Also two recipes from Vegan Soul Kitchen (Savory Triple-Corn Grits and Cucumber Watermelon Soup). This is like a first ever, Oprah usually likes a crap ton of cheese and pork in her recipes. Good for Oprah!

Of course there is also a douchey little box about humane meat. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HUMANE MEAT, OPRAH, YOU BUTT NUT.

Anyway, what you do is put some zucchinis in there and it makes some fake pasta. But the thing is then you can eat all that fake pasta and it is GOOD for you. I am on this kick now where I think wheat murders you by punching your insides with its tiny gluten fists but even if you are a rational person who does not think this, still you cannot deny that you can eat a giant pile of this and then NOT have to take a nap. Chris O says it is nothing like pasta but I think it is sort of. Anyway you can treat it like pasta.

Have you noticed how the introduction to every raw food recipe has some crazy unsubstantiated health claim in the introduction? Like, “Raw zucchini molecules bind to toxins in your lymph and reduce the acidification of your kidneys.”

You can make a marinara in the vitamix with fresh tomatoes and a garlic clove and basil and oregano and a little nutritional yeast, which I like EVEN BETTER than real marinara:

You should cook your mushrooms even if you are on a raw kick because they have a couple carcinogenic toxins in them when raw. Or you can marinate them in acid for overnight. This is a real and true fact from Becoming Raw, which is a book that references all of its wacky claims to real scientific studies, hello, certain popular raw foods authors/eco-lifestylists, you might want to try that once in a while.

Anyway you can also make a fake alfredo (leave out the agave, it is weird in there):

OR, the very BEST OF ALL, make some pesto (add some baby spinach to it too) with walnuts. Did you know that the omega 3’s in raw walnuts lubricate your corneas and prevent eyeball cancer?

That salad is made from lettuce from my CSA box. I want to love my CSA but the first box was pretty disappointing so that now I am regretting not choosing the other local CSA option. I went with this one because it drops off right at my work but I hope it is going to step it up a little.

It has a huge amount of nice kale and some green onions, 1 salad’s worth of lettuce, an anemic little dill plant, the three most pathetic radishes I have ever seen one of which seemed to be made of wood, and a skimpy pint of strawberries that were simultaneously underripe and rotten. Boo! I hope it gets better. However it is fun to think of everyone else and how distressed they will be about all that kale. I am an experienced eater of kale and it makes me feel a little panicky. Good thing kale chips were invented.

I told Sweetie I wanted one for my birthday, never expecting that I would ever get one, and then I got one for Mother’s Day! I forgot that he was already making a shake every day for breakfast, so really it was for him too. It is the best $500 blender I have ever had. I have used it a lot already, and it is so impressive. It seemed to get a little angry when I made chocolate avocado pudding without soaking the dates first, but then it calmed down. Next time I will be less impatient and soak the dates. I don’t want it to break mysteriously like its east coast counterpart. Every morning I make Heather’s optimized bright green smoothie for breakfast, it is delicious. The Vitamix is also great for terrorizing toddlers with.

I also have my own bandwagon now, an organic CSA produce box that gets delivered on Fridays. It delights me to no end. I might have squealed this morning when I checked this week’s list of stuff online and saw that we’ll get corn, peaches, and apricots. I love that I have no control over what’s in there, that I just have to figure out what to do with it. I have a deal with myself that if I have to throw anything away, then I have to go down to the next size down box. I started with the biggest “Monster Mix” size, because that’s how I roll, and also, hello, we are vegan. One of Bryan’s friends referred us to this CSA and he said that just the regular size was more than you could eat in a week, and maybe that’s true if your dinner plate is piled high with meats and cheeses and 3 broccoli florets. So far, so good, nothing has been thrown away from rot yet in two boxes. I do have 4 grapefruits (soon to be 6) that I don’t know what to do with, since neither of us like grapefruit that much. I think I might make marmalade. Last night I made some whole wheat pasta and the hurry up alfredo sauce from Vegan Yum Yum and added roasted asparagus and a baby lettuces salad. The baby teeny lettuces were so cute! I also roasted some delicious beets but they were taking too long to wait for so I ate them at 3:30 am when I woke up to move a small child out of my bed. You’ll have to imagine their lovely color on the plate.

