raw(r)

A couple weeks ago I bought Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen, because we are eating a lot of salads on E2L and aren’t salads really just raw food. Plus Dr. Fuhrman’s desserts leave A LOT to be desired and I thought the raw foodists might have some better ideas for me and they should automatically not contain sugar or flour.

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: