Day Eighteen: A Milestone Day!

Well I’ve finally done it.  The longest I’ve ever been raw (up until today) was 17 days.  And here I am, on day eighteen, and I know that cooked food is behind me.  I mean REALLY behind me!!!  Like I said to Jahn at the beginning of this journey:  “There’s nothing cooked that we can’t make a raw version of.  And if we can make it raw, why would we ever eat it cooked?!?”

So to celebrate, he and I did some creative work today in the kitchen to invent what he calls pepperawni (a raw version of pepperoni).  We sliced up some Italian squash (which looks and tastes a lot like just a mini zucchini) and we slathered them with a mixture of a tomato concoction we came up with which was:

• wheat-free tahini
• sun-dried tomatoes
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• water
• pink Himalayan salt
• black pepper

We put that all together in the Vitamix, put it on high and kept smashing it down to get the stuff to make a creamy paste.  After the slices were slathered and placed on a dehydrator tray, we took several cups of raw, soaked pistachios, walnuts and almonds and mixed them up in the tomato mixture as well.  I’d love to be able to buy Jahn the marinara nuts we found yesterday all the time, but that doesn’t fit into our budget except as a treat, for now.  Besides, it’s fun to try to get a recipe at home to taste like the stuff you found at the store.  And now the house is starting to smell like a freakin’ pizza parlor!  Poor kid is having a hard time waiting the few days that it takes to dry the nuts back out.  But at least the squash ones will be ready by the end of tomorrow.

So for breakfast I had a frozen chocolate-dipped banana (oh, tasted just like my memories of Disneyland as a kid, when I first had them).  Is being raw wonderful, or WHAT?!?  The longer I do this, the happier I am.  And I’m so happy that Jason and Jahn are so happy, too.  For the first time in any of our memories, we are truly, and I mean TRULY satisfied when we are done eating.  We never overeat anymore, I don’t have to monitor how many sweets Jahn gets, because they are all completely safe and don’t give him a sugar rush (and his behavior and memory have gone off the charts, in the positive direction) the crazy cravings that made me obsess over foods and make horrible, malnutritive choices are gone.  I feel … I feel free!  I feel like I’ve been enslaved by “food” for so long, and now that I’m eating REAL food and my addiction is FINALLY broken, I am alive, happy, getting healthy, and the world is my oyster (or some non-animal equivalent) 

Lunch was a smallish salad and some chocolate sauce (not on it, of course), and dinner was blackberries again, but I tried some dipped in chocolate — an EXCELLENT combination!  I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, as I have the house to myself and a new shipment of cacao paste and butter to start my next round of candies with!  Can’t wait! 

Day Seventeen: Pizza and a Movie

Ok, so Jason and I went grocery shopping at Terra Organica today, and holy GOURD did we find a great thing to eat!  David Wolfe has some raw Moroccan olives that are so dang tasty, and Gone Nuts (a raw, sprouted nut company) has this flavor called Sun Dried Marinara that tastes exactly, and I mean EXACTLY like pepperoni.  So when you mix the 2 in your mouth, I swear it tastes just like PIZZA!  I couldn’t believe it!  The texture is nothing like pizza, obviously, but who cares???  We were both sitting in the front seat of the car, bouncing up and down with glee at how miraculously, perfectly, WONDERFULLY delicious it was.  I’m talking eyes-rolling-into-the-back-of-your-head-damn-near-orgasmic DELICIOUS!!!

And speaking of orgasmic, in the evening, we went to see Wolverine as a family (and brought Miko along, too).  Good LORD is Hugh Jackman hot!  You just can’t go wrong watching that man run naked through the countryside.  Oh yes, you read correctly.  Running naked through the countryside.  (Is it getting warm in here?)  But I digress.  No wait, I don’t.  I do have to say thank gourd he didn’t have that ridiculous hair from X-Men movies past.  No amount of bad hair or makeup seems to make him or Johnny Depp look bad.  Am I the only one who’s noticed that?  Ok, seriously, I digress now.  (Time to lighten up on the maca.  It’s doing its job a little TOO well.) 

