So I am on day 3 of my raw food challenge. And while it
started off with good intentions and a fridge full of produce, it’s rough
going. Read it…and weep.
Day 1
I
actually started out with dinner and luckily for me, I happen to like salad. A
lot. But because I was not so
cruel as to make my husband and child go through the raw diet, I prepared some
pasta for them as well as a giant salad for the three of us.
You
would think that preparing a salad would be pretty easy from the rawist point
of view. Wrong. While the vegetable component was fairly simple, the dressing
was not. Our go-to salad dressing had a problem and the name of the problem was
balsamic vinegar.
Vinegar
is a fairly simple: it’s just the byproduct of wine or alcohol making when the
yeast involved in fermenting wine eat up all the sugar and convert it to carbon
dioxide and acetic acid, aka, vinegar. But unlike most vinegars, which are not
cooked in any way, balsamic vinegar is based on the cooked must of the white
Trebbiano grape then left to age (usually in oak casks).
Yup.
Balsamic is cooked. But no problem! I just replaced the balsamic with red wine
vinegar. But in my dressing, I usually also put a pinch of sugar to balance out
the vinegar. Guess what. Commercial sugar, either cane or beet, is out-it’s
based upon the processing of boiled raw beet or cane juice so it can
crystallize. So, out with the sugar and in with the honey. Olive oil? Luckily,
that was OK. But salt? Commercial salt is also made with high amounts of heat.
Luckily, I had some super-pricey French salt that was naturally evaporated by
the sun.
Normally,
salad dressing takes me 3 minutes to do. Thanks to reading and researching
every single ingredient in my usually simple salad dressing, it took me 20. I
was NOT amused. If it weren’t for the glass of wine (thankfully, NOT cooked), I
would just said, “Screw this.” But after my booze, my cooler, rational head
prevailed and told me not to quit. After all, I am doing this in the name of
science!
Day 2
I
usually don’t make breakfast. My husband does that. But before you have this
romantic dreams of breakfast in bed or a whirling dervish of cooking activity,
the breakfast I get is the “Continental[1]”
kind: toast, coffee, butter and jam. If we’re really fancy, we bring out the
yogurt.
As
you can see from my usual breakfast, I was entering a rawist minefield. Bread
is baked. Coffee uses roasted beans and boiled water. Butter, while potentially
acceptable for rawists, is a problem because all the milk here is pasteurized
before being churned. And jam? Always cooked and it already had sugar in it,
which made it double problematic.
What
did I do? Well cereal is out – that came out of cooked grains. I had some
meusli running around. After a quick check of the ingredients, it looked
acceptable, but no yogurt, milk or in fact any dairy product was acceptable.
Before I started getting worried I would have to choke down some breakfast, I
looked in the pantry and saw some soy milk. Saved! Until I realized that to
make soy milk, the beans are boiled and then pressed the make the milk.
In
the end, I ate my muesli raw with a piece of fruit. Wasn’t so bad. And not
having coffee? Well, I guess I could just do some tea with some hot tap water.
I don’t really need the milk for tea, so I was OK.
Two
hours later, I’m not such a happy camper. Lack of caffeine has set in and
despite 3 cups of black tea, I have the headache from hell. I want my coffee. I
want my coffee NOW!!!
Out
of desperation, I decide to consult several raw food books and see if there is
any way to get my coffee fix. The short and the long answer? NO. Out comes the
advil.
Luckily for the raw diet, I don’t eat
lunch (mainly due to the fact that as a writer, I really don’t spend any energy
except for getting cups of coffee…which I no longer can drink). I snack on some
carrots and an apple. I want a yogurt, but that’s not happening. I’ve prepared
another salad for dinner, this time with some nuts and raisins (which,
according to the Raw Food Nazis, is ok).
Kid and hubby get some roast chicken. I try to inhale extra calories
from the smell.
Day 3
After
a hearty breakfast of some more muesli and fruit, I realize my stash of fresh
fruits and vegetables is disappearing…fast. I make a trip to the grocery store
thinking I could get some nut milks, some more produce and nuts and olives as
snack items to tide me over the stomach rumblies.
I
find my goods and I come home. But I realize, I’m exhausted. And I still have a
headache. I think it’s a lack of protein, so I munch on some more nuts and
drink buckets full of water and some juice. No luck. It’s time to use my
lifeline. I call my vegan friend, who seems to have all information on diet and
nutrition.
Bad
news. According to him, the reason why I tired, grumpy and headachy is because
all the “toxins” are leaching from my body. If all the toxins leaving my body
were causing me so much pain, then maybe I should have stuck with keeping the
toxins in my body. At least I
wouldn’t be so bitchy.
He
recommends that I take a B vitamin supplement and a D vitamin supplement. He
also recommends that I start “soaking” raw grains to get something that
resembled a cooked starch, which then gets me thinking about rice. I can do
without bread for eons, but rice? Someone is going to take away my Asian cred
if I can’t get my rice. God damn it…now I want rice.
Seeing
that I am starting to hit the desperation point for food, I start looking into
all the recipes that for rawists. What? I could have pasta and or a sandwich?
Yay! Until I saw the ingredient and equipment list. Someone didn’t tell me in
the Raw Food Newsletter that I would have to invest a small fortune in a
dehydrator, a juicer, a seed sprouter, chia seeds[2],
psyllium husks,[3] dulse[4]
galore. I tried looking around e-bay for a cheap dehydrator. Cheap being 170
dollars I didn’t have. Seed sprouters – uh, not available at the grocery store.
Needless to say, I didn’t have any
psyllium husks, chia seeds or dulse.
Back
to eating another salad. Or maybe not. I realized that there were a bunch of
proteins I could eat that were not “cooked.” I live in Scandinavia…there’s
pickled herring galore! Also, there’s gravlax! But of course, there’s a catch.
Both herring and gravlax are traditionally eaten with bread, mainly to
counteract to saltiness. No bread, therefore, just salt. I tried making a
little ssam like gravlax burrito. SOL. Too Salty.
Ten cups of water later, I’m still
thirsty and hungry. Try an extra bowl of raw oatmeal with almond milk to quell
the hunger. Not working. I’m just going to bed. I’m going to have to find a
solution because I’m starting to get really annoyed with this diet. But that
will have to wait until tomorrow.
Too…tired…to…think…about…food…again.
[1] I’ve always
been really curious as to why this breakfast has been called a “continental”
breakfast. Granted, this is the standard of breakfast for most across
continental Europe (Even the French don’t eat a croissant everyday…it’s a
occasional thing. You are more likely to see the French eat a baguette with butter.) But who decided that coffee and toast
was the purview of the “Continent”? Hmmm.
[2] Yes, this is
the same stuff from “Chi-chi-chi-chia” Head. Apparently, chia seeds are a
“superfood” containing a large amount of Omega-3 fatty acids (like the kind you
get in fish).
[3] This is the
same stuff that’s in Metamucil. The one problem you don’t have going on a raw
diet is fiber….
[4] Dulse (Palmaria palmate)
is a red seaweed found on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It’s primarily
used as a thickening agent (carrangeen) for food products.
