Donna’s Pilgrimage – on the road to beautiful

So…today I met some friends for lunch. Their favorite restaurant is the China Dragon…trouble for me. They all hit the buffet for their tasty Chinese treats while I scoured the menu for a salad of any kind. No luck. I ordered the vegetable stir fry which came with your choice of soup (none were vegetarian) and rice (none were vegan). I passed on the soup and ordered the vegetable fried rice. They felt bad for me, and gave me a veggie egg roll which had egg in it (so did the fired rice)…who knew? I picked at my food, and finally just gave it back to the waitress, saying I was finished. It was awful. I need some kind of plan bc tomorrow we are going to face that same situation again when we take grandpa out for his birthday lunch. I thought every one had a salad, but NOT…
Anyhow, I was famished by dinner time. Luckily we had some leftover soup and cabbage salad. But I’m craving chocolate or junk food or cooked food. Guess that theory that cooked food is addicting has some truth to it. I can beat this if I get a big glass of water and go to bed soon….sounds like a plan.

I’ve been wanting to make this raw un-chicken noodle soup since we began our raw thing this time. It uses raw potatoes as noodles, and as I remember was really yummy and satisfying. This particular recipe uses dried coconut blended with water for the broth. It took me awhile to remember the coconut when I was shopping at Roots or Mom’s (My Organic Market), but I finally remembered it, found it, and bought it last week.
Our soup today was yummy. I substituted sprouts for the celery, added some of our marinated mushrooms, and used my fun cutter to make the potato noodles. The blending warmed it just a bit, so it was very comforting as well as filling. It makes enough for 2 meals, so tomorrow’s dinner may be a corn chowder using the leftover broth now patiently cooling and waiting in a pint jar in the frig. That was lunch.
Dinner was our old favorite, cabbage corn salad, green salad and fruit salad…all leftover from previous meals. The soaking wild rice will be ready tomorrow, and I also have sprouted lentils and sunflower seeds waiting. i think there will be a chili coming soon. Maybe during the Super Bowl. Nothing says football party like chili!
Meanwhile Sat. is grandpa’s birthday, so we will be taking him out to lunch to celebrate…either his favorite Italian cafe (their salads are sad) or IHOP ( is there anything raw there?). This will be a real raw adventure. See if we can pull it off without being too weird…
On a side note, today is the first day I have done 20minutes on the nordic trac. I’ve been slowly working my way to this point so I can do this 3-5, maybe 7 times a week. It’s one of my favorite ways to exercise…just turn on the ipod and nordic trac away. My stronger body is in the making, and that makes me very happy.

After an amazing Sunday with special peeps in Alexandria where the crepes rocked, but raw was not a priority, I’m back to uncooking and cooking in my own gorgeous kitchen in my own lovely house. We haven’t been having breakfasts, but have opted for tea (found an herbal chai that is yummy) and fruit while we read and write. We usually gather at the table for lunch, then eat supper by the fire. We’re still eating on our cauliflower salad and our marinated eggplant and our green salad. I added a fruit salad to the menagerie tonight that will also be our breakfast or lunch tomorrow with manna bread slathered with cashew butter (and maybe a clausen bread and butter slice and sprouts….sounds awful, but very tasty).
The new Mother Earth news has an article about urban homesteading that really caught my eye, and has me daydreaming of bigger and better gardens. Time to order the seed catalogues and make some choices so I can get a head start when the time is right…next month for seed starting, and March for peas and who knows what else. I really liked the idea of verticle gardening…more trellises and vines and and pretty fences.
Tomorrow I plan on making more raw trail mix. Should really do it right now, since I ate the last bit this afternoon. Luckily I have the biggest stainless steel bowl in the world, so I can make gallons, some to give away, and most to freeze for later snacking.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a shelf John made last summer, but never painted. My dad painted it black, now I’m embellishing…my favorite part. Hopefully we will be hanging it tomorrow along with a 2-man saw my father cleaned up for us, and a special slate picture frame I brought home from my fun time in Alexandria.

Yesterday we ate out for lunch and just about finished the veggie salad for dinner…again over chiffanaud (sp?) of mesclun and topped with chunky avocado. So today I plan to experiment with some different salads…broccoli and cauliflower, fruit, and green. If I have those stashed in the frig, we’re good for awhile. I want to get some dried coconut to try a new soup recipe that uses raw potatoes as noodles, so later we may head to Roots for some exotic ingredients to make our food even more delicious. Those Frontier Spices rock!
I also have some more zucchini in the frig just waiting to be turned into noodles. Raw spaghetti has become one of our staples. Mike is the most amazing sauce maker. He always knows just what to add to make things even more delicious. And I no longer feel guilty asking his “more than” help.
I also cut up some portabella mushrooms to marinate in olive oil, braggs aminos and garlic. Some I chunked for salads and some I sliced for open face sandwiches, but found myself just chowing down on the chunks when I needed a midnight snack. So good, and definitely worth the garlic breath.