Oh!  The day’s menu, you say?  Ah yes, the day’s menu!  THAT’S why you’re here!!!  Of course!  Well, breakfast was chocolate pudding again (it was so good I just couldn’t help myself).  It’s amazing how much it tastes like the dairy alternative, only it’s actually tastier.  Wow.  Did I just call something that is mainstream an ALTERNATIVE??? Interesting how the mind changes to start seeing raw food as the norm.

For my next non sequitur, I noticed yesterday that our kitchen and our home in general are starting to smell different.  Well, I suppose that if you change everything you eat, the scents will change.

But back to the menu.  For lunch it was the nuts and olives that made up “pizza”, and dinner (which was after the movie) was a few pieces of chocolate bar, more pizza-olives-and-nuts (we wanted Jahn and Miko to try them), and blackberries (we found some at the local outdoor produce market, Youngstock’s, which does not have a site for me to link to).

After dinner, we watched Simply Raw – Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (AKA Raw for 30 Days).  Pretty interesting documentary.  We started to watch Food Matters, but we were fairly tired after a big day and 2 movies already under our belts, so I think we’ll watch it tomorrow.  G’nite for now.

Day Twelve: The Yard Sale (Part Two) and Lasagna Gardening!

Well we certainly felt like we got caught up on a bit of sleep last night.  We got up this morning at 8 a.m. and were ready for yard sale business by 9 a.m.  We didn’t get that many customers, but we made $20 and took the rest of our stuff to Goodwill.  We’ve actually found a few more things we wanted to get rid of, (isn’t that the way it always goes with yard sales — AFTER you’ve had them?) but our neighbor just across the way is having another this coming Saturday, so we’ll be able to probably off-load a few more things.  Yippee!!!

So we got a GREAT, almost brand-new, looks-like-it’s-fresh-off-the-showroom-floor couch off of craigslist today, and we only had to pay $85 for it!  I love that we are finally starting to make our first house look like a home (and not a college student’s apartment).  The furniture in the living room and bedrooms is starting to look like we meant to put them together that way and not like we found it on the side of the road.  ;o)  Gotta love when the place looks nice!  I’ve never really had that before (since I’ve been on my own, anyway), and since I’ve been on my own longer now than I lived with my parents growing up, I say it’s high time!

Jay came home with a book from our friends Dave and Laurie called Lasagna Gardening.  I’m pretty excited about it, and we’re going to start our own garden, probably using the techniques outlined in the book.  We’ve gotta save up a bit, but we’ll be starting something small this year, and based on how that goes, we’ll add to it next year.  Our eventual goal is to grow almost all of our own food in a biosphere of Jason’s design.

But none of this is about chocolate, is it?  For breakfast I had chocolate frosting of all things!  More of a ganache.  It was cacao powder, maca, mesquite, agave and just a touch of coconut oil.  Lunch was non-existent.  Just couldn’t get hungry.  At night I made a new batch of pizza dough that I invented last week (it will be ready in the morning), and while I watched The Holiday, I pulled basil leaves from their stems (there were a LOT of leaves).  Then I made a quart of pesto, and Jay and I will probably have pesto pizza tomorrow with nutrional yeast on it.  It came out a little too sweet, but by tomorrow it should be perfect.  I don’t do so well with garlic when it’s freshly chopped, but the next day it’s usually ok for me.  I tasted the pesto, having forgotten about the garlic sensitivity, and it made my stomach hurt.  I ate a strawberry, and for some reason that calmed my stomach.  Don’t know what drove me to do that, but it worked.  So I had a few more with cacao syrup, and that was dinner.

I cannot believe how quickly weight is coming off me, btw!  I mean, if I had been told 3 years ago that I would, or even could lose weight AND HAVE MY SKIN SHRINK as I lost weight, I would’ve thought they were crazy.  But it’s working.  Jason and I are taking pictures of each other every two weeks, and I’ll be showing how we looked and how our bodies changed when we publish the ebooks.  We have the eventual goal of printing them, as well.

Well, I’m tired now, so I’m off to bed.

Day Six: Have I Been Doing This For Almost a WEEK Already?