Oh how I made gross-looking brown smoothies and then learned to make less-gross-looking bright green smoothies and the creamiest frozen banana dessert ever and also the smoothest avocado chocolate pudding ever and a really good milkshakey thing which is soy mik, a frozen banana, a handful of walnuts, and some maple syrup.

The best one is green grapes, frozen mango, an apple, a banana, and spinach. It is so delicious! I drank it twice per day! Then my vitamix died. It started sputtering like an old boat engine and made a really bad smell of burning glue. HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE. Then I had to send it back to the company and now I have not had a green smoothie for six days and am sad.

Anyway other than the crap ton of wheat and sugar I ate on vacation, it is still mainly Eat to Live with Additional Nuts. I am down to 127, so down 15 lbs since mid-January. I wouldn’t mind losing 5 more so I am considering exercising or something.

To summarize the rest of the week.

Disastrous things that went directly into the trash thereby wasting a lot of expensive nuts and dates and a lot of blender- and food-processor-washing time:

• Ani Phyo’s raw carrot cake
• Ani Phyo’s trail mix cookies

I think I was lulled into a false sense of raw-dessert-success with the ganache cake. I still want to make a raw cheesecake though. I just need a million dollars worth of macadamia nuts. It is unfair that the government subsidizes meat and dairy with my tax dollars. They should subsidize NUTS.

Things that are good though:

• Raw nut cheese, which is just soaked nuts and lemon juice and garlic in the food processor. Then you put a glob on your salad and it is instantaneously exciting.

* The term “superfood” makes me want to itch my skin off. Superfoods are so annoying, I don’t know why I am compelled to try them one after the other. Goji berries? Taste like DIRT. Expensive superfood granola? Delicious but then you feel like your heart is going to explode. Agave nectar? It’s just sugar! Who are these people who make this big deal about giving up sugar and then they are guzzling down agave? Oh, I did that? Right, well. Hemp seeds? Those I have not tried yet but I totally want to.

Here is a video of Moby making pancakes:

Why is Moby’s exgirlfriend so mean? Why isn’t Moby British like I thought he was?

It is possible that my recent discoveries in the area of raw nut-laden recipes have derailed my ETL weight loss journey. Nonetheless this cake is quite amazing. Perhaps it is not good if you are not coming off of two months of sugarlessness and wheatlessness. My palate might be completely crazy now. But I think it is GREAT. It even makes me feel bad about my sarcastic comments in the last post and is causing me to refrain from remarking on how the Trail Mix Cookies from the raw desserts book taste like how it would be if you left a Larabar in your pocket for two weeks.

The recipe calls for raw cacao powder but after reading all the various wacky rants on the internet about how it is either an amazing superfood or going to kill you immediately, all written by some total nuts who say things like “once I did a fast where I lived on water and raw cacao for 2 weeks and it was AMAZING” or “I find that I feel best when I eat very little and do a huge amount of yoga so as to exist on a higher plane of purity” I decided to just use the regular dutch-processed cocoa powder that I already had (although it is processed with alkali and therefore has no antioxidants blah blah blah).

Blend in food processor:
3 cups walnuts
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
Add and blend:
1 cup pitted, destemmed medjool dates
Pat into cake shapes.

Blend in food processor:
1/3 cup dates, pitted, destemmed
1/4 cup agave syrup
1/2 cup ripe mashed avocado
1/3 cup cocoa powder

Usually, the thick aura of pseudoscientific bullshit surrounding the raw foods movement makes my head explode. This book is no exception. It is liberally peppered with crazy rants on the pages in between the recipes. Some are in light green boxes and some are in dark green boxes and some are not and it makes no sense and has no organization and generates an air of wackiness that irritates me. Plus the rants are crazy. She literally says “Some folks worry about how eating fats affects their weight… The more fats we eat, the more our body lets go of fats, because it knows more will be coming in.” I cannot express to you the extent to which this statement makes my head explode and the sheer craziness of allowing someone to write things like this in a paper book that you can buy in a real store. I understand the point, but I think the point is really more that if the bulk of your diet is raw then it is all very low calorie so you can eat much more fat than would otherwise be okay. But STILL.

