Recipe: Summer Zucchini-guine with Miso

Day 14 of my 30-day 100% Rawgust adventure, and I am so psyched to be sharing my first raw food creation with you. This is the very first raw recipe thought up completely from scratch in reaction to what tastes and food my body was craving. And it was delicious! A really nice, light, flavorful pasta dish for the summer. I would do a few things differently next time around, and I am including these potential variations in the recipe below. As with all raw recipes, take liberties with it and mix up the veggies based on what your body gravitates towards. Bon appetit!

Summer Zucchini-guine with Miso

Summer Zucchini-guine with Miso

Pasta: one round zucchini spiral-sliced in a saladacco to make wide noodles. I have recently started using the round zucchinis as they make thicker strips then the long squash, and I love a nice pappardelle noodle.

Sauce:
- Bring water nearly to a boil (this will be the quantity of your sauce so use as much or as little water as you want. Remember also that the zucchini will expel water unless you salt and drain it prior to mixing in with the sauce).
- When the water has cooled a touch, mix in with 1/2 T of white miso. Let sit while you prepare your veggies.
- Cut up your veggies. I chose thinly sliced yellow onion (1/4 of an onion), freshly shelled peas (my first time eating raw peas - yum yum and yum! be sure they are not old- you will know because old peas' skins come off and the peas split- as old peas are bitter), thinly sliced radishes (about 6), green onion (2 bunches), 1/2 green pepper. You can see I was gravitating towards bitter and spicy veggies... I will add tomato next time.
- Back to your miso: cut up ginger (I did 2 T) and add together with sesame oil (few squirts) to miso. I also added a touch of agave, but next time I will use lucuma as I prefer the taste, and the powder will help to thicken the sauce. Whisk it up!
- To serve, I put the veggies on the bottom of the bowl, then added the noodles, then poured the sauce over the top. Stirred it up, and ate it with a smile.

Any comments or thoughts, please share. And enjoy!

Final sprint!

I am rounding the corner and starting the last week of the 30-Day Raw Feast! (Yes, I am back to calling it a feast!)

Lunch today is pumpkin soup with fennel, red onion and zucchini croutons. Does this look as delicious to everyone else as it does to me?

Half-way point

I am now in my third week of the 30-Day Raw Challenge. Today I will use the descriptor challenge because it does not feel like a feast. The fall weather is chilly, the office is chillier, and the thought of cold food for lunch was making me grumble. But, I made it through lunch without giving into my desire for the three cheese pizza and its heavenly smell that wafted around me throughout the entire meal. So why did I want to eat the pizza, and therefore why did I choose not to?

I believe the desire to chow down on the cheesy pizza came from the association I make between its smell and past happy pizza-eating memories. I link pizza with relaxed, fun times with friends and family, with parties and late night talk sessions, and all of these memories are bathed in warm lighting. The urge to eat pizza is not for the actual pizza itself, but for the associative emotions.

So why didn't I eat it? I reminded myself of the simple fact that we eat (or we should eat) for nutrition. There is no nutrition in a piece of pizza. The crust is dead (sometimes rancid) grains stripped of all nutrition, the sauce is processed (heated at high temperatures) and therefore inactive, and the cheese is most probably pasteurized (heated at high temperatures) and therefore dead as well. There are no live, active enzymes in the pizza. It adds no value to your body, and, even worse, requires that you spend energy digesting it. So instead of giving you energy, it depletes you.

Yes, you can argue, but it tastes good. Does it? Our mouths are trained to enjoy the tastes we feed it. If you eat salt on every meal, you will need and crave more salt for the food to taste good. Likewise for sugar and fat. And it works the other way too! Eating crunchy fresh vegetables and juicy fruits trains your mouth to crave natural sweetness, textures and flavors.

So I steered away from the pizza and headed to the salad bar. Made a big bowl of carrots-cucumbers-tomato-lettuce-pumpkin seeds-alfalfa sprouts, and added lemon juice on top as I find its acidity really helps cut down on mouth cravings. One of my objectives for these 30 days is to retrain my mouth and break mental associations with food. I have made it for 16 days, I am more than half-way there! Just need to make it through today...

My raw hiccups

I am now into week 2 of the 30-day raw challenge/ feast. Attempt number 1 failed after 6 days for a combination of reasons, all of which I seem to have magically resolved! I expect a new crop of obstacles to pop up shortly, but so far, attempt number 2 is going remarkably smoothly. I thought others might be interested to hear, and perhaps discuss?, the first set of issues I faced, so here is a quick recap.

