered possibly the most rapid and unexpected health decline I've every witnessed (and I've seen a lot of sick animals) and this morning, tragically, she was put to sleep. One day, with no warning, she began having difficulty walking and blancing, because she couldn't use the left side of her body properly. I suspected a stroke although she wasn't showing the other signs - the vet agreed that this was not the cause and gave two possible diagnoses - an inner ear infection (affecting her sense of balance, and thus causing the trouble with walking) or a tumour on the pituitary gland (which is in the brain, for anyone who doesn't know). This is quite a common problin domesticated rats - it sickens me that wild animals do not suffer these horrendous dis-eases yet we have now introduced them to our poor domesticated ones to the extent that they are 'common.' Spirit was put on three different medications for a week - I felt horrible giving them to her, like I was only making things worse (especially with everything I've been reading about natural hygiene lately) but I couldn't bear to see her suffering. I was feeding her about 80% raw and giving greens (like the best of us, she loves a good gs!) and hoped this would also help. She displayed some improvement, but it did not last. On tuesday I got more drugs for her, anti-inflammatories and anti-biotics (as we still didn't know whether it was an infection or tumour) but Thursday she looked quite bad and yesterday she was terrible. I took her to the vet this morning, not knowing if anything more could be done - the vet said we could hospitalise her and treat intensively but that may only buy a few days - when she was suffering, what on earth is the point? So, I made the heartbreaking decision to end the life of one of my very best friends. If you have never lived with a rat you may struggle to understand - most people probably don't understand the level on which I connect with animals, I find them so much easier to understand and deal with than people. Spirit was incredibly important to me and I will miss her so much but I do not feel hollow and lke she has left a void in my heart - instead, I am full of the beautiful memories of the times we have shared. I don't understand why this happened - I cared for her so well and she was always in perfect health - but it has happened and there is no point dwelling on the 'why' of something I will never know.

Now, to move on from such sad things to what I'm sure you really wanted to seem which is ... FOOD! For lunch today I had a totally scrummilicious salad which I found on the Raw Pleasure website (I just about live there! :-) and altered just a little - it contained chinese cabbage, carrot, celery, corn, cherry tomatoes, avocado, strawberries, and a squeeze of orange juice over the top. It was soooooo good, you should really try it. The strawberries were a really nice addition. Aren't the colours stunning?!

Dinner tonight was from Shazzie's 'Detox Delights,' it was Double Stuffed Tomatoes and came out really well. The proportions were a bit off, I fiddled around with amounts but used the basic ingredients, sans olives and with a few pumpkinn seeds replacing some of the sunflower seeds. Once I'd stuffed my big tomato and still had LOTS of filling mix leftover I added a little tahini too it, food processed up some more and then made a lovely stack with dehydrated eggplant 'chips,' and carrot and celery sticks for dipping, which was really delish (I had more celery and carrot, just didn't put it in the picture :-) Another successful Shazzie meal!
Have a good night everyone!

2006-10-03T09:54:00.000+09:30

Quick Foodie Post

Okay this must be brief but I thought I'd share two Shazzie recipes that I've eaten recently. First of all is Saturday night's dinner - my first recipe from 'Detox Your World' (great book - lots of information plus heaps of delish-looking recipes). It is Herby Stir-Fry and it was REALLY yummy - I made lots of changes but stuck to the basic idea, and it came out great. I loved the fact that it had peach in there, it was a really interesting and yummy flavour (yay for all the new season summer fruits - sorry to all you for whom winter is just beginning :-)
The only other change I would make next time is to either soak the sun-dried tomatoes before hand or leave them out - their very strong flavour didn't complement the peaches much. But all round, a success.

Here is Crunch Munch salad from 'Detox Delights' - simple, filling and delicious, what more could you want?
Have an awesome day everyone!

2006-09-30T10:10:00.000+09:30

Living in the Clouds
Hmm, I'm tempted to change my blog name to the name of this post, because that's what I've been doing since going raw - it is a feeling beyond description. I hit my 10 week mark yesterday and I can hardly believe no toxic cooked food has passed my lips in that time!

Anyway, this is lunch from... thursday. It is a Mushroom Pizza from Shazzie's 'Detox Delights.' Is it just me, or does everyone else harbour a secret desire to make every single recipe from a recipe book? It is a dream of mine and I would love to achieve it with this book. There's a few recipes that will require a fair bit of tweaking, and a few of them require seasonal ingredients that I will have to wait for, but I think its possible! The pizza is a combo of yummy things like chopped spinach (recipe called for watercress but thats really hard to get here), parsley, garlic, onion, tomato and maybe more mashed up with avocado and blobbed into a big field mushroom (the pizza base). It was sooo delicious!