Ok, so don’t hate me, but this is actually feeling pretty easy!  Doing raw, I mean.  And it’s NEVER felt easy before.  I don’t know what made me decide to do only chocolate for 30 days (and obviously, I’ve added to that out of necessity), but something is clicking this time that never has before.  I’ve been trying to go raw for over 2 years, and it’s never stuck.  Maybe it just took me that long to transition, maybe I needed the education base and it took that long to get it.  Maybe I needed to get that “magic diet” I’ve always wanted, but never really believed I could have.  Or did I?  I didn’t give up on it, so some part of me must have intuitively known that chocolate was good for me, I just hadn’t looked enough to find the right kind.  Maybe I’ve only been able to do it twice for 2 weeks at a time in the past because I wasn’t getting superfoods often enough and overemphasized the greens.  Or maybe it is just time, so I’m simply ready.  I can’t say for sure.  But there is a calmness now that’s never been there before.  Like that guy Dhrumil that I saw on We Like It Raw talking about letting go of seeking.  That really hit me in a profound way, and I haven’t had the need to look for perfection in my diet anymore since I saw that video.  It’s like somebody else said it was ok to stop seeking perfection, and even though he wasn’t giving me permission to eat Volcano Tacos, I just felt like his words helped me give myself permission to do so.  But once I gave myself that permission, poof!  Most of the desire for them went away.

What’s I find most interesting is that we’re all ready at the same time (everyone in my household) to finally BE raw, and not just try again to GO raw.  I’ve just finished day 6, Jahn has finished day 4 and Jason has finished day 3.  For some reason, within days of each other, we’re all just makin’ the leap, and it really doesn’t seem that hard.  And it’s not like we have less access to the old foodstuffs, or like we suddenly don’t want them — it just sort of seems gone from our consciousness, in a way, and this way of eating now suddenly seems normal, easy and preferable.

I had this conversation with Jahn recently (after we went on the picnic on Saturday at the bird festival), and we were talking about our cravings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at picnics and for pizza at parties.  I said to him, “So here’s the deal:  there’s nothing cooked that we can’t make a raw version of, if we put our minds to it.  We’ve already made pizza and peanut butter, and I think I can figure out jelly with a good freezer jam recipe.  So,  if we can have a raw version of it, WHY would we eat the cooked one???”  And I could see the light come on in his mind and his eyes as he TOTALY got it and said, “YEAH!”

It’s almost like we tripped and fell into it, or at least that’s how it seems now, from this side of things.  It’s a beautiful thing, and we are all requiring just a few hours of sleep each night now, with a nap here or there.  Jahn got a cold and it was gone in 24 hours.  The stresses and situations of life are not much changed, but we have.  And it’s so nice.  I don’t know if I’m just rambling, but it just feels so different now.  And not in a trying or striving or attempting kind of way.  There’s just a state of being that is so calm now, and Jason noticed and conveyed to me last night that time seems to be slowing down so much.  We are getting more done in a day, or at least it seems that way.  Is this making any sense?

My friend Michael is here and I just read the above paragraphs to him to see if they made any sense whatsoever, and he said that yes they does make perfect sense, so they it seems weird to you, then we can blame him.  ;o)  J/K  Love you Miko!

So I started the day with our chocolate shake/milk this morning that we’ve had most mornings, then I spent the day taking Miko to different stores for produce as he is working on going raw, too.  He’ll be staying at our place tonight, and I fed him salad with a new strawberry vinaigrette recipe that I came up with on the spot.  Jahn made him banana slices with chocolate and strawberry sauces on them for dessert (which he loves to call annunaki towers) , and they were both thrilled with it.

So let’s have the rundown:  breakfast was a chocolate shake, lunch was an avocado and a mango because I was on the road and it took MUCH longer than I thought it would to get home (errands kept coming up — one of those days, dontcha know), and for dinner it was, of course, salad, and then a piece of chocolate candy and annunaki towers for dessert.  Oh!  I made Miko a chocolate shake as he’s trying to get more recipes to help him stay raw, so I had a second one as an afternoon snack.

All in all, even though today was a busy day and I would have called it stress-filled in the past, now it just seems like an unusually busy day.  And staying raw was easy.  The Taco Bell sign wasn’t even tempting today.  I’m really starting to FEEL different, and my false body is slipping away, finally giving way to my REAL body!

I’m gonna go work on my books now, and tune in tomorrow for my first weigh-in.  I can feel a difference in my body already, we’ll see what the scale says.

Last, here are a few pics of me on Christmas Day, 2008.  Just to give you an idea of where I started with raw at approximately 240 pounds (as I was over 300 pounds at my heaviest, but would never consent to pictures at that weight).