• Integration of raw and society. My first hiccup was self-consciousness. This came to the fore most prominently at work and when eating out with friends. There is a long discussion thread on this topic at rawfoodtalk so I will not go into all the aspects of this topic, but I have two key takeaways which I hope will be helpful to others. One, the individual constitutes society, and, therefore, society takes the form and substance that we individually give it. And two, most people are not concerned about what others eat. Of  those who are concerned, some will be genuinely interested to learn about the decision to go raw, and others will feel threatened and challenged by a choice that is different than their own. But this will happen with any topic that is based on a personal decision. So I got over myself and scratched self-conscious from the list.
  
  
• Eating in restaurants. This is related to issue #1 above. Ordering raw on a menu in Paris can be difficult, and raw vegan is extremely difficult. The options are less (if any), and ordering a small green salad for dinner while your friends eat savory, larger meals can make you feel isolated. Eating together is a social behavior, and changing this behavior is not easy. You are breaking years of habit and associations you have formed between food and friends. As I have done several cleanses in the past, I do have experience breaking food habits, so I immediately recognized the thought process and questions I had to address to get over this one. In the end it boils down to one question: Do you choose to eat this food? If yes, then be happy about your choice. And spending time with people is what makes memories, not the food that is on your plate. (Ok, in some instances this will not be true - if I am ever lucky enough to be at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, I will probably not be eating raw...).
  
  
• Chocolate cravings. No need to go into details on this one! But there is raw chocolate, and from what I have read about it, it is a superfood high in anti-oxidants and rich in essential minerals. So I have ordered raw cacao powder as well as raw chocolate bars from Mamma Earth, a UK-based website selling raw food products. It is suppose to be delicious, stay tuned for a future post!

Day 2

To rid myself of any white sugar temptation, I brought the lovely organic madeleines I had at home to work today and distributed them around the office. Hope the free sugar does not result in any bad kharma. They were organic, bio as we say here in France.


Day 2 of the 30 Day Raw Extravaganza went off without a hitch. Banana and Kusmi tea for breakfast, asparagus with mock salmon paté and a red cabbage-mesclun-pignoli salad for lunch. Pear for a mid-afternoon snack.


Dinner was delicious - zucchini angel hair pasta with marinara sauce. The two pictures on the left are the zucchini angel hair pre-sauce, and with the deliciously chunky sauce.

Dessert was strawberries with almond cream. Yum!

Off to upload Episode 3 commentary to Facebook - Gossip Girl Commentary: XOXO by T & S If you watch Gossip Girl, check out the group!

À demain!

Day 1

Today was a great kick-start to the 30 day challenge/feast. As I was working from home, it was a bit easier too as my kitchen is stocked with fresh fruits and veggies, sprouted quinoa, fresh herbs, and soaked nuts and seeds.

Before breakfast I hydrated with water touched with a drop of food-grade Hydrogen Peroxide. Yes, it's healthy (diluted!), and it adds free radicals to your blood which is a good thing! Adding extra oxygen helps stabilize all those free bad radicals in your body. And you will notice the change, such as clear eyes and skin. A touch of oxygen is especially great for urban dwellers like moi-même.

Breakfast was a green juice: 2 turnips, 1 cucumber, 3 carrots, 1 tomato, knob of garlic. I always fill a shot glass with the fresh juice and mix it with spirulina. I call it the Good Morning! blue green energy shot.

Mid-morning snack of banana.

Lunch was a maki roll of mock salmon paté wrapped in nori, and a pear-strawberry-mesclun salad. I had the mock salmon paté already prepared, so it took 5 minutes to whip up. Recipe for the paté is from Jennifer Cornbleet's book: Raw Food Made Easy for 1 or 2 People Great book! Simple, easy recipes that don't require a dehydrator or fancy (expensive) ingredients.

Mid-afternoon snack of avocado boat (1/2 an avocado) overspilling with tomato-cilantro-redeyechili salsa. Yea, it was spicy. And a handful of dates to satiate my sweet tooth.

Dinner is going to be zucchini soup; also a recipe from the above lauded book. Deelish!

See you on Day 2, and until then, be sure to do something to celebrate your health.