Note: This posts contains some personal thoughts about eating cooked food which may or may not interest you. The recipe is at the bottom. Feel free to skip to it.I have been eating a bit of cooked food to save money (beans and rice, but other things too), although that's not why I started putting it back in my diet a month and a half ago. It has been an interesting experiment.
It started when I was visiting my aunt in California, and she made this beautiful vegan pot pie/
shepards pie/something like that. It was the first vegan thing she'd ever made, and I was so touched by it. It didn't really seem like a big deal to eat it, so I did. I felt fine, which surprised me. I felt my senses getting a bit dulled down (that could have been the wine), but I didn't vomit or anything. It was just cooked vegetables, no flour, tofu, or grains, so I think this helped. Before this, I was eating all raw for quite a while.
I felt fabulous pretty much all the time when I ate all raw. My moods leveled out, I had tons of energy, I didn't need too much sleep (although I never got to where I was sleeping four hours a night. I think I need all that dream time), and physically my body didn't get fatigued as much and recovered from exercise rapidly. I biked everywhere carrying tons of stuff on my bike, stood for 12 hours straight, hiked, ran, all that kind of stuff, and my muscles were rarely sore.
Although I wasn't sick before I went raw, I felt like I was almost on the verge of getting a cold quite often. I felt right at the tipping point of being unwell, and emotionally, I didn't feel too great. I just knew I wasn't living at my potential, so I thought I would try this raw thing out. It worked.
I didn't start eating cooked food again because living on just raw food wasn't working for me. It was working great! I didn't even crave or miss anything (not even Thai food. Okay, actually I missed beans and rice, but that's really it).
I think this foray into cooked food it is really about experimenting. I think of this time as slipping my big toe back in the water, to compare and remember what it is like to have cooked food in my diet. I think it's about making sure I'm making the very best choice for myself, rather than just nodding along with the popular statement "cooked food is poison".
It has been very interesting to observe how my body feels after I eat things like canola oil, tofu, bread, grains, and any cooked oils. It doesn't like them. Especially with bread, my eyes and face get very puffy, and my little glands in my neck get huge. I also find if there is nothing raw, I eat till my belly is uncomfortably full and then still feel hungry. This is really a drag.
I miss the way I felt before, so I will probably stop eating cooked food again (except maybe beans and rice :). Besides, I honestly feel like you can't beat a good salad.
This is the first cooked recipe I've posted on my blog. It is
yummmy! When I first made it I could hardly stop "
mmming" as I ate it. It is very simple to make, uses only a few ingredients, and packs a big feel good punch in the tummy. It is great the next day. After I ate this for breakfast as left overs, I felt great and had tons of energy. I don't know if it was the beets or B&R, but it worked for me that morning.
This soup is awesome for three reasons:
- it has a great color,
- the red lentils disintegrate nicely to create a creaminess which I think is cool,
- and it is super cheap.
I have made it with both olive and coconut, and they both do different things to the soup. I like both, but might prefer the coconut because my little glands seem to like it better.
Red Lentil and Rice Borscht:
one onion
2 T oil (olive or coconut)
two beets, with beet greens
1/2 to 1 c red lentils
1/2 rice
water
salt
caraway
misoSlice the onion. I like half rings. Cook the onion in the oil at the bottom of the pan. Add some salt and caraway seeds, and stir it around until the onion wilts. Then add the beans and stir those until they are coated in onion and oil juice. Add as much water as you want, around 6 cups or so, and cook the beans and rice until they are soft. Half way to three quarters through the cooking time, add chopped beet
root, but leave the greens and stems out. Once the rice is cooked, turn the burner off and add the beet greens and stems.
I served this with a spoonful of
miso in each bowl. This way the soup is cooled enough so the good bacteria in the miso don't get killed.
In addition to sprouting, I have been adding chia into my diet because of it's low cost and fab nutrient profile. This is seriously one amazing little seed and quite yummy. I can't believe it's taken me this long to get into it, as I have been reading about it's virtues for about a year now. Here are some highlights:
I soak the sprouts in a big bowl to get rid of the hulls.
If you don't have the hemp milk, then you can make this in the same amount of time as it would take you to make cooked oatmeal and milk a cow (or hempseed).
I am not complaining about the price. I think farmers should get a fair wage and I would of course rather eat local than something trucked in, but I also think it would be nice if buying local was affordable for everyone. While we're at it, I might as well go all the way and say I wish everyone could just eat out of their back yard instead of choosing to mow it.
The seeds I am going to soak and make milky-type stuff out of, pates, raw breads, and stuff. The beans and seeds I am going to sprout into greens. For fruit I will eat Larabars I have at the house and occasionally indulge in an apple or bananas. For added greens I will eat the rest of the Vitamineral Greens and Greener Grasses I have. I already have some basics like oil and sweetener, plus a fridge full of recently purchased greens ($15 worth of bok choi, in fact). I imagine I will go over the $30 to purchase fresh things occasionally like carrots or onions, but I will aim to keep that at a minimum.