Me giving Jason an "I Love You" hand sign

Me smiling with glee at getting the Obama calendar I asked for!

So there, now you can at least see what I look like “before”.  I will post more pics at the end of the month.

Day Four: Sea Bird Watching and a Picnic

I woke up feeling pretty sluggish, so I made a chocolate & maca shake and it perked me right up.  My side of the family invited us all to a sea bird festival, but Jason had to work, so Jahn and I went with my mom, dad, sister, her husband & son.  We packed a picnic lunch of strawberries, grapes, Clementine oranges, chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup, chocolate cheesecake and lemon cheesecake.  Jahn and I stayed totally raw, despite being surrounded by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bologna sandwiches, Cheetos, Doritos, juice boxes and hard-boiled eggs (left over from Easter).  I made sure to pack the cheesecake because I knew that it would fill us up quickly so we wouldn’t be tempted to eat the other things.

But the picnic was the last part of our outing.  First, we went to the funnest little festival.  It was all about sea birds, and there were real birds from a sanctuary there (permanent residents that are too old or injured to be returned to the wild), free games, prizes, face painting, a nature hike and a ferry boat ride!  Jahn and his cousin Ben got to actually drive the boat!  It only held 16 people, so it was very cozy, and the boys were beyond proud of themselves for actually steering under the Captain’s supervision.  Too fun!  And they even got Honorary Captain certificates to commemorate the day.

Then it was off to the picnic (which I described above) at a local park, where the boys got to run off the rest of their energy.  I was even able to keep up with them and didn’t need a nap!  Then Ben came over to our house and played with Jahn for a few hours.  Jahn discovered the sweetness of dandelion flowers and was smashing them up and eating them.  Ben wasn’t as keen on it, but we all had a taste and had some fun gathering up flowers and leaves and trying them out.  Worst case scenario, we get a little liver cleansing out of it.

I certainly got my exercise and was ready for bed by 10.  I had a bite of raw pizza with Jahn and the rest of the fruit with chocolate left over from the picnic.  Then, for dessert, we had sliced bananas with raisins on them, drizzled with strawberry and chocolate syrups.  Delicious!  All in all, a great day, and Jason stayed raw all day, too.  Looks like we’re finally on our way!

Day Two: The Chocolate & Salad Diet©, Pizza, Shopping, Withdrawal & Lassis

Now doesn’t that just sound smurfect?  I did not post my day two on day two because frankly, I felt like mud all day long.  You ever tried to move 228 pounds of mud under your own power all at once?  Not too easy.  So now you see how I felt yesterday.  Not a fun day in a lot of respects, but it all came out well in the end.

Problems started when I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before due to salad cravings.  I got up and tried to make a chocolate shake for breakfast to boost my energy, and against my better judgement, I added goji berries in with it, as Jason had soaked them ahead of time and didn’t want them to go to waste.  I never have liked gojis in a smoothie or shake, because despite the uber-lovely and strong Vita Mix, they never actually get smooth.  If I could just find a way to get those darned grainy little seeds out, I might like it better.

And for whatever reason, my coconut, chocolate, banana, maca, mesquite & goji “shake” was just abysmal yesterday.  Actually made my stomach hurt.  Plus, it got all gelatinous.  Mmmmmm … grainy pudding!  Yeccchhhhhh!  Jason liked it ok, but I added too much mesquite, also.  I forgot that too much mesquite tastes a little like vomit to me.  Don’t know why.  Just does.  That’s why I usually add just about a 1/2 or 1/4 teaspoon of it to each 2 heaping tablespoons of cacao I use.  In my opinion it’s amazing as a complementary flavor, and shouldn’t be used in high concentrations.  Maybe that’s why my stomach hurt.  Who knows?  Jason ended up drinking the rest of mine, cause I just couldn’t take it.

For lunch I ate nothing, as my stomach was still upset, and the idea of food, much less chocolate food, made me wanna hurl!  So no lunch.  On the way home, driving by McDonald’s actually made me shake!  I wanted to stop in so bad I was getting a little nuts!  But I prevailed!!!  )  What’s odd is that i haven’t eaten McDonald’s hamburgers in YEARS!

