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Category Archives: Raw Foods

Dr. Oz suggests raw food

Written on January 5, 2010 by hollie in In The News, Raw Foods

The Dr. Oz website has a whole section on raw foods, called The Raw Food Challenge, designed to help you transition to a raw foods diet. I’m floored. After the last few years of listening to mainstream news talk about how crazy those raw foodists are (It’s all an eating disorder! Enzymes aren’t necessary!), here’s the Doc himself showing people how to switch to a raw food eating plan.

What do you guys think? Would you consider a raw foods diet if your doctor told you to think about it? Would you be more or less likely to consider eating raw if you had cancer?

Me, I think I’d love to go mostly raw someday, if it’s possible for me to get all my macronutrient requirements met with my finicky taste buds, but I can’t imagine being 100% raw. I really appreciate Carmella’s comment at the end of this post (filled with beautiful photographs!) about how she eats a little cooked food now and then, and doesn’t try to be so rigid with her eating. I love the idea of eating a nutrition-soaked diet, but I don’t like the idea of never being able to eat out with friends, or of forcing my dinner hosts to do anything more complicated than, “No meat please”.

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Happy New Year everyone!

Written on December 31, 2009 by hollie in Going Vegan, Raw Foods

I hope everyone is going to have an awesome evening! I’m at home with the guys and the kids, enjoying a quiet evening. I dislike crowds and traffic, so staying home tonight is actually a nice treat. We’re going to watch some fireworks on the TV pretty soon, and until then I was reading some of my favorite bogs.

After clicking on something at the Raw Reform E-Journal led me to a community called Raw Food Rehab, and now I’m over there reading a ton of great information about raw foods! I love food communities, especially vegan and raw foods ones, because they are filled with cheerful people practically exploding with excitement over VEGETABLES, and whenever I read their comments and recipes and blog entries, a little bit of that enthusiasm rubs off on me. I don’t wake up and become a raw foodist, but it definitely reminds me to drink my kale smoothies, and keep on truckin’ in this journey toward Vegetable Acceptance in my life.

On that note: today is ONE MONTH VEGETARIAN! I’m so happy about that! I did have one fast food meal (which chicken) during this month, and I’ll write about that later. The result was awful – I felt sick immediately (among other sensations and emotions) – and I know I’m meant to be vegetarian. If that was some kind of test, well, it was clear to me afterward that I’m a bean girl.

I’m excited to be going into 2010 with a month of vegetarianism behind me! It feels like a great way to start the year. I’m hoping to post more recipes, photos, and even movies in the coming months. I’m starting to get my bearings a little bit with this – what to eat every day, that sort of thing. I’ll be soaking both white beans and adzuki beans tonight, and tomorrow I’m going to make some lentil soup for lunch.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

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Kale chips are making me fat

Written on October 12, 2009 by hollie in Raw Foods, Weight Loss

In the last 7 weeks I’ve gained 7 pounds. Yes, we can do the math, but let’s just say it out loud, shall we? That’s A POUND A WEEK. Every time I step on the scale I wonder what the heck is going on. Since we moved to Seattle I’ve definitely been eating more junk food, but not that much more. I’ve also been exercising a lot more than usual, which I’d have expected would cancel the extra M&Ms right out. So what’s going on? I finally solved the puzzle. It’s the kale chips.

Basically, you take an entire head of kale and chop it up, bathe it in marinade, and dehydrate it until it’s crisp and delicious. The taste is savory, which I don’t get a lot of since I don’t like meat much, and it’s also a “raw food”, and “raw foods are healthy”, and you can see where I’m going here, right? Right. If you look at the marinade recipe, you’ll see that magic word: TAHINI.

Tahini is sesame seeds, made into a paste. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a cup of tahini, roughly 1100 calories. I’m pretty sure God made sesame seeds so tiny precisely so that we wouldn’t eat 1100 calories worth of them at one sitting. I’m betting kale chips are going against the divine plan, because do you know what happens when you dehydrate something? It gets smaller, and cuter, and easier to eat. A batch of kale chips is an entire head of kale coated in sesame fat, and then shrunk down to fit neatly in a cereal bowl, which you can finish off in just a few crunchy, yummy bites. Mmmmm, I’m getting hungry……

I can easily eat an entire batch at one sitting, and in fact I frequently do. I’m estimating I eat one or two batches of kale chips a week, which is 2200 extra calories a week! It takes 3500 calories to make a pound, which means all my body has to come up with to sock away that extra pound a week is another 1300 calories, and I’m sure I’ve been eating that much extra in junk food.