Also there is a section on dog foods and let us pretend for a moment that I do not object to the financial investment that would be involved in feeding Lenny two cups of raw nuts per day. On one page it says that her dog “loves whole fresh food. On her own in nature, that’s what she’d be eating.” On the facing page it says that the dog’s favorite food is durian. Are you kidding me. On his own in nature, Lenny would be eating big mac wrappers and rotten old squirrel carcasses and as many poops as he could find. Durian! Her dog does look healthy though. This is where the nine thousand vanity photos in the book come in handy, there are opportunities to scrutinize the dog from every angle. You can scrutinize Ani Phyo from every angle as well since there are ten thousand pictures of her for no reason. I think you can tell how it is from the google preview of the book. It is like the preview times one hundred. Actually this didn’t bother me because after reading some of the crazy, crazy soup recipes that have 1.5 cups of olive oil for 4 servings I sort of wanted to examine whether she is oozing greasiness from her face or anything. (Appears not.)

And this is nitpicky but there is no reason to spell “milk” as “mylk.” Soy milk is milk and coconut milk is milk. We are all grown womyn here and we can handle the word “milk.”

So after all that complaining, Chris and O and I both really liked the two things I have made from this book so far. The Eat to Live food is very light and vegetabley so it was really good to eat something rich and dense. The raw food way is very heavy on nuts, seeds, and oil, which I did not realize, so I was a little apprehensive about making these things because the calories are a lot higher than any straight-up E2L recipe but we have gobbled them down like little nut piglets and nothing happened to our fatness levels. The first thing I made was a “save-the-tuna” wrap.

Ah, I remember my horror when wraps started to get popular and I could not understand why you would want to eat a sandwich without real bread and now look how I am using a collard leaf. Anyway you can find the recipe for this if you google. It is made from sunflower seeds which are soaked in filtered water for 8 hours, which is apparently how all nuts and seeds should be prepared. The whole soaking thing is odd to me. Presumably they are supposed to germinate and become “living foods” which are better to eat. But what if I buy cashew pieces instead of whole cashews? They are cheaper. Then they turn into living pieces? Like zombie nuts? Anyway we liked this a lot.

Then I made these nice donut hole things.

The recipe is on youtube, although I didn’t do anything by hand because my dried pineapple was hard as a rock and uncuttable by knives so I ground up everything in the food processor. It was pretty exciting to put each pineapple piece in and hear it make a noise like the whole kitchen was about to explode. Anyway I also added some cinnamon. We ate these all in 24 hours but we didn’t get fatter the way we get fatter when we accidentally eat a Chipotle burrito. I think even regulars would like them.

So now I am getting sucked into raw foodism even though it makes my head explode. I was literally shopping for dehydrators (“dehydrators are electrical sunshine simulators”) on amazon until I remembered that I don’t even believe this craziness about the magic 105 degrees above-which-food-loses-all-nutrients and how if I want a cracker I can make one in the damn oven.

I’m going to make this fake cake tonight:

ETL things that are good:

• Lightened-Up Falafels from The Everyday Vegan by Dreena Burton
• sauteed portabello mushrooms on salad
• a medjool date cut in half and the seed hole filled with peanut butter (not technically allowed)
• New England Clam-less Chowder by Nava Atlas (this is REALLY good but you have to eliminate the oil and count it as a starch and it probably has too much salt from the baked tofu)
• Red Lentil Artichoke Stew from The Vegan Table (p. 70) with quinoa and steamed kale
• fake ice cream made with frozen fruit and a banana and some soy milk in the food processor or especially with frozen cherries and cocoa powder
• Fuhrman’s orange-sesame salad dressing (6 cashews, 2 T toasted sesame seeds, 1/2 c orange juice, and some rice vinegar, blended in the blender)

ETL things that are NOT good:

• Fuhrman’s black bean brownies (a good texture but not sweet at all and not chocolatey; perhaps could be rescued by adding banana and more cocoa powder; also can be partially rescued by putting peanut butter on top (not allowed).)
• basically all the desserts besides fruit-in-the-food-processor. Maybe this is on purpose so you shut up about dessert and eat some damn fruit instead.