Raw Fun recipes, avoid boredom tips by Wrenn Blog entry

Blog: QI (Chi) Pig
by Wrenn

Raw Fun recipes, avoid boredom tips

article by Frederic Patenaude on how to avoid boredom,
and also nutritional deficiencies, by keeping Raw food Living FUN

Date: 3/3/2005 9:46:26 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2654 times

Making it Fun !

Avoiding Boredom and Nutritional Deficiencies
on a Raw Food Diet

By Frédéric Patenaude

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The scene looks like this:

you’re hungry, you’re alone,
and you’re going to eat another meal of romaine lettuce,
tomatoes and avocados.
And you’re bored.
And these avocados are starting
to be less interesting than ever.
And it’s raining outside, and cold, and damp.
And you’re wondering, is the fun of eating raw gone?
Will I be able to eat like that forever?
Can this really be healthy?

As pure and as simple as our raw meals can be,
there comes a point for most of us
where boredom can set in,
when we require more variety
or friends to share food with,
else we will might face two things:
lack of enthusiasm and inadequate intake of nutrients.

I’ve told people that simplicity is best.
That a simple meal of ripe mangoes
when you’re hungry beats the best raw
or cooked pie you’ve ever had.
That making a great salad
doesn’t necessarily involve putting everything
but the kitchen sink in it
and that, too often, raw recipes are too complicated
and, as a consequence, difficult to digest.

However, I did not mean that it is better
to be a sad ascetic than a merry epicurean.

It may be because I’m a bit of an epicurean myself.
I love food and,
since I seem to be endowed with a few culinary talents,
I get never bored.
I like to vary my diet and introduce new fruits,
new nuts, new vegetables and new recipes.
And I encourage you to do the same for two things.

First being bored isn’t fun.
Second, it might not be healthy either.

I’ve noticed a few things in raw foodists.
They don’t seem to vary their diet a lot.
They often stick with the few foods that they like.
I’ve noticed for example that many raw foodists
eat avocados everyday.
Others eat almonds everyday.

Many raw-foodists told me
that they eat a meal of romaine lettuce,
avocados, sprouts, and tomatoes everyday.
Sometimes they add some red bell pepper.
Others bananas for lunch a
nd nothing else almost every day of the year.

Is this supposed to be what simplicity is about?
Always eating the same thing? Is this natural?

Chimpanzees are know to eat over 120 different varieties
of plant food in a year.
While carnivorous animals always eat the same
and never get bored,
frugivores seek variety.
Most of us, too, have been raised on a varied diet
When someone only eats porridge and potatoes
every day, we know that things are not going well for him.

As human beings we are used to variety
and, if we don’t have variety,
it’s usually because of a lack of means
or sheer incapacity to cook
(many divorced men find themselves in that situation!).

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On a raw food diet,
variety is even more important
because raw fruits and vegetables provide nutrients
in a less concentrated, more diluted form.

Thus, a certain vegetable may lack
in many important nutrients,
which are compensated by what other vegetables can provide.
It is not enough to look at the charts
and calculate our nutritional intake
because these numbers are wrong.

A tomato grown in a farm in California
doesn’t have the same nutritional value
as another tomato grown in a local garden
or one grown in a hothouse.

The only way we can insure proper nutrition
on a raw food diet is by constantly varying the foods
we eat according to the season.

_______________________________________________________

Let’s review a few pieces of advice and add some more:

1) Vary the fruits — It’s easy to get stuck
eating one food that we like
and forget everything else.
I know, personally, that when grapefruits are in season,
I can eat 2-3 every morning
and forget about the other types of fruit.

But fruit is fun. Fruit is what makes the raw food diet
a lot of fun,
especially when we include exotic fruits in the menu.
So I suggest constantly varying the fruits
that you are eating
and discovering as many tropical fruits as you can.
A durian cure once a year is allowed.

2) Eat according to the seasons —
When I tell people to eat seasonally,
most of them don’t understand.
They think, if something can be bought in a store,
it means it’s in season, right?
Partly. It’s in season somewhere,
but not necessarily in your hemisphere!
Let’s consider the following:
cherries are in season during the summer,
but in our side of the world.
So the cherries you may buy may be imported,
but they are in season for you.
If you find cherries in the stores
in the middle of the winter,
this means they have been imported from a far away country

like Chili, which is situated in the southern hemisphere
where the seasons are reversed!
It is not only completely un-ecological to import foods
from that far away,
but the fruit is also picked way too early
and eating it at that time
doesn’t follow our own biological rhythm.

3) Eating simply doesn’t mean eating just one food
at a meal —
I don’t believe in mono-eating
in the sense that every meal
should be ideally composed of one food alone.
I think this way of eating leads to abuse.
For example, pineapples and oranges are acid.
If we eat only these fruits at one meal
, we’ll likely eat too many of them to satisfy our hunger
and introduce too much acidity in the system.
Dates are too sweet.
Plums contain a particular acid
which can give you the runs if you eat too much.
Melons and papayas are rich in water
but a meal of them doesn’t satisfy.
So I recommend, when eating fruit,
eating 2-3 varieties, ideally not more than that.
And if you like, you can eat them one at a time
like a true mono-eater.