So there you go. If you’re too thin, I’d definitely recommend becoming a kale chips addict. If you’re carrying too much extra weight, I’d suggest you save the kale chips for a treat, not breakfast. In my next post, I’ll outline what I’m going to do to lose weight. Again.

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Sweet potato chips not so chippy

Written on September 9, 2009 by hollie in Raw Foods

I tried the sweet potato chips from The Sunny Raw Kitchen blog today (great blog!), and it’s been almost 9 hours and they’re still bendy. They taste like they want to be good, but they just can’t manage it. I’m about to go to bed, so I guess I’ll just leave them in overnight? Which means I’m running the risk they could be EXTRA chippy tomorrow.

This is the frustrating thing with recipes that don’t list dehydrating times, yet at the same time it can be really hard to know how long to give when creating a recipe, since everyone’s dehydrator is different. I’ve read of a few long-term raw foodies who don’t even use a dehydrator anymore; apparently a lot of people grow out of them over time. I’m still a complete n00b, and I love mine.

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How to make delicious kale chips in the dehydrator

Written on September 9, 2009 by hollie in Deep and Meaningful Commentary, Raw Foods

Okay, confession time: I’m currently on my fourth batch of these. I like them better than bacon. BETTER THAN BACON. Even while I know I could end up the product of broken home after this, abandoned by Greg and Jason, scorned by my family, but it’s true! I can’t deny it! They are freaking delicious.

I got my recipe from a post on the forum Raw Food Talk, and the original recipe is called Chrissy’s Goddess Chips. Be sure to read her directions too. I didn’t have a few of her ingredients though, so I ended up with a different, more bare bones version that looks like this:

Dehydrator Kale Chips

3/4 c sesame tahini
1/2 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 c water
1/4 cup nama shoyu
1 lemon, juiced

1.) Stick all this in a blender and whip it up until it looks like a dressing you’d put over salad. It should be somewhat runny. If not, if it’s very thick, add a little more water. I haven’t had to add water yet, but other recipes suggest it.

2.) Prep the kale: rinse it to get any dirt off, and then pat or shake dry. Then what I do is lay a leaf in front of me on the cutting board, fold the leaf over so that the spine is sticking out, and then take a sharp knife and slice that spine right out. I do this for all the leaves, and I’m using the Lacinato Kale*, so it’s pretty easy to do. Then slice the kale crosswise into strips, about the width of bacon. Muhahaahahaha.

You want to slice the spines out because if you don’t, they dehydrate into LITTLE TWIGS, which aren’t fun to pick out of your teeth.

3.) Then I put the dressing in a big bowl, and put the kale strips in the big bowl, and use my hands to mix it all up.

4.) Place the strips on the dehydrator sheets, on the Teflex sheets over the mesh. Don’t pile them up, make sure they’re all separate from each other, although they can be close. The strips will drip a little – try to shake them off a bit before you put them on the sheet, although there will be some drip there too. That’s okay.

5.) Put the dehydrator on at 110 degrees, and set a timer for 4 hours.

So far my batches have been going almost exactly 4 hours, which has been great. The exception was when I made the marinade in advance, at night, and then tried to make the kale chips the next morning. The marinade was a lot thicker than I realized (that’s the batch in the photos above and below), and it really stuck to the leaves. It took about 6 hours to get completely crisp, and even then the flavor was more intense than I’d like. Next time I’ll thin it with water if I do that, or whip it up for a few minutes and get it nice and warm.

These are easy to make and taste fantastic. I eat them right off the trays as they’re coming out. Then I put them in a glass container, sealed, and in the fridge. VERY IMPORTANT TO STORE KALE CHIPS IN THE FRIDGE. If you don’t, they wilt and get moist (ick). If you keep them cold, they stay crisp and delicious. TRUST ME.

I eat them all the time, whenever I want a snack, but I think they’re especially good to eat for breakfast, with a banana on the side.

Another recipe for kale chips I haven’t tried is here.

* The last bunch I got was organic, from PCC, and just the one bunch was HUGE. It took up the entire 9 trays of the dehydrator.

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