Raw for Now

my Humbolt cheese

With apologies to “Humbolt” – I had no ash. So I went for the smoked salt and the black lava salt. So – it was salty. But offset by also being peppery. I enjoyed it, esp. the triple-crème texture. One of the real fun deals about the kitchen here is the shelf of spices – ones common and not so common. I do fear I will be off in search of truffle salt and smoked salt and porcini powder…..

So here is a gallery of some other cheese plates.  The basis for all these lovelies is either cashew or macadamia, then flavored as you will, then served either fresh or put into the n’oven for a spell to cure.

my plate of other cheeses...the green was a favorite: it was a coating of pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds and .....? I'll have to go look it up. But the real favorite was the Plain Jane in the back there. I layered macadamia, cashew, then macadamia and put it in the n'oven overnight. It had a very successful cheese taste and texture.

Daneen's cheese plate...my favorite was the one on the right. That layer in the middle is a very deep & flavorful porcini-tomato sauce she had made as a pizza sauce. It is recycled here to great effect.

Jewell's cheese plate

Tatiana's cheese plate... two favorites here: the amazingly colorful item in the back which is strawberry flavored, and the sienna colored cheese in the front. If I told you she had flavored it with seaweed, you might give it a pass. But that would be a shame.

Teri's cheese plate...my favorite here was the little guy on the left. It had spicy peppers in it that just popped as you ate it.

One of the things you definitely learn in the land of the Raw, is that you do not  – nay, can not – eat the same quantities you may be used to in the land if the Unraw… these items have a different kind of rich. So it rather promotes the slow food approach. Which is a good thing, I think. And hunger – well, kiss hunger goodbye. All this stuff comes with a real sense of “satisfied”.

Jewell's & my tarts

So, just to play catch-up a bit, here’s a handful of photos. “Lunches” of all sorts: savory tarts, portobello burger, cheeses….and granola for a granola and yogurt (made from coconut meat) breakfast. Tons of variations. We won the “most diverse of any of Russell’s classes” award for our cheeses. I’ll return to that subject later.

Marinated Portobello Burger

This looked great and tasted great in all its parts as I made & sampled (which we do constantly as any cook should) but by the time it came to eating it, I gave it to the wait staff.  They are always appreciative!

excellent granola

I am very attached to my granola from home but the recipes we did here had no oats – they were buckwheat based. I was skeptical but I am now converted.

some of my cheeses

These are all cashew or macadamia based. The guy in the back there was also “aged” via the n’oven. More pictures to follow of everyone’s variations. Total fun. And quite, quite tasty. But, as you have heard me say before, filling.

Little brown things that look like hats

Gads. We made chocolate chips. What fun. And the winner of the chocolate tasting (which did actually leave me a bit groaning even thought we took wee little tastes):

Tatiana's chocolate cups

Her chocolate was deep and complex, as she had added cinnamon and cayenne and ginger and cardamon, and there was a gooey yummy hazelnut filling with pecans in it…..tasted like the best turtle you ever had.

We come in each morning and get into our chef garb. We get our places set: cutting board, knives, measuring cups and spoons, bowls, etc. We each work at a station that gives us a lot of marble countertop, drawers for our tools, shelves for other stuff and a “reach-in”, that is, our own under-counter fridge.

The first week, we started each day off with knife skills, which also got us a growing bowl of veg that became kim chee by the end of the week. We might also check on stuff  we have set to sprout or check on stuff that’s drying in the dehydrator (hereinafter to be referred to as the “n’oven” because it’s shorter and more fun). As folks familiar with the Raw know, there is a rolling sort of rhythm that is a challenge sometimes to negotiate. The soaking, sprouting and drying are the actions that need to be choreographed. (I liken it to making bread: do something with ingredients that takes five or ten minutes, set it aside to rise, come back to knead for five or ten minutes, set it aside to rise, etc.)  In our 8:00 – 2:00 day, with this rolling rhythm, we cover quite a few recipes, demonstrations, questions and tastings of everyone’s efforts. But as we head to 2:00, we are also making ourselves lunch.

Here, then,  are some of our lunches:

Fresh Lasagna

This is a fresh lasagna. The layers are thin cut zucchini, softened in oil, salt & pepper. Between layers: a vibrant pistachio pesto, ricotta made from macadamias, marinara made from fresh & sundried tomatoes, spiced with a touch of chili flakes. This version also has sunflower sprouts layered in for crunch and a sweet and tangy yellow tomato slice to top it off.

Yasai Maki

Here is a vegetable sushi. Quite delicious. Everything here would be in your usual maki, but the rice is a delightful combo of jicama, pine nuts, vinegar, agave and sea salt. Inside: avocado, red pepper, cucumber, sunflower sprouts, scallion, sesame seeds & marinated shitaki. The 2 dipping sauces are raw soy with lime juice and a knock-out soy, fresh OJ & tahini combination (terrific on its own with cucumber slices).

Arame salad

This pretty little thing is a seaweed and mixed greens salad that I had some fun putting into a thin-sliced cucumber corset. There’s also radish, orange segments and beets in the salad. All is (looking for a word here that Posh Nosh would use….) baffled ’round with an orange dressing similar to the sushi dipping sauce with the addition of a little sesame and olive oil. Too pretty to eat.

So, that’s a taste, as it were.  Today we had a very light yet hearty taco lunch. Let’s see, where’re those photos….?   Ah…here:

Taco ingredients

Taco assembly

Tacos served up

This used to be a beet

Wow, that went by. I did sorta think I would write each day but instead, wine and truth with classmates has been the name of the game. That’s cool. But now it’s the weekend and I shall try to come to grips with the swirl of thoughts that are in my head.

For starters, it’s been an intense week of pulling back the curtain, getting insights into all the many roads that led we seven (and three more by way of 105degree’ers) to this spot: to OKC – center of Oklahoma. Oklahoma, center of the USofA…..sounds sort of omphalus. Well, for us, for this month, it certainly is the center of the raw world. If you would like a great day-by-day photo tour of our work, please check out classmate Barbara’s blog here.

Rather than duplicate the effort, my thoughts have been about my relationship to food. A lot of the stories we’ve been hearing are about uncomfortable brushes with ill-health, ideological compulsions to “fly right”, understandings of the very broken nature of the food industry in this country (as I write that, I must say “food” and “industry” do make an unhappy and unholy pairing. Our deep collective feeling about that surely explains all those warmly sunlit, on-the-farm ads for I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter and the insistence that Coke and Happy are synonymous).

So realization #1 is this: food is a celebration for me. Food, with family and friends, is Happy. It doesn’t have to be A Celebration – no one’s birthday or Thanksgiving. Every morning when David says “Let’s go get coffee” or comes back from the farmer’s market with a stunning cinnamon roll and we sit together (even both reading our papers), it is a celebration and a gift. When I call Dave and Kit and Pendar and say “I am driving past the truck with the fresh-picked corn on it. Dinner? How many ears do you want?” it is a celebration. I finally now understand why I am one of those that cannot eat when I am unhappy.  And it is not, btw, about being hungry. I would have to honestly say that I am just about never hungry, as the word is commonly understood. That is not why I eat. I am embarrassed to admit this since there are so many millions that are not only hungry, but starving.  I realize only too keenly the riches of our life.

Realization #2: Despite the loving relationship I seem to have with food, it does not love me back equally. Damn. I have learned, à la Julia Child, to eat well and in moderation. (Well, sometimes.) But even so, through various experiments, intentional and accidental, I see a food-related raft of “problems” – the morning cough, the stuffed sinuses, headaches, that bloaty feeling, the afternoon energy dive……yup. All that – and more.

Realization #3: Having had – over the past four years – a couple of experiments with juicing and eating raw food (or, as I am coming to prefer, “raw cuisine”), I now have a basis of comparison of how that way of eating makes me feel: all ‘round better. Yes, from every cell upwards. I can even see each and every cell being rejuvenated and breathing a sigh of relief.  “Thank you, Mair”

So where does all this thinking leave me? Not sure. Where will it all lead? Aye, that’s the question.