To see the recipe for this Tropical Chocolate Ice-Cream Pie, go hereto my raw recipe blog. It is soooo tasty and I gave it to my dad and he said 'you could give this to anyone and they would have no idea it was raw vegan!" Now, while my goal in creating recipes is simply to produce delicious food that is good for you and utilises what nature provided in its unadulterated form, I realise that most of society is addicted to cooked foods and animal products, so if something raw vegan can be enjoyed by an omnivore, I'm happy!!

Now to address a question posed by Mary in the comments of my last post regarding nuts. As she said, a lot of raw recipes seem to contain enormously large amounts of nuts. However, most dedicated long term raw foodies eat a very simple diet with mainly fresh fruits and veggies - it is mostly the more 'gourmet' recipes used to seduce cooked food eaters into the world of raw that have lots of nuts in them. That said, it is important to get some fat in your diet, for which avocados and coconuts are perfect. Also, everyone has different bodies and some people can digest nuts better than others - they are always more digestible if soaked first. Check out my raw recipe blog for some tasty nut-free recipes (in addition to some nutty ones!)Finally, I am still eating a quite a few nuts because I am trying to put on the masses of weight I lost in the last 3 years while starving myself, although I'm eating lots of avocado too.

2006-09-27T22:59:00.000+09:30

Raw Picnic 3
Oh my, I just realised that I went to my third raw picnic over a week ago and I still haven't blogged about it! This has to be very quick, so here is the dish I made:

It is a carrot cake, adapted from this recipe and it was VERY well received (none came home with me, that's for sure!)

This shows everything that was there - unfortunately a whole lot of people who planned to come all pulled out at the last minute due to other commitments so we only had four in attendance. Rachan and his (non-raw) girlfriend Rommie bought Kim Chee which is apparently the national dish of Korea. It is fermented chinese cabbage and spring onions, basically, and Rachan made a spicy and a non-spicy version. I ate copious amounts of the non-spicy version, which was delish with the truly raw almond butter Joss bought. Although, it was REALLY salty and I was very thirsty afterwards! :-) Unusual, because I don't normally eat salt. In addition to the almond butter, Joss bought some Exotica Mix (its kinda like trail mix, just goji berries, cacao nibs and raw cashews) and mini red capsicums stuffed with almond hummus. Oh and some slices of tamarillo. Okay, must go. Have a great night!

2006-09-25T10:19:00.000+09:30

Very Lucky Little Raw Foodie

Before I start, this is my 100th post! YAY! I can't believe how long I've been blogging and how many cool people I've 'met' through my and other blogs. The internet truly is a wonderful thing. I've had some of the most awesome (should I say RAWsome?!:-) comments lately about how my blog has inspired people or put a smile on their face and that makes me feel so good, so keep those comments coming! If I can turn one person vegetarian, vegan or raw, or even just get them eating more of those foods, I have changed the world and that makes me feel great. It has also been wonderful to have this 'virtual support' as I make my journey to raw and overcome my eating disorder.

Now, onto what we're all here for... FOOD! Pictured above is Greensleeves Salad from Shazzie's Detox Delights - as I said yesterday, all I want at the moment is salad, salad and more salad, and this book has so many great options. I left out the onion but I think that was about the only change I made. I stumbled upon a great dressing in one of the Living Nutrition Magazines that my new friend Joss gave me last week (more on that later), it was really simple and just what I wanted. In a food processor, combine avocado, celery, fresh herbs of choice (I used dill and parsley), lemon juice and orange juice. It went perfectly with this salad.

Now, I shall tell you why I'm so lucky. First of all, the picture above shows a Young Coconut, also called Green Coconuts, Thai Coconuts, Thai Green Coconuts, Drinking Coconuts, Kulaway Nuts (not sure where that one comes from)... and probably more! These. Are. Heaven. If you have never tasted one, go and do so now, somehow. I'm very lucky because I've discovered a SUPERMARKET that sells them! Not organic, not as good as fresh ones I'm sure, but still amazing. I splashed out on Saturday and bought TWO. They're not cheap but they're worth it!