4) Vary your vegetables
— Your mum told you “Eat your vegetables!”
And she was rights.
But the chances are that even as a raw-foodist
you may not be listening to her.
First you may not be eating enough vegetables,
and second you may not vary them enough.
To eat enough vegetables, you have to be creative.
A salad can get boring.
So put your salad in the blender
and make a raw soup sometimes!
Check out some raw soup recipe books for ideas.
Green vegetable juices are also extremely beneficial,
and I recommend to drink some every day, if possible.
I like my green juice to be tasty,
so I mix enough celery juice in it
and sometimes add a little bit of carrot and beet juice
And as for variety, the key is to make the base
of your salad out of a different vegetable
every time and discover the unknown varieties.

5) Don’t eat avocados everyday
— This is my advice for raw-foodists.
Most of them tend to eat too many avocados and too often.
Consider the avocado as one type of fatty food,
not the staple of a raw food diet.
I suggest eating avocados no more than once
every other day.
Try to eat some nuts instead,
and discover new varieties.
Seeds are also excellent. Hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds,
flax seeds and sesame seeds
should be added to the menu more often.
This will help provide a wider range of nutrients
that avocados alone could not provide.

6) When in doubt, blend it up
— Why shun all modern developments
and insist to eat only whole fruits and vegetables
when we have diabolical machines such as the blender
that can transform them into liquid meals
of unsuspected nutritional power?
Hey, a little technology is good. One of my friends says,
“I love my car.”
With the same unabashed mien I say “I love my blender,”
which just happens to be a Vita-Mix
that I use almost everyday.
Smoothies and raw vegetable soups are great ways
to vary your diet and avoid boredom.
And when we add young coconuts, soaked nuts,
avocados and carob powder to the blending orgy,
the possibilities for fun creamy treats are almost endless.

7) When wondering what to eat, go to the Chinese
— The Chinese themselves like to say they'll eat anything
with four legs except a table.
We‘ll close an eye on some of their unscrupulous ways
and concede that they have helped us get out of the dark
ages of raw eating in northern countries,
when no durians were available.
Chinatowns are full of surprises waiting to be discovered.
I even found durian toys.
Then you can learn to say “thank you” in Chinese
(shiay shiay),
or in whatever language the store owners happen to speak.

I gave you some basic recommendations on varying the diet.
However, I didn’t tell you exactly
how you can make your raw meals fun and exciting.
I will now give you some ideas
for quick and fun raw meals,
which will hopefully open your mind to try out more.

A friend of mine, for whom I was un-cooking,
told me with a shrewd look one day,
“It’s all salad anyway.”
I was probably preparing a raw spaghetti from courgettes
or lasagna with eggplant,
and he told me, just like that, “It’s all salad anyway.”

Okay, it may all be vegetables,
but first it doesn’t look like salad,
and second it doesn’t exactly taste like a salad.
The difference between a salad
that looks like a salad
and a vegetable mix
that looks and tastes like something else is,
as Mark Twain once put it,
“the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!”

______________________________________________________

Here are some ideas:

1) Take a nori sheet.
Spread some pumpkin seed butter on it
(available in most health food stores).
Add grated courgettes and rinsed dulse.
Roll up like and eat like a sandwich.
Everyone will think you’re a genius.
If you can’t find pumpkin seeds butter,
use almond butter with a touch of sea salt
to make it taste like peanut butter.

2) For a great smoothies,
blend some papaya, a whole ripe mango,
one teaspoon of spirulina powder
and, if desired, a tiny bit of olive oil.
Blend with some water and beware of flying socks
if you have your friends try it out.

3) Soaked sun-dried tomatoes really add flavour.
Put them in everything that is not sweet
and be ready to discover great combos.

4) Blend frozen durian with other fruits.
Let it thaw for a few hours
and then blend it up with coconut water,
mangoes, or other fruits.
You can even blend it with some carob powder,
coconut water, and a few dates
for an “out-of-this-world experience.”

5) For a quick nut spread,
blend in your food processor
raw tahini and carrots together.
Add your favourite seasonings.

These were just a few ideas to vary your diet
and avoid boredom.
My motto is it should be tasty, healthy,
and easy to prepare.
When I open some raw cookbooks
and find a recipe with a page long worth of ingredients
I ask myself,
“Do they really expect me to spend that much time
just to eat?”
Then I think of all of the time it will take
to wash all the dishes and I give up.
Are they kidding?
I can prepare something in 10 minutes
and it will be just as good, easier to digest
and will leave me enough time to do the things
that I really like to do,
such as writing articles for Get Fresh!

So in conclusion, varying your diet
doesn’t have to get complicated.
It doesn’t involve becoming a raw gourmet genius
. It just means having the attitude of,
“Hey, I’m going to have fun with this
and try something new everyday.”
It’s about being open to try new foods
you’ve never tasted before,
and making sure you don’t eat the same thing every day.

And remember, the cure for boredom is curiosity.
But there is no cure for curiosity.

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for more article from Frederic goHERE">http://www.fredericpatenaude.com/rawfat.html">HERE