Two Platings of Beet Ravioli

So, I have been here in OKC since Monday evening. But it has been for work, not raw class. Our friends at the Cowboy Museum asked us to make and install various mannequins for their Native American gallery. That meant lunch and dinner in OKC every day. Mmmm. And we have been partaking of all the good food OKC has to offer. Every meal has been a down-the-middle split complimented by our own salad each. But boy, even doing that, it is a lot of dense food. The land of steak, after all.

Tonight, with our project complete, we made our way to a wonderful out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant that gives you more food for free than the (copious) amount that they put on the plate you actually ordered. Groan. But after our Chile Relleno (yes, split in half), we went over to check out 105 Degrees and treated ourselves to two desserts-to-go (hoping in an hour or so to have room for it).  We have just had a sampling – of course we couldn’t finish the whole of it. And they were fresh and delicious beyond compare. Intense berry and smooth, cool coconut cream exploding on the togue. Devin, who has been giving me a bit of razz about the Raw, was impressed. And he was impressed with the restaurant when we went ’round. And I showed him a clip of soon-to-be-teacher Russell James. Now, he says, he feels better about leaving me. And I am now able to turn my head to this upcoming adventure and I am excited too. Dev and I have had many talks that bring in London (we both go *sigh*). I just realized I am in for an intense month of Russell’s English accent – a life raft in the warm sea of slow southwestern drawl.

Whenever I hear a diet being promoted by promises of “you won’t be hungry”, I always think: I am hardly ever hungry. It is not usually hunger that prompts me to eat.

This article by Karen Knowler addresses that in an interesting way. What do you think?

Go For “The Clean Burn”!

It is not uncommon for me to hear people say, “I do feel better on raw food, but I don’t feel quite as amazing as I expected to feel. Where is all this energy I’m supposed to have?”

There can, of course, be a multitude of reasons for not feeling as good as you could, and way more than we can go into in one article, but today I’m going to discuss one of the most common:  Over-eating.

Whether we eat cooked foods or raw – or a mixture of both, eating more food than we need quite simply overtaxes the body. Digestion takes more energy than any other activity we do – in fact sometimes it can even exhaust us completely (think Christmas Dinner, and your half-comatose relatives asleep in the chair!). It’s incredible that food can make or break our energy in this way, but it really does, and sometimes this can be subtly undermining (which all adds up) and other times blatantly obvious.

When we eat raw foods, generally speaking, our digestive demands lessen. Our foods are more simple, we are eating enzymes rather than needing to find them from our existing stores, and, unless our diet is fat-dense (i.e. eating lots of nuts and seeds) then typically our load is much lighter and much faster to transit through than the average diet.

It is estimated that one in three people in the doctor’s waiting room is there for a colon-related issue. A shocking statistic don’t you think? But hardly surprising when we consider what passes for “food” today and what extremes some people will go to in terms of diversity, quantity and frequency. Of course, most people in this bracket don’t necessarily eat in a way we could consider to be healthy, but there’s so much more to it than just what we eat…

So how is it that some people on raw foods don’t get the amazing energy that myself or others rave about? Especially if you are eating low-fat?

As far as I can see, a lot of it comes down to making sure that when you eat you are genuinely hungry.

My own research over hundreds of clients shows that at least 95% of people I survey either do not know what true hunger feels like and/or do not wait until they are hungry to eat.

What this means is this:

If you are eating when you’re not hungry then you are essentially putting in more food than your body needs. When this is the case, your body will use its precious energy to digest (or “burn” as I like to call it) your food rather than have the energy available to use for something more productive (like feeling good!).

One of my greatest lessons on my own food journey has been to wait until I am truly hungry before I eat. This doesn’t, by the way, mean that I wait until I feel “starving”, just that I know that even if a plain bowl of lettuce leaves was placed in front of me, then I would eat them and genuinely enjoy them because I am that ready to consume.

Why this example?

Because of all the things that we can eat on this planet, green leaves are the least addictive foods of all, and they are among the most nutritious for us… and if we feel drawn to eating them un-dressed and unaccompanied then that’s a great sign that we really are hungry – because,  as you know, our taste buds and bodies can appear so fickle and easily persuaded!

