The Cooked Stops Here (for 30 days anyway!)

Today began our first day of eating all raw.  12 hours in and it’s not bad at all!  Now, I love to cook for myself and my husband Gary but besides salads and fruit, we don’t really experiment with other raw foods.  All that’s changing now baby!

Monday I started soaking some almonds, chickpeas, buckwheat groats and wheatberries (all of them raw, not roasted).  I was hoping to take my soaking to sprouting (which essentially makes the enzymes and nutrients in the food more accessible) but what I realized this morning was that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.  Worse than that was that I thought I knew what I was doing (Gary will say that this is sometimes my characteristic over-confidence).  Unbeknown-st to me, you soak the nuts first (as in, under water that you change a couple of times a day) and then when the sprouting portion begins, you drain them completely and just rinse them a few times a day until little “tails” start sprouting.  It was the draining that escaped me.  I was drowning my nuts.  Ugh.

Well, I went onto the Information Superhighway today (some of you know this as the “internet”) and discovered why my chickpeas didn’t have tails.  I’m trying to salvage them-we’ll see how that goes.

Breakfast today was a cold porridge, of sorts.  Sounds very Oliver Twist-esqe, I know.  It was a combination of soaked buckwheat groats, a banana, a couple of soaked dates, cinnamon and a diced apple.  I put everything but the apple in the food processor and proceeded to take it a little too far on the blending.  Next time I’ll puree the dates and banana and add the groats at the end to keep some of the chunkiness.  The flavor was good but the texture was similar to “baby’s first rice cereal”.

Gary made it through his first morning without coffee.  Big event, folks.  He’s actually told me that it’s the thing that gets him out of bed in the mornings.  Not the smile of his sweet wife; not the opportunity to do something cool for our little business.  No, it’s a cup or two of Intellegentsia Yirgacheffe with cream and sugar.   You can imagine his horror when I told him that coffee wasn’t raw.  He did well today though.  I made him a few cups of peppermint tea with honey (I know-it’s not raw but come on, let’s give  a little here).

Due to a meeting that ran all afternoon we skipped lunch and came home ravenous around 5pm.  I whipped up a REALLY good dish that a raw website called “Crunchy Tacos” but I called Mexican Lettuce Wraps.  It was a combination of onions, tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, avocados, cilantro, garlic and spices.  Whipped it all up in the food processor and spooned it onto romaine hearts.  One word for these: awesome.