When I got home, I was on the war path for a salad again!  I mean I NEEDED one!  So I’m thinking that cacao and greens are a very good combo for me.  If I was craving something like pizza or lasagna or any other cooked food for that matter, I would have no real trouble keeping myself from eating it.  But if my body is crying out for green leafs, for Pete’s sake, who am I to deny it that?  And why am I referring to my body and my mind as though they are different entities?  I guess I’m just too used to it.  Well, there’s another thing to put on my to do list:  Start thinking of all parts of my body and systems as one thing, since they are.

On a completely different subject, I have long wanted some nice, thick, heavy glass serving plates and glasses, especially for the Go Raw, Not Crazy © books.  Nothing takes a beautiful dish and makes it look like crud faster than an ugly old beat up, plastic bowl, cup or plate.  So when he got home from school, Jahn and I went to Value Village (a favorite thrift store of ours), and picked up some of the most gorgeous crystal and glass serving plates, platters, ice cream social type glasses and apertif glasses known to the human race.  Since I only needed one of each of most of them, it didn’t matter that they didn’t have mates.  How many times do I need to show a chocolate shake in a book anyway, right?  Also, some of the glasses came in 3′s, so I got those for serving delights to my Valenti boys at home.  I love it when somebody gives their dishes in 3′s to Value Village — ’cause all we need are 3!

While still out, we stopped by Costco, as they are the only place in town where we can get a certain kind of mango that Jason likes.  Jahn saw the pizza on the sign and started going a little nuts for it.  Poor dear.  He’s gluten intolerant, so I couldn’t get it for him even if we ate cooked food, but he was going through a hard patch, so I told him we’d try to make some raw pizza.  Now I had to think FAST on my feet, because I didn’t have ANY idea how to do this.  We went to Terra Organica since no one else in town has such a selection of raw foods already prepared, and started our search for ingredients.  Thankfully, Livin’ Spoonful makes some of the most amazing raw crackers on the PLANET!!! I picked up a package of the Sunny Garden Herb, as they have flavors much like pizza already in them.  (The company puts the gluten-free spin on their site, but they are actually raw, too!)  I got Jahn a raw cookie as well, and gave him a taste of the cracker.  HE LOVED IT!  Whew!  One ingredient down (crust), two to go (sauce &  cheese).  So I got a few nice red, ripe tomatoes, a package of sun-dried tomatoes and out the door we went.  When I got home, I put 1 small tomato, a handful of sun-dried tomatoes, about a tablespoon (accidentally) of Italian seasoning, a pinch of Celtic grey sea salt, and a few dashes of pepper (Jahn loves his stuff spicy).  Blended it up in the Vita Mix, and it came out tasting, if not feeling, exactly like pizza sauce.  (Jason suggests water and chia be added next time to make it come out more like an actual sauce next time.  Plus, then it will be thicker and I can then blend it longer.  I think I’ll take him up on that!)

So I took a cracker, spread a bit of sauce on it, topped it with the only thing I could find which was hemp seeds (for protein, and because they look white, sort of like the color of raw cheddar), and plopped it down in front of the wee one.  Would he eat it?  Tune in tomorrow to find out.

KIDDING!

He put Herby on it (he puts that stuff on everything savory — no, I mean EVERYTHING!!!), promptly gobbled it up and said it was delicious!  I about fell on the ground in shock!

Jahn gobbles up his "pizza" with gusto!

So that’s going in the kid recipe book for SURE!  For dessert, I made him a mango lassi, as he’s been missing those, too.  He used to go out for Indian food with his dad, and really missed his lassis.  I cut up 2 mangos, a young thai coconut, and set the Vita Mix a-whirlin’.  Good LORD was it bland!  Added agave, still not quite right.  Added the juice of half a Clementine orange to give it some oomph (this batch is rather tart), and Jahn said it didn’t really taste like a lassi, but that it was very good.   “You can save the rest for Pop,” he said.  Well, I can’t win them all.

All this excitement with “pizza” and “lassis” and helping someone stay raw made me forget about what I was up to, which was chocolate.  So I had the left over mango bits with chocolate sauce (quite good!) and sent the little one to bed.

All in all, my day was more about Jahn and his diet than it was about me and mine.  But that’s ok.  I got 2 new recipes that will be highly effective in the future out of it, and some of the prettiest dishes I’ve ever owned.