Next up I will explain some more of my incredible good fortune (normally I don't say luck, I say good fortune, because I think we really create our opportunities and experiences - not much happens due to luck alone. Anyway...) as I mentioned in a previous post, a new friend I met on the Raw Pleasure forums (see link in sidebar) sent me her old copy of Shazzie's Detox Your World (EXCELLENT book). Unfortunately it might be a while tell I get to really 'meet' her, as she lives about 7 hours away by plane, but I have also made loads of awesome friends who live nearby and who I have actually met in person. One of them is a great lady named Joss, who only lives about 20 mins walking from me. On saturday she contacted me on the forums to say she had a whole tray of black sapotes that she had gotten really cheap, and would I like some. Ummm... YES! If you don't know, black sapotes are a tropical fruit also called 'chocolate pudding fruit,' which I had never tried but was desperate to. So I walked and met her yesterday and we did a fruit exchange and now I have 6 sapotes. Oh wow they're yummy! I've heard lots of ways people eat them, and I have some cool recipe ideas brewing, but so far I've just enjoyed half of a big one in its pure fresh goodness. Sorry the picture above is blurry - it shows an unripe one, while the one below is ready to eat. I took four photos showing the inside of the one I started, and how chocolate-puddingy it looks, but they were all blurry.

Oh and in case you hadn't noticed in a few of my recent photos (including the sapote ones) we have got a new dining table. We actually didn't have one before, and haven't since we moved at the beginning of the year - I'm a hippie and I eat sitting on a great big embroidered cushion on the floor (I also sleep on the floor - I love being close to the earth) and my parents are slobs (kidding!) and eat on their laps. But now we have a table, and it is great for photography.

Last thing of all (this became a very long post!) is my dinner from Saturday night - Cheeseburger #2, a Juliano recipe. As you will know if you've been following my blog for about the last 25 or so of the 100 posts, I LOVE Juliano. The man is a genius and all his recipes are sublime. What's great is that they stand up to lots of adaptation - for example, I never use olive oil but have not had a problem yet. Now, these were nice. But they weren't brilliantly mind blowingly good. The recipe suggests only dehydrating for 3-4 hours - mine got 5 1/2 and I think they would have been better with more. I'm not sure what it was about them - ocassionally a bite would be really awesome, and then others would just be good. They definately won't be replacing Cheeseburger #1 in my weekly recipe rotation! Oh and he suggests serving them on pieces of Real Toast with Mayo #1 or 2 but I wrapped mine up in a big lettuce leaf with a Cheeze Sauce I invented. I'll post the recipe on my other blog later if I can be bothered, but for now I advise you to hop over there (link in the sidebar) because I FINALLY posted the soup recipe that I blogged about ages ago.

Have an incredible day everyone!

2006-09-23T23:45:00.000+09:30

Raw Goodies

Hello, I realised that I took a photo of all my lovely fruit and veggies yesterday and then forgot to upload it for all of you! Aren't they just stunning?

And all I want at the moment is sala, salad and more salad, which there are an abundance of recipes for in Shazzie's Detox Delights... this is Italian Salad, minus the olives and with cashews instead of pine nuts. It was divine! Sorry this is so short, I have to go cos Dad wants the computer. Have a good night!

2006-09-22T17:53:00.000+09:30

A Veg*n Meme

What wonderful foods did you bring home from the grocery store?

Midweek Munchies: What Freedom is contributing for the week

Is it just me, or has everyone else quit the Midweek Munchies Club? Not that I mind, but I haven't seen another list in ages... Anyway, I had a most stunningly wonderful, fruit-filled day today. I LOVE FRUIT!! Here is a post I put on the raw pleasure forum (see link on sidebar) this afternoon because I had to share my elation:

Oh my, I'm having a wonderful day. It did not start so well, my mum had to go to hospital at 4.30 this morning with a huge fever (they thought maybe she had menningococceal but no, thank goodness kiss) but she is home now and sleeping, hopefully getting better.
Anyway, back to the amazingness - friday is shopping day and I go to the Fremantle markets, just the best place to shop. There are three organic fruit and veg stalls and lots of conventional so I can get the best price. I got organic oranges for $1.50/kg, when I've been paying $3 for about a month and a half! Then organic kiwi fruit (which I just can't get enough of at the moment!) 4 for $2 (I've been getting 3 for $2) next was some pesticide-free red capsicum (green just isn't the same!) followed by ... PEACHES! The very first of the season, tree-ripened up in Carnarvon. I just ate one a little while ago and ... oh my, it was heaven. I actually gasped in delight when I bit into it, it was so sweet juicy and perfect. Why oh why didn't I buy more???
Last of all, I made a new find... pomegranates! They were not organic and were imported from the US, so I wouldn't normally go for them but I've never had one before so I couldn't resist. Can anyone tell me how I know when they're ripe?
So that is my wonderfully fruity day. Oh and I also bought possibly the yummiest dates I've tastes. Sheer bliss.
Hope everyone else is floating as high as I am...
(goodness me, I sound like I'm on drugs or something... fruit is the best drug of all)