No new raw revelations today. We started our morning with “pudding”- blended 2 handfuls of cashew, 1 mango, 2 bananas, and 1/2 bag of frozen cherries. Yummy, but cold, so it was accompianed with a chai tea. I have been trying to cut back on the caffeine by starting my day with a green drink, and herbal detox tea, but the chai tastes so goooooooood, and warms me to the bone…always a good thing.
We went out for lunch, again. I took Sarah’s advice to always order “to go” at Panera bc the portions are larger, and she is right. Thanks, Sarah! My Greek salad and apple filled me up for more than 5 minutes. After lunch my friend Rosemary and I headed to our funnest adventure spots…the Mission store. We both found Valentine treasures, and had a ball!
I’m making my dad’s fave breakfast cake tonight, so the house is smelling so good and warm and comforting and sweet. Bread, esp. hot from the oven, and all its mutations is what I miss most when I eat raw.

Today was an easy day. I took a friend to lunch at Great Sage. So…breakfast was a clementine and banana, then a yummy southwestern salad at G.S. and more of our veggie salad from last night on greens with grapes for dinner. John did dig into that humus for lunch. He swears there was no fuzz. He loaded it on some seed manna bread and topped it with a clausen pickle…he said it was heaven…glad I was eating out.

We’ve been raw for 22 days at last count. A kind of new year’s resolution which followed the cancer diagnosis. We’ve had some disasters…zucchini humus is disgusting. And even though John said he would eat it, it’s still untouched in the frig and is now growing fuzz.
So, I was hoping to share successes and keep a record right here of what we eat, how we prepare, and what we’re doing today to keep us from starving or calling Papa John….
Right now I’m soaking lentils in a big jar that will sprout in 2 days. Tomorrow morning I will add another jar of soaking sunflower seeds, and some more wild rice to soak.
My new strategy is to make lots of one thing then use it in different ways, thereby staving off boredom and time crunches…as in “have to eat immediately or faint”.
At first this raw thing was just overwhelming. My dad is a meat and potatoes man, and since I feed him too, I was really stressed by thinking about, planning, then executing 2 different kinds of meals 2 or 3 times a day. What really helped was making and freezing gobs of meat and potato meals that can be defrosted and served quickly, and that are some of dad’s faves.
Now I’m free for a few weeks to give my energies to raw and tasty.
So, tonight I made a huge bowl of veggie salad with soaked wild rice, (I try to keep some of this soaking every other day or so bc it’s so versatile), and cut up tomatoes, some thawed corn and edamame (technically blanched before frozen, but some of my raw books don’t seem to mind), zucchini, raw salsa, sundried tomatoes, sweet red pepper, mushrooms, and green beans that had been marinating for the afternoon in my new fave dressing…olive oil, braggs raw apple cider vinegar, bragg’s soy sauce, with a touch of mustard to bind keep it from separating. I topped it with some chopped avocado, black pepper, some more dressing, and we chowed down. There’s plenty left to put on top of greens tomorrow for a green salad or to spice up with a raw spaghetti sauce or chili sauce for yet another meal.
Our late breakfasts have been fruit salad and manna bread with raw almond or cashew butter or apples and/or pears and our raw trail mix blended together.
We keep a huge bowl of fruit in the kitchen for snacking throughout the day along with our raw trail mix, and lots of John’s favorite, dates.
That’s our journey so far. Share your recipes and ideas with us, pls. Let us know what works, and what doesn’t…besides that zucchini humus, we’ve also not had much luck with those almond/carrot pates. That said, we did stuff some portabellas (taking out the gills and stems- good advice from chef Sarah) with a cashew pate that we spiced with cayenne, that everyone liked. Everyone being Mike and Sarah. We’ve been eating raw with them when they come over for dinner on Sunday nights. So far there haven’t been any complaints, but we do have lots of wine, too. That covers a multitude of mistakes.
We are still talking about pulling out the champion, but haven’t done it yet, even though we have 10lbs. of organic carrots waiting in the frig.
The journey continues….