It took me many years to get to the point where I ate only when hungry, but I have to say it really is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the way I eat/ live my life. There is nothing more gratifying than going to eat a meal that you are really and truly ready for. I’m sure I love my food ten times more because of this. It tastes and feels so much better! In fact, I really do find that now if someone places food in front of me or offers me something – even if it’s just a single piece of fruit – if I’m not hungry I get very strong signals from my body not to eat it and I find myself actually physically repulsed by it. Now that’s incredible!

Considering my extensive junk food background, I really do believe that if I can reach this place then anyone can, although I appreciate we all have different issues to overcome in order to get to here.

I call this place of genuine hunger the place of “The Clean Burn”. That’s because I know that when I’m in this place I feel as if whatever I eat is really enjoyed from the moment I start preparing it to the moment it starts its journey down my throat and into my stomach. From this moment on I feel as if the food is being digested and utilised immediately. No hanging around waiting for breakfast to pass through or “falling” on top of last night’s supper and – wait for it – fermenting and rotting. Eugh! It feels as if it is being welcomed with open arms and that my entire body is ready for it and loving it. Now that’s worth waiting for!

It’s rather ironic that throughout our entire childhood and typically, adulthood, we are never taught how to eat properly. Whether we use a knife and fork from an early age seems to be of more importance than whether we are actually ready to eat! It’s no wonder we have the weight issues that we do – a lean body is often a clean body, and a clean body is one that really knows and experiences the feeling of  The Clean Burn on a regular basis.

As I sit here writing this article it is 12:33pm. Today so far all I have consumed is one pint of watermelon juice, which I had as soon as I felt some hunger around about 10:00am. I am just starting to get that Clean Burn feeling now, but I know I’m not quite there yet, so I will wait a little longer before I go downstairs to eat. There is an art in detecting what stage you’re at, and after years of practice and awareness I know now that although what I’m feeling right now would be considered “really hungry” by some people, to me it is a sign that, if I were away from home, I should start looking for food in order to secure it, but if I already have it to not yet eat it as the Clean Burn is not yet fully upon me!

Are these the words of a closet anorexic? No, I can assure you they’re not! I am most definitely not into deprivation at any price, and least of all when it comes to food! No, what I describe here is a way of feeling and being around food that feels quite the opposite to deprivation – if I were to eat now before I got fully hungry and could fully appreciate every ounce of my meal – now THAT would feel like deprivation.

On that note I’m going to ask that you really pay attention to your hunger signals over the next few days and see how far you can go with this. This means ignoring the clock, getting all the “shoulds” out of your head about what, when and how you “should” be eating, and really paying attention to the different degrees of hunger as they unfurl. And yes, of course, waiting until you are FULLY hungry before you begin.

Yes, I know this may sound or feel like advanced stuff and even a little scary for some people, but if you can start to put even a little of this into practice in your daily life then I’d be very surprised if you didn’t start to lose any excess weight you have, gain a lot more energy overall and generally start falling in love with your food – and your body – even more than you ever thought possible.

Oh yes, and did I mention that your food bills may very well go down?!

Enjoy the pursuit of The Clean Burn, a few more minutes wait for your food is a VERY small price to pay for such huge and multifaceted rewards, believe me!

used with the generous permission  of
© 2010 Karen Knowler, The Raw Food Coach publishes “Successfully Raw” – a free weekly eZine for raw food lovers everywhere. If you’re ready to look good, feel great and create a raw life you love get your FREE tips, tools and recipes now at www.TheRawFoodCoach.com.

Do I need an excuse to post this?

some of the wealth of Borough Market, London

Ah, the wonders of the web!
Russell James is an Englishman who has his own funny story of coming to raw. Who knows how I came across his site. But there, among other things, he has posted a very decent smattering of his recipes. I tried them. I consistently liked them. And I liked his approach. Very clean. Happily devoid of doctrinaire ideology.  He would give short weekend courses from time to time in the UK. I thought how much fun if I could get to one. But then his life changed to include a stint teaching month-long courses in OKC.  And there will I be, too, starting end of August.

I’m out here all on my own, friends, so your comments will be most welcome.