Now that you've got a slight idea of what I bought, I'll give you the actual list. A little * means organic and a # means it might have been organic but I'm not sure/can't remember.

*apples (pink lady, fuji, lady william)*
*avocados (fuerte and hass)*
*buckwheat (hulled)*
capsicum (pesticide free)
cashews
#cos lettuce#
dates
*garlic*
#grape tomatoes (like cherry tomatoes but... well... shaped like grapes!)#
*kiwi fruit*
*macadamias*
*medjool dates*
*mushroom (a big field one)*
*oranges*
peaches
*pears*
*peas*
pomegranate
*sesame seeds (hulled)*
sweetcorn (two ears... this is the best corn I've ever tasted!!)

I'll also be buying more tomorrow - lots of veggies to balance out all that fruit! In addition to my wonderful fruit day I've had an INCREDIBLE week because a wonderful new friend I made on the raw pleasure forums (who lives on the other side of the country) sent me an incredible gift. I was moaning about how much I wanted 'Detox Your World' by Shazzie to accompany her other book 'Detox Delights' (the only uncookbook I own) and how I'm currently in a competition to win a signed copy but if I don't win I'm going to buy a copy. My new friend said "don't buy it, I have it and don't want it any more, you can have mine." This thing is worth $45 (australian) new and she GAVE it to me!! It arrived in the post on Wednesday and I am devouring it. Oh I'm so lucky! I'm just so happy at the moment, I can't put words to it. I have been raw for 9 weeks today, by the way.
Have an outstanding day/night!

Links to other Midweek Munchies
(If you participate, leave your link in the comments and I'll post it below; or, you can post in the comments)

Click here for the Midweek Munchies code
Click here for Harmonia's blog

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Technorati Tag: Midweek Munchies

A special thanks to Running2Ks and Rift for all of their help with coding, graphics, and encouragement for this project.

PURPOSE of Midweek Munchies: Put together by a small group of Veg Women, we hope to spread the word about healthy vegetarianism while obtaining idea starters for meals, recipes, learn about new products, and meet other female veg*n bloggers. Visiting and commenting on other participants lists are encouraged but not required. Have fun and Go Veg!

2006-09-19T10:15:00.000+09:30

Travelling Back in Time

Okay, since I've been so slack lately, I have LOADS of yummy food to share with you all. First of all is a green dip... I made it up as I went along (with inspiration from here) and I think it contained

chinese cabbage
baby spinach
dulse flakes
avocado
lemon juice
onion
garlic
young coconut water

It was really divine and a great way to cram in lots of greens :-) I ate it with carrot sticks, sweet potato 'chips' and a couple of my delicous flax crackers (go back a couple of posts for the recipe).

This is what I had for lunch on saturday... in Detox Delights (Shazzie's book) there is a section called, simple, Side Dishes and a comment from Shazzie saying "... or you can combine two or three to make a delicious main meal" so that was just what I did. Here we have Crunchy, Nibbly and Avomato containing respectively celery, apple and grape tomatoes,corn and sunflower sprouts (the recipe calls for olive oil but... yuck!) and avocado and tomato. Don't you love the names? So cute :-)

STill loving soup, here is Saturday night's dinner - NRG Soup (another Juliano). I have to say I didn't love it at first but it quickly grew on me and was very tasty.

Next up is just a juice I invented which was really tasty - one large orange, a chunk of pineapple and a rib of celery. Push through a juicer, stir till its lovely and green then enjoy!

Last of all is a bowl of cereal... not all that exciting but I thought I'd share. I'm going to post the recipe on my other blog later, so check it out!

Have a rawsome day everyone! Oh, and for the wonderful Mary, who is embarking on a raw journey (and anyone else) here are a couple of links to great places for raw people: Shazzie's Site (has some recipes from her books),
Michelle's Site (LOTS of recipes)