Monday, January 10, 2011

Day 1 - Let's Get it Started


Day 1 went well, considering Mondays are relatively easy to "eat well". I sit at work and eat whatever I've brought for lunch and drink lots of water. Pretty typical. Very little temptation. In the past couple of months, however, I've become a regular consumer of a medium cafe au lait with soy. This is basically 3/4 coffee and 1/4 steamed milk of cozy goodness. For the past several weeks, I've been getting decaf so I didn't feel the hit in my energy level. But no less, this drink is very comforting in the morning, and today I was without. ...Read my first post if you joined the party late...


Moving on...I ate an apple, an orange and a raw food bar (dehydrated fruit/nuts) and drank about 75 oz of water. As part of the detox, we're supposed to drink half of our weight in ounces of water each day. I've exceeded mine and it felt pretty normal, yay.

Here at home for the evening, we made our first raw meal of the month: Pasta Alfredo & Salad w/ Italian Viniagrette. The recipe was adapted from The Rawtarian.

I started with soaking approx. 2 cups of cashews overnight - this gets the enzymes working in the nuts so that your digestive system has an easier time breaking them down. The nuts were large and soft in the morning, so I stuck them in the dehydrator to dry out a bit. I did the same to a bag of flax seeds that we'll play with tomorrow!

Alfredo Sauce:
2 cups cashews (soaked and dried optional)
1-2 tbsp lemon juice
3 garlic cloves
1 tsp celtic sea salt
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
Italian seasoning

Put all ingredients into a blender and POOF, alfredo sauce in less than 2 minutes! FYI, these measurements make a TON of sauce. I'll probably make half the amount in the future...I have lots of leftover that I'll probably end up eating with carrots at lunch.
This is our VitaMix, 2-horse power of blending brute, baby! Sauces turn out super creamy because they are completely pulverized.

Next up is the Pasta: All you need is a few zucchinis and a spiral slicer, or a veggie peeler to create the noodle-like effect. This is the Joyce Chen spiral slicer that I got for Christmas last year - only about $20 on Amazon - and it allows you to do lots of fun stuff with veggies.

One zucchini made this much pasta. I ended up using all 5 of our zucchinis, because the sauce recipe made SO much sauce.

Combine your pasta with the alfredo sauce, and voila! Add additional lemon juice, garlic or salt to taste. I ended up using an entire lemon, and it really brightened up the flavor.

Not bad for day one!







Check back tomorrow for my homemade flax crackers. They're dehydrating as we speak =D

Cheers,

K

8 comments:

  1. This may be completely a wrong question, but do milk and cream count as "raw" ingredients? What if the milk is organic? Either way, I definitely want to try these recipes!

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  3. Technically unpasteurized milk can be considered raw, but not vegan. Unpasteurized milk is illegal in the U.S. I believe.

    SO the "cream" in this case is cashews. Sneaky huh!

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  4. Unpasteurized milk IS sold for "dog/cat consumption".
    I've bought raw goat milk before.

    Now, whether you feed it to the dogs or cats...

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  5. Interesting, did you buy raw cow's milk for the dog/cat? I've heard it's good for you, just didn't realize it's available!

    We buy raw milk organic cheese - really good pepperjack.

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  6. these look delicious! and i can't believe 1 zucchini makes that much ... was it big or average size? do you think the sauce would work with a regular food processor?

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  7. I thought the zucchini was on the smaller side, but maybe it was closer to average. Yea it makes quite a bit of "angel hair pasta".

    In a food processor the nuts might just stay a little chunkier, but it'll be pretty similar. You can also make a dryer version that is more like a cheese spread, add herbs, etc. =)

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  8. yum!! i've heard of using zucchini and cashews for an alfredo dish. excellent job! you two are quite the chefs over there. i'd love to